FrightFest review – Your Host
Director DW Medoff’s I Will Never Leave You Alone was a fresh, intriguing trapped-in-a-haunted house story. This follow-up, scripted by Joey Miller, is a stale torture porn picture – which turns from being merely tiresome into actively annoying at about the hour-in mark when the backstory takes a swipe at the #metoo hashtag in an astonishingly inept manner … though we’ve been in this dungeon/gameshow too many times (the Danish movie Finale went this route a few years ago) for even the nastiest bits of grue (and one exercise in splitting a head has a Fangoria-cover-in-the-1980s vibe) to have much impact.
Four young folk who grate on each other (and us) even before their darker secrets are exposed squabble during a weekend break, then get drugged and wake up chained by the neck to a wall in a concrete bunker which is also a gameshow set. ‘Your Host’ (Jackie Earle Haley), wearing a half-mask, does all the standard patter – it’s impossible to parody game-show hosts by now – while setting sub-Saw challenges for final girl type Anita (Ella-Rae Smith), uber-git James (Jamie Flatters), dog-lover Melissa (Joelle Rae) and not-so-nice nice guy Matthew (David Angland). Body parts are lost and prizes tend to be painful.
In these films, victims always ask ‘why are you doing this to me?’ and for once we get an answer – which pauses the torture for a bit, but sends out a lot of mixed signals. Haley – one of the two or three recognisable actors in five whole days of FrightFest 2025 – mostly underplays, but he’s a typecast creepy guy giving a creepy performance, echoing Tobin Bell rather than his own earlier work, whereas the script seems to call for an image about-face turn from a less threatening entertainer.
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