Liam Neeson returns to our screens and, in what must have been an enormous stretch for the actor, he plays a father out to avenge an injury to his family. This time around, Neeson’s son has died in mysterious circumstances, and Neeson’s investigations see him move one victim at a time closer to the core of the conspiracy that saw his son killed.

The film is an English-language remake of that snow-and-ice-bound Norwegian movie In Order of Disappearance – which was such an oddball, deliciously black comedy that audiences around the world watched it without noticing it was an archetypal Liam Neeson vehicle. Clearly, though, someone noticed, and here we are.

Donald Pleasance (Dr Loomis in Halloween) and Victor Wong (Egg Shen from Big Trouble in Little China) reunite with John Carpenter for arguably the strangest film in the cult writer/director’s oeuvre.

The pair star as a priest and nuclear physicist that team up to scientifically investigate some gnarly green goo in the basement of a disused church in Los Angeles. That gnarly green goo that turns nearby hobos (Alice Cooper among them) into zombie-like slaves of Satan and opens a portal to the opposing force to life in our universe.

This is an off-kilter rumination on science versus religion dressed as a gothic horror film in the Hammer Films vein that is rarely given a chance to shine on the big screen.