Pentagram (UK 2019: Dir Steve Lawson)

Lawson's second collaboration with Jonathan Sothcott (possibly the least popular person working in the horror genre today), follows on from The Exorcism of Karen Walker, released earlier this year, and represents no improvement on his last movie: it suggests that while Lawson can at least get his films financed through Sothcott's Hereford Films company, the trade off is that he has to use the producer's stories, which are both unoriginal and totally ill suited to small budget productions.

Pentagram is the slender story of four people en route to California, holding up diners to pay their way. (you know, just like the couple in Pulp Fiction) They are bad boy Max, his girlfriend Lauren, Holly and her brother Luke. Holly is a drug addict and their intention is to get her into rehab in LA. Fleeing from their latest robbery and with their getaway car on the fritz, they hole up in a very un-American looking house (ok, none of it looks like the US, because it's Derbyshire). In a bedroom at the top of the house Holly, looking to rest up and beat her craving for junk, comes across a man lying on the floor in the middle of a hand drawn pentagram within a circle. The man, Oliver, pulls Holly inside the chalked design and explains that she is to be a sacrifice, which in turn will enable him to leave the pentagram without being ripped apart by a strange entity. His ruse fails, he's pushed outside the circle and a creature slices him up. It's not long before all four of the young travellers end up inside the pentagram, and have to work out how to leave and who, if anyone, should be sacrificed.

In a more experienced director's hands, and with a larger budget, this fairly simple idea may have worked, or at least managed to generate some tension. On Lawson's watch, it's sadly largely a boring mess. The laws of magic in operation are full of WTF moments, and the audience gets lots of opportunities to raise quizzical eyebrows because of the, shall we say, languid pace of the thing. Cast wise everyone attempts, and fails, to deliver US accents - really, why bother? - and like Lawson's last film, a rather faded star - in this case Nichols (Hazell) Ball - is roped in for an afternoon's work and trumps all of the rest of the cast in the hopeless accent stakes. Probably the best thing in this is Alexis Rodney as mean old Max: he acts everyone else off the floor and deserves a much better film than this tripe. Lawson was once an interesting director - he needs to unshackle himself from Mr Sothcott and recover some of his micro budget mojo.