Your Host

Does anyone remember the films of Uwe Boll? The German filmmaker from the late 90’s/ early 2000’s who became renowned for adaptations of horror computer games, but mostly for making them into big, steaming piles of dogwank? He made movies for a while but they were never commercial successes because of how stupidly bad they were and eventually he gave up. He became a restaurateur after that, and the world breathed a sigh of relief, but now he’s back. Now he sees where there’s space in the market, buoyed by the recent deluge of cheap-crap horror that’s been flooding the cinema screens and streaming services over the past fifteen years, and he sees that if everybody else is doing it too, then by crikey he can live his dream and make totally horrible movies until he dies.

What’s given him succour and renewed vigour is films like Your Host, the worst kind of cheap-crap, borrowed from everyone else in the genre, cobbled together from a production studio that revels in this kind of pseudo-porn, nonsense. There’s four kids – or at least they would have pretended to be high school or college kids in Uwe’s day, even if they were being played by nearly-thirty-somethings with eating disorders and a bad coke habit, but here they’re ‘young professionals’ taking some time out from their oppressive barely working lives – and they’ve rocked up to a nice, newly inherited house in the sticks somewhere, now belonging to James (Flatters), the trust-fund daddy’s boy who thinks it’s a game to rail on everybody all of the time, and who would in Uwe’s day be the shock-jock with a father in politics or law.

They spend some time getting jazzed-up on alcohol and bad acting, each revealing their stock characters to the audience, showing how little we’ve come from the jock and the cheerleader, his best-friend and the reluctant hottie in glasses and a ponytail, to now have basically the exact same stereotypes just updated and downgraded so than Gen Z can understand them. Lo and behold, once they start engaging in hedonistic and sinful activities, the bad guy turns up – this one’s got a video camera, he’s not very original – and the low-level terrifying begins before they are all captured, trussed up like prize turkeys, and chained to a dungeon wall somewhere in an industrial estate or whatever.

So, yes – it’s the same old pish all over again. Just like you saw in Saw (2004), and in Saw II (2005), and in Saw III (2006), and in Saw IV (2007), and in Saw V (2008), and in Saw VI (2009), and in Saw 3D (2010) and in Jigsaw (2017) and in Spiral (2021) and in Saw X (2023) and in Saw XI (26th September 2025), and in any other knock-off horrors I could be bothered to mention including all seasons of Squid Game and every other S&M snuff movie that some people seem to get their kicks out of.

Jackie Earle Haley turns up as the killer, Barry Miller, a former quiz show host with a literal axe to grind, along with a shotgun, a chainsaw, and a whole host of other torture devices linked to his devious question rounds. He’s wearing a suit right out of Joker (2019), which basically also makes him Rupert Pupkin, and a mask, 70% of which is basically The Grabber from The Black Phone (2021), and he’s making people play games of torture against each other so that there’s horrific injuries and gore and death, so he’s not exactly all that original. Haley does his best with what he’s got though, and it really is his show with this film, as there’s nobody else in it with an inkling of what acting is, other than screaming and pleading and getting covered in blood. Haley does what he can, but there’s no saving this god-awful show from the eternal hell of cheap-crap knock-off horror.

There’s some character development at the end for Barry, which I guess is supposed to morph him into some kind of Jigsaw character, but really who cares? He’s just another sick puppy in a mask who likes to go around torturing people, the same as all the others, with no semblance of originality, while yet there’s apparently still plenty of producers going around saying to regular human beings that this is the kind of stuff they want to make and see on screen.

If you want to go and see it then go and see it. You’ll know exactly what you’re getting before you go in, if not entirely how bad it will actually be, and if bland, standardised gore and terror is what you want to see with no difficult emotions attached, it’s all yours. But when you come out at the end, and it was just the same as all the other cheap-crap torture movies you love gooning over at home, not really worth spending your time on, tune in through the white noise and you’ll clearly hear me saying that I told you so.

Your Host will have have its World Premiere at FrightFest 2025 on 22nd August.