Downloads and streaming: new releases to watch at home
A selection of new films to enjoy on the small screen.
Fear Of Rain (Cert 15, 109 mins)
Available from April 26 on Amazon Prime Video/BT TV Store/iTunes/Sky Store/TalkTalk TV Store and other download and streaming services
High school student Rain Burroughs (Madison Iseman, pictured right) is rushed to Tampa General Hospital after she comes off prescribed medication for schizophrenia and lashes out, destroying her bedroom and injuring her father John (Harry Connick Jr).
Rain’s emotionally unstable mother Michelle (Katherine Heigl) is by her bedside as she regains consciousness.
When she is rested, the student returns to counselling with psychiatrist Dr Ellen Pangloss (Enuka Okuma).
“One more misstep and the state’s going to institutionalise you,” the shrink warns Rain, who feels zombified on her medication.
Unable to sleep on her latest drug regimen and bombarded with visions and voices, Rain becomes convinced that her next-door neighbour, childless schoolteacher Mrs McConnell (Eugenie Bondurant), is holding a young girl hostage in her attic.
Rain convinces misfit classmate Caleb (Israel Broussard) to help her search for clues.
Fear Of Rain is a pedestrian thriller, which uses schizophrenia as a narrative device to repeatedly blur the lines between fantasy and reality.
Writer-director Castille Landon’s treatment of the central character’s mental condition is neither sensitive nor subtle.
There are glaring plot holes, including one scene when Rain has a mobile phone to hand and could film what she thinks she sees and then show the footage to someone she knows is real, trimming at least half an hour off the running time.
Iseman delivers a sympathetic and committed performance as a young woman in perpetual fear of her surroundings while Connick Jr and Heigl offer solid yet largely forgettable support.
Wrong Turn (Cert 18, 110 mins)
Available from April 26 on Amazon Prime Video/BT TV Store/iTunes/Sky Store/TalkTalk TV Store and other download and streaming services, available from May 3 on DVD/Blu-ray
Jen Shaw (Charlotte Vega) and her boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley) drive to rural Virginia with two other couples, Milla (Emma Dumont) and her fiance Adam (Dylan McTee) and Gary (Vardaan Arora) and his boyfriend Luis (Adrian Favela), to hike the Appalachian Trail.
They stay overnight at an inn and landlady Aileen (Amy Warner) warns Jen: “Keep to the marked trail. The land here can be unforgiving.”
The six friends, of course, ignore these sage words and head into the undergrowth in search of the ruins of an American Civil War fort.
Instead, Jen and co stumble into the clutches of a brutal, self-sufficient clan called The Foundation, which formed originally in 1859 in response to the impending conflict between northern and southern states.
Tribe leader Venable (Bill Sage) sets about severely punishing the friends for their transgression.
Meanwhile, Jen’s concerned father Scott (Matthew Modine) heads to Virginia to locate his missing daughter and encounters fierce resistance from the terrified townsfolk.
Wrong Turn is a very gory reboot of the blood-soaked horror series, which began in 2003. Original screenwriter Alan B McElroy rarely deviates from a well-trodden path of splatter including a stomach-churning array of blunt force traumas to heads in icky close-up.
Opening scenes in a booby-trapped forest are littered with spikes, snares and pendulous hazards.
Vega’s feisty heroine, who can change a tyre and possesses a moral compass that her friends conveniently lack, is generic and she only comes to the fore in a twisted second half that includes a lip-smacking flourish over the end credits.
Things Heard & Seen (Cert 15, 121 mins)
Streaming from April 29 exclusively on Netflix
Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried and James Norton star (pictured below) in husband and wife Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman’s psychological horror which is torn from the pages of Elizabeth Brundage’s acclaimed novel All Things Cease To Appear.
Professor George Clare (Norton) and his wife Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) move to the small New York town of Chosen, taking over a dairy farm that has fallen on hard times since tragedy befell the previous owner.
As the couple settle into new surroundings and raise a young daughter called Franny, the farm’s dark past, however, begins to manifest itself around them.
Catherine experiences phenomena that she is scared to disclose to her cynical husband, whose attention is in fact otherwise focused on a flirty female student anyway.
Slowly, Catherine’s mental state unravels and she comes to fear that a decidedly grim history may be repeating itself in a way that will be no good for anyone.