'Here Comes Hell' doesn't live up to its premise of Agatha Christie period piece meets Lucio Fulci gorefest in an The Old Dark House makeover... but it is an affectionate emulation of a bygone era.

Director Jack McHenry does everything in his limited power to transport you back to the 30s: the aspect ratio, black-and-white photography, music, and even the chroma key compositing for car sequences. However, it's made with an excess of heart and not enough substance or skill to create the riotous horror comedy pastiche it wants to be.

6/10.

Rich Victor plays host to his sister and friends at his large but run down English country mansion. A seance is held to contact former owner Ichabod Quinn, an occultist, but the medium gets possessed by a demon and the film goes all Evil Dead. Set in the 1930's it is filmed in black and white, no widescreen here, instead we get a 4:3 screen ratio. I liked that idea, plus some of the music was quite jolly. The movie does pack in some seriously gory special effects, even in black and white they look very bloody. Sadly this was billed as a horror comedy but I found very little to laugh at. Low budget British horror movies often find it necessary to include an American character, here we get a Texan called George Walker Junior, played by Tom Bailey who does a terrible accent. More bad acting comes courtesy of Charlie Robb who plays Victor. The only half decent character is nasty Christine, played by Margaret Clunie, the rest of the actors are amateur in quality. Fairly disappointing.

I don't really like criticising films I don't enjoy, but there's no denying that HERE COMES HELL (2019) is a very poor film, an attempt at a comedy horror told on a micro budget. It's a British indie set in the 1930s which sees a group of friends heading to a country house for a knees-up, only to run into supernatural trouble when a seance goes bad and demons arrive on the scene. What we have here is an EVIL DEAD clone openly ripping off lines and scenes from the first two movies in the Raimi series. It's entirely cheap and badly acted throughout, with excruciatingly plummy voices, and the black and white digital photography adds nothing either. There's plenty of gore for those into that kind of thing, but don't expect decent FX on a budget this low. I found it all very silly and a definite miss rather than a hit, despite the undoubted enthusiasm of the filmmakers, and I'm glad I saw it for free on Film4 instead of forking out for it.