Wolves at the Door

Poster taglines for this pedestrian horror quickie state it is "inspired" by the Manson Family's slaughter of Sharon Tate and her friends in Los Angeles in 1969, arguably a carefully chosen word to give the film-makers broader dramatic licence. As it is, four Hollywood types gather at the home of a pregnant actress (Arrow's Katie Cassidy), unaware their summer of love, as it's explicitly and incorrectly described, is about to become a hate-fuelled nightmare. Manson continues to be a source of big- and small-screen material (the David Duchovny-led TV series Aquarius is but one), but director John R Leonetti's Wolves would appear to have been raised on generic fright-flick clichés (menacing silhouettes, close-ups of door handles, music boxes playing nursery rhymes). Most attempts at tension are telegraphed so far in advance, they might as well be stamped with the previous week's postmark, while Cassidy and co are portrayed as such irritating "beautiful people" that some may find themselves reluctant to root for them.