by Ben Bussey Between the time when the ocean drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of… a time when there was a conspicuous lack of movies featuring muscle-bound swordsmen doing battle with hideous monsters and black-hearted warlocks whilst quivering, nubile, near-enough butt naked women gripped feverishly […]
As tomorrow is Walpurgisnacht, we at Brutal As Hell decided this would be as good a time as any to celebrate Satan on screen. Kicking things off, here’s an appropriately devilish entry from Keri O’Shea… The Devil’s relationship with cinema is a lengthy one. As the horrors of Hell have always found their way into art […]
25th anniversary retrospective by Ben Bussey As is the norm with these kind of things, beware of spoilers… March 13th 2012, and it’s another silver jubilee. This time, however, I’m really not sure if I can find the words. This time it’s a film so unique, so unmistakable, that as familiar as it is it’s […]
by Keri O’Shea “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.” Those of you who are regular visitors to Brutal as Hell might […]
A 25th Anniversary Retrospective by Ben Bussey Reader Advisory: Moderate Spoilers ahead… I’m not sure how well we all remember 1987 – blimey, some of our readership and possibly even some of our staff might not have been born back then – but it was quite a year for horror cinema, seeing the release of […]
by Keri O’Shea At this time of year, you invariably hear a great deal about keeping the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas: it’s too schmaltzy, it’s too commercial, it isn’t what it was… well, it certainly isn’t what it was, but the idea that Christmas has always been a peaceable Christian festival is just plain incorrect. […]
by Ben Bussey He was the first great horror director of the talkies era. Responsible for four of the very best 1930s Universal classics, horror cinema would be a very different place without James Whale. While he will of course always be most remembered for the Frankenstein films, he did a lot more than […]
Continuing our celebration of Frankenstein’s 80th Anniversary, Keri O’Shea looks at some of the weird and wonderful Frankenstein films that have come in its wake… The influence of the Universal Frankenstein movies cannot be underestimated. Boris Karloff’s ‘dear old monster’ has become a horror archetype, crossing the breach into popular culture and staying there, for the best part […]
by Ben Bussey READER ADVISORY: spoilers ahead (though perhaps that’s a given on a retrospective…) 22nd August 1986; a day that will live in… well, I can’t honestly say I have any conscious memory of that particular day. I was six years old and living in North-East England. As such, I certainly wasn’t aware that it was the […]