2073, despite initial appearances, is not a narrative film. It certainly enjoys playing up to that appearance, though, with its big, dystopian-style movie poster, its big star (Samantha Morton) and its opening scenes, which tease that it is set in 2073 – 37 years after ‘the event’. Don’t be fooled, however. There’s no key ‘event’ […]
Starting with a lone, bloodied man tormented enough to start pulling his own fingernails out, Itch! (2024) could go in a number of ways, albeit none of them very pleasant. It seems as though the film – with its stark opening titles and heavy cinematic grain – is calling on the nastiest, grisliest of its […]
The horrors of Hollywood keep on giving: last year, this year, no doubt next year, and so on. Skincare (2024) is another film which bases its storyline in the beauty industry, and all in all, it’s an engaging horror-adjacent tale, even if on some levels it struggles to settle on a genre. We start at […]
The Fix (2024) starts with an advert: there’s apparently a product available which will enable people to ‘breathe the air again’. Uh-oh; so it sounds as though director Kelsey Egan’s interest in environmental sci-fi and horror is still intact, if being given a different level of reach here than in previous films, such as Glasshouse. […]
“Our younger selves sing on in our hearts. We hear them still.” Thirty years ago, Luo Tong was a member of a choir which achieved a short-lived period of fame during the 1990s, thanks to their performances on a national stage. Now a filmmaker, Tong reunites with her fellow singers and teachers to reflect on […]
Free spirit Nina (Inès Anane) has lost custody of her daughter as a result of a court hearing centred around her unconventional lifestyle. Given her daughter back for just a weekend, Nina’s aim is to take her to see the sea, regardless of the fact that she doesn’t really have the requisite amount of money […]
Douchebag businessman Richard (Kevin Janssens) charters a helicopter in order to take his mistress Jen (Matilda Lutz) to his swanky holiday pad in the desert for some extracurricular activity. The next day, Richard’s friends Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive, with the three men intending to go off on a hunting trip. That […]
When we think about vampires, our expectations have inevitably been shaped by popular literature, which has in turn – for the last century – also found expression in cinema. In the nineteenth century, popular reading habits created a set of cultural expectations about vampires. The birth of horror fiction, which stemmed in turn from the […]
After biologist and coral smuggler Dr. Theresa Gorgeous dies in strange circumstances, Interpol agents Chase National (Alex Zhang Hungtai) and No St. Aubergine (Esther Garrel) head to Mexico to investigate a convoluted case that may be connected to Gorgeous’ illicit cargo. Can they solve the mystery before the body count spirals out of control? Described […]
*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 […]
Glue Trap (2023) opens in medias res, focusing on a sparring couple – Dan (Isaac Jay) and KJ (Brittany Bradford). At first, it seems like they’re in a therapy session; actually, it’s worse. They’re at a dinner party, and the host couple seems very happy, which only underlines their own issues. But some good comes […]