Five strangers traveling in an RV in southern Italy become stranded in the woods, where they must fight desperately to get out alive.

Roberto de Feo and Paolo Strippoli’s Italian horror movie streaming on Netflix steals endlessly from other folk horror movies, and then blatantly acknowledges this in its own meta way. A fusion of The Cabin in the Woods, Midsommar and The Evil Dead, while the movie has some nice humour, the emphasis is on non-stop horror.

Eliza (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) is the movie’s lead, sharing her road trip en route to having an abortion. She’s travelling with an oddball collection of weird/annoying characters, and things very quickly go south once the RV swerves to avoid a dead goat and finds itself well away from any roads or civilisation.

The RV is parked up outside a cabin/church with severed animal heads and straw totems outside. The group find evidence of the worship of the Garduna society – Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso – fiends that perform different mutilations to their victims. After one of their party fall victim to these monsters, the travellers try to make their escape through a graveyard of cars, but keep looping back. And that’s all I’m going to say.

The twists and turns from hereon in are in turn predictable and surprising, and ultimately you’ll decide whether they’re credible or land as well as they might. There’s certainly a lot going on, and personally I tired of the frequent winking to camera meta moments. Working best when it’s a full-on horror flick, Lutz steals every scene she’s in, and it’s a great feature debut from the directors.

Verdict: Not a classic horror story, no matter what the movie calls itself, but certainly worth a watch to see if you can anticipate which rabbit hole it’s going to take you down. 8/10

Nick Joy