Thunderbird, out October 9

A recovering alcoholic (Buffy and Dexter’s Julie Benz) tries to get her life back on track by staying in the spooky Havenhurst apartment block for addicts, overlooking New York’s Central Park. She soon realises that some of the tenants are mysteriously disappearing and that there’s a killer on the loose!

Sometimes a movie is so good that its name alone sells it to the DVD crowd. Others have no such luck and change their name in the vain hope that the new title will make the difference. This is one such film (released as Havenhurst) but by giving it such a bland by-the-numbers name it shows just how disinterested the distributors are this formulaic fare, seen so many times before.

What’s a shame is that Julie Benz is actually very good as the lead. We know she was an alcoholic because we get shots of her drooling at bottles of whisky in the shop window, and a clunky, signposted tragic back story. The set itself is also very atmospheric, the spooky cinematography aided by the Tomandandy score. So far so good, but then we remember that American Horror Story has been delivering this sort of content (though more extreme) for years, so why would anyone make a point to seek this out?

Fionnula Flanagan has great fun as the mysterious Eleanor Mudgett, not taking the nonsense seriously as her tenants enter secret rooms and passageways, picking up convenient clues and working out who’s doing the killings.

Verdict: A generic horror house movie that has no ambitions to do anything new, instead retreading a tick-list of generic, genre plot points. Low stakes and an unsatisfactory ending with no great twists, there’s not even any evil that gets resurrected. Watch out for this (or don’t) on a minority satellite channel or in a DVD sale dump bin at your local retailer. 3/10

Nick Joy