David Cameron’s favourite eighties movie, according to Amazon Prime’s trivia. However, I didn’t let the former prime minister’s approval put me off. Eyes Of Fire is about some European settlers transgressing taboo land and features a patriarchal character full of belief in his abilities but lacking any sense or spine. Weird how the art we love can shape our lives, eh David?

Having upset a village by having two women under his roof, a clergyman leads his outsiders and oddballs toward a ‘promised land’. It all goes tits-up from there, as you might expect. They cross into a valley that even the local Shawnee avoid and dark spirits soon gather to terrorise and absorb them.

Director David Crowse is a noted photographer and it shows, for good or bad. The sense of landscape is mesmerising and the supernatural imagery is genuinely effective (Plus there’s a jump scare that made me jolt) but everything else is a bit uneven. The dialogue could have used another set of eyes aside from Crowse’s, the acting is variable (a sign the director wasn’t on the ball in that department more than the actors’ abilities) and the sound insists on using an obvious synthesiser when anything supernatural happens.

Yet it’s stuck in my head. The last third is a psychedelic treat, if occasionally incomprehensible, and folk horror set in America was quite rare back in the eighties. The film has a narration track over it which makes me suspect they put it in after major edits, so perhaps there’s a better and longer cut out there somewhere. All in all I think Eyes Of Fire is one of those ambitious movies that falls short but that the ambition itself is compelling. Definitely a movie that could be remade.