101 Films, out 7 October

When fashion designer Rose is involved in a motorbike crash she suffers horrific facial injuries and agrees to undertake experimental surgery. What looks like an unqualified success is masking some very sinister motives, and Rose begins to transform.

Twisted Sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska (American Mary) remake David Cronenberg’s cult 1977 classic, taking only its barest bones and creating something quite different and incredibly entertaining.

Laura Vandervoort (Smallville) is Rose, working for a fashion house, which immediately pushes the movie into The Neon Demon/ The Devil Wears Prada territory. It’s a bitchy, cutthroat world (quite literally at one point) with the directors themselves getting in on the action as spiteful co-workers. And then the accident happens.

In Cronenberg’s film, Rose gets away with fairly light injuries, but here she loses sections of her face and intestines and has to drink liquid food through her wired jaw. It’s grim stuff. Naturally she agrees to pro bono stem cell surgery, and the results are astonishing, but as with all Faustian pacts, there’s a price to pay.

The previously vegetarian Rose now craves meat – just what is in those ‘protein shakes’? – and it’s not long before she’s sprouting appendages and an additional set of razor teeth. And so begins the sustained bloodbath that leads us back to the mad doctor and his real MO. It feels less Cronenberg and more Brian Yuzna or Stuart Gordon, though there are Cronenberg Easter eggs such as Santa getting shot (reprised from the original Rabid) and scarlet surgical scrubs (Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers).

101 Films’ release includes part two of their documentary about Canadian film-making: The Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film – Part Two: An Emerging Revolution: New Territories & Diverse Fears, as well as some behind-the-scenes fun with the Soskas, an interview with lead Laura Vandervoort and an on-set message to 2018’s FrightFesters.

Verdict: A romp of a horror movie remake that is far removed enough from its source to be genuinely original while still tipping its hat at the right times. Gloopy, ridiculous and gloriously entertaining – the perfect FrightFest movie or Friday night viewing. 9/10

Nick Joy