Cub

Referencing everything from 'Suspiria' to 'The Cabin in the Woods', this is a horror movie made by and for genre fans - but that's not necessarily a good thing.

This backwoods camping adventure and folk-legend fusion flies off the rails, unleashing a grotesque and vile nature in every character. "Cub" will leave you wanting to pack up your things and head home early.

Cub ends up being a predictable dull mess which simply recreates past films that the director has seen, without any sense of originality or fun.

Cub is characterised by terrific performances (especially from the pre-teen cast), playfully ghoulish bloodwork, and the most inventive instruments of death we've seen since the Saw franchise ran out of ideas.

The film's producers should give audiences a sew-on badge for surviving this.

Similar in tone to Let The Right One In, it starts slowly and builds into a fantastical and creepy look at childhood.

At a time when horror movies seem to only want to make the audience jump, it's great to find one that bothers to build a sense of dread.

Feels a bit like 15 slasher movies you've already seen, but also ends up being a rather novel, unpredictable, and insane little horror flick.

The film creates a pleasing air of mystery that director Jonas Govaerts sadly loses all interest in sustaining.

The build-up is entertainingly eccentric, and there's some ingenious booby-trappery at work among the pines, but Cub runs dry once it knuckles down to the routine bloodletting.

Not much adventure. Not much horror.

Cub will keep gorehounds happy, but its cruel dismissal of youth makes it disturbing in more ways than it should be.