A creepy debut from David Mackenzie, director of Young Adam, Hallam Foe and the recent Perfect Sense. A cuckolded husband on a revenge mission (Alastair Mackenzie, the director’s brother and – more curiously – best known as the star of Monarch Of The Glen) is waylaid when he picks up Vicente, a Spanish gigolo fleeing mafia heavies. Running out of petrol, both wind up in a dodgy retreat high in the, uh, highlands, run by an RD Laing-alike Peter Mullan and home to a cast of liberated mental patients.

There’s some spooky business involving an attractive ghost, and the final reel leads to some rather nasty bloody retribution. Shot on digital film and soundtracked by lo-fi legends The Pastels (with a guest vocal spot from Jarvis Cocker), the whole production is blessed with a kind of ramshackle charm, shot through with wry Scottish humour and wonderfully framed. It might have made a fine tourist ad, but for the madness and murderising.From Beyond The Grave (1974)

In this, the very best of the much-loved Amicus portmanteau flicks, Peter Cushing wreaks antiques-based vengeance on a cast of petty crims, like some sort of schizoid Lovejoy. David Warner falls foul of a haunted mirror, Ian Carmichael is butchered by a boggart (this passes for light relief), and Donald Pleasance casts homemade spells on the family of a lonely commuter. Despite the flashes of gore – especially during Warner’s opening segment – the whole thing bounces by with a kind of innocent joie de vivre, and is never more than lightly menacing.

It’s competently shot and the famously quick turnarounds of Amicus production – a micro-company run from a hut in the grounds of Shepperton Studios – don’t seem to have harmed the product at all. Perhaps the deepest pleasure comes from the fact that the whole package lacks the customary weak link, and the wrap-around narrative fits each of the pieces neatly in place before reaching its own amusing conclusion (complete with tooth-grinding pun).