My recent forays into the depths of Amazon Prime’s streaming horror queue have yielded some interesting results — indeed, on the whole I’m ready to feel reasonably optimistic about so-called “micro-budget” genre filmmaking again — but then along comes something that not only confirms, but unquestionably amplifies, everything that all the nay-sayers who don’t even bother with this sort of thing assume to be true : the acting is laughably bad, the script is loaded with cringe-worthy dialogue, the plot is hopelessly redundant and unoriginal, the low-rent production values are embarrassingly amateurish, yadda yadda etc. etc. It is, therefore, my distinct displeasure to present perhaps the —errrmmm — finest example of all these frequent criticisms writ large that I have yet some across, director Dirk Hagen’s 2015 atrocity The Warning.

Honestly, the word “bad” seems too simple — and frankly too kind — to describe what’s on offer…