Fifty years ago this week, the 16th feature film from American writer-director Russ Meyer – and the very first US production to be given the X-rating – had its premiere screening. Although, as with Meyer’s entire body of work, Vixen is now generally classed as a cult film, it was on release an unprecedented commercial […]
Editor’s note: this discussion of Men Behind the Sun contains spoilers. The Chinese film Men Behind the Sun (1988) is not altogether well known in the West, and has yet to enjoy the kind of lavish DVD or indeed Blu-Ray release which has usually happened for even the most censor-baiting movies by thirty years after […]
UK horror festival season is once again in full swing, and one of our favourites, Sheffield’s Celluloid Screams, have just announced the films they have in store this year – and it’s looking like a very handsome line-up indeed, boasting many of the most eagerly anticipated genre titles of the year. Nor is it all […]
Spoiler warning. It certainly doesn’t feel like ten years has passed since Pascal Laugier’s divisive horror film Martyrs first arrived, but the more I reflect on the state of horror cinema at the time of its release, the more I feel inclined to agree that ‘the past is a foreign country’. In 2008, horror cinema […]
Abertoir is a film festival close to the heart of Warped Perspective, dating back to the good ol’ days of our former incarnation Brutal As Hell. Taking over the Arts Centre in Aberystwyth, Wales every November, 2018 marks the 13th annual event, and in honour of the occasion they’ve opted for a slasher movie theme, […]
You know a film still has something, however many years pass, when you consider what would happen to it if it was pitched today. So at a guess, and alongside most of the best horror and exploitation films ever made, a film which involves exploding drug addicts and reanimated hookers via bad science would be […]
If you freeze-frame in the opening reels of Basket Case 2, a curious thing happens. You can almost – almost – sense the utter surprise on Frank Henenlotter’s part that he’s making a sequel to his surprise grindhouse hit at all. At the end of Basket Case, see, it seems that both Duane and Belial […]
By anyone’s standards, sixteen years is a hell of a hiatus for a filmmaker to take between films. Yeah, from time to time this happens (Herschell Gordon Lewis went a staggering thirty years between The Gore Gore Girls and his next film) but overall, it’s still unusual. After all, if you’d taken that long a […]
If you didn’t already know from your experience of watching Basket Case that bad things are almost certainly around the corner, then you could be forgiven for thinking that the beginning of Brain Damage (1988) features a perfectly respectable elderly couple, in a well-decorated New York apartment, doing something perfectly reasonable. Sure they’re feeding…something, but […]
A few years ago, at the Dead by Dawn horror festival in Edinburgh, I was invited to take part in a ‘play dead’ competition with the rest of the auditorium. Quite unusual as a pastime, you might think, even for a horror fest. Well, this was all off the back of a competition being held […]
We’re no longer the 100% horror site we used to be back when we still went by Brutal As Hell (sigh, remember those days? Anyone…?) However, the genre is still very close to our blackened hearts, and as such we’re as excited as any bloodthirsty Brit for the upcoming horror festival season. While the bulk […]