Celluloid Screams 2024 35mm Grindhouse Screening: Pieces

*THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS* For this year’s mystery Celluloid Screams grindhouse screening, we were promised something equally as bonkers as the previous year’s Lady Terminator. I was also advised by someone on the CS programming team that I’d probably seen it, which somehow meant to fellow Screamers that I would be able to pluck the […]

WIN Speak No Evil (2022) on Blu!

Recently remade for English-speaking audiences, we should remember that the original Danish Speak No Evil (2022) – one of my favourite horror films in the year it came out – was and is good enough and ground-breaking enough to even merit a second version. Directed by Christian Tafdrup, he escalates themes which have appeared in […]

Just One Drink (2015)

Just One Drink may have been made in 2015, but it feels like a film from 2005, not least because its star – Barbara Nedeljakova – is the star of one of the biggest horrors of 2005, namely Hostel. She’s back to her old tricks in filmmaker Andrew de Burgh’s debut short film, which is […]

Heretic (2024)

That’s that, then. That’s religion. It had a good run. Except, of course, if you happen to be religious, and will brush away any such declarations with the power of your faith. In a nutshell, that’s the premise behind, and the dispute within Heretic (2024) – a film which comes off as a kind of […]

MadS (2024)

As MadS (2024) opens, the camera pans back from what turns out to be an image of a woman’s agonised face; you could call it foreshadowing, or perhaps it’s just an incidental feature, an arty poster on the wall of an apartment being used for a drug deal, as a young man called Romain (Milton […]

Spirit of Independence 2024: Reputation

Small-time drug dealer Wes (James Nelson-Joyce) has a good thing going in his hometown of Dennings, with a growing stream of punters getting hooked on a form of ecstasy called “Clown.” He’s in a stable relationship with Zoe (Olivia Frances Brown), they’ve recently welcomed a son into the world and, longer term, they’re looking to […]

The Final Pact (2024)

The Final Pact starts with a Suspiria-lit house and a fleeing priest; we’ll be here again, you catch yourself thinking, but it’s not quite how you’d imagine. Rather than a tried-and-tested religious horror, this is much more of a psychological drama, albeit one which draws on supernatural elements to get where it needs to be. […]