X offers deliberately old-fashioned and unpleasant horror movie thrills

If a weird old man in the darkest and creepiest of houses said to you “There is another lamp down in the basement… Will you go and get it?”, would you? I mean, would you really?

But of course she does. X is a deliberately old-fashioned horror film, one where everyone blandly walks into danger, their every instinct to save themselves obliterated by the mere fact that they are in a horror film.

And it’s one which is determined to tick all the boxes. A group of young people drive off to the middle of nowhere in order to make a porn film – and promptly come face to face (or more accurately face to neck) with a slasher.

There’s not the least attempt to update the genre in any way.

This is a horror movie as they used to make them, precisely as the title suggests. We like to call our X-rated films 18s now. This one drags us back to the 70s by calling itself simply X, a nice touch in a film which otherwise abandons all attempts at subtlety.

We are in 1979. There’s a wannabe film star convinced she’s worth more in life than she’s currently getting; there’s a “churchmouse” geeky film-maker rather too interested in what is going on. There’s also a nerdy cameraman, a ghastly exploitative director who’s super sure of himself, an overconfident starlette who’s been there before and a former Marine who’s to the manner born when it comes to strutting around in adult movies.

It’s a disparate bunch to say the least, all of them fairly sketchily drawn for the simple reason that there’s hardly any point getting to know any of them. And so one by one they start to meet their grisly fates.

Their big mistake at the outset is to rent their makeshift studio in the middle of nowhere from a creepy old couple who live opposite.

The warning signs are there when the old boy, barely a tooth in his head, greets them with a gun.

But why on earth would you scarper when you are just itching to throw your clothes off?

Sadly, the old girl is even weirder. Sexually frustrated (the old chap has a heart condition), she hasn’t turned to jam-making, jigsaw puzzles, crosswords and Victoria sponges instead. No, she wanders the grounds casting her kit off and then sidling up to anyone who is fast asleep. Either that or she thrusts a knife into them.

Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow, Mia Goth, Scott Mescudi, Jenna Ortega, Owen Campbell and Stephen Ure make up the cast. It’s unpleasant, implausible stuff, but pleasantness and plausibility were never on the agenda, and nor was edification.

And with the sheer modesty of its ambition, it’s a film which mostly works – though rather more tension would have been better. It’s watchable and will certainly make you jump a few times, but it’s not terribly gripping.

But one of the rewards is a lovely line from the sheriff at the end. We start at the end as he wanders through the blood bath. We then scroll back 24 hours. When we return to the sheriff again, somebody asks him “What do you think happened here.”! His answer is worth the admission price.

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