Coming soon! 26th Fantasia International Film Festival

Fantasia International Film Festival usually winds up giving me a large share of my films of the year: it’s second to none in sourcing and selecting a frankly daunting array of fantastic new features. Now about to launch its 26th edition, and after bearing up under a couple of years of Covid restrictions, it will […]

Saint Maud (2019)

Whilst depictions of loneliness are not rare in genre cinema, on odd occasions a film comes along which treats the subject with a level of sophistication and subtlety which is both compelling, and difficult to do justice in words. Saint Maud (2019) definitely fits into this category. Having some similarities to Lucky McGee’s May (2002) […]

The Mortuary Collection (2019)

The (almost total) demise of the anthology film is a crying shame: despite a minor, if noteworthy comeback with some notable entrants into the genre such as the ABCs of Death or Dead Girls over the past decade or so, it’s still a format which just doesn’t seem to attract the interest it once did, […]

The Cleansing Hour (2019)

Perhaps it’s to be entirely expected that the number of social media-related horrors continue to grow and grow. Alongside the likes of Tragedy Girls, Assassination Nation and Making Monsters, we can now count The Cleansing Hour, though quite unlike those others, this most recent film melds the premise of a successful social media channel with […]

Celluloid Screams 2019: The Nightingale

If ever a film spoke to unpalatable truths, then it’s Jennifer Kent’s most recent film, The Nightingale. Where her previous feature The Babadook put a fantastical spin on mental trauma, The Nightingale strips back all varieties of artifice and fantasy, striving to represent a notoriously brutal period in Australia’s colonial past as realistically as possible. […]

Celluloid Screams 2019: After Midnight (2019)

One of the most talked-about films on the horror film circuit back in 2013 was The Battery, an ultra low-budget mumblecore American indie take on the classic zombie apocalypse set-up. It proved divisive, with many viewers finding it too slow, uneventful and low on the expected gut-munching horror, but plenty of others (myself included) being […]

Mayhem Film Festival: The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (2019)

There’s a brutal serial killer on the loose in South Korea. His modus operandi is quite simple: by faking a collision with another vehicle on a deserted road, he encourages the aggrieved party to get out of their car: when they do so, he waits for them to get distracted, then stabs them to death. […]

Mayhem Film Festival: Daniel Isn’t Real (2019)

Daniel Isn’t Real was introduced as ‘a cross between Drop Dead Fred and Hellraiser’; if you are immediately wondering how that could ever play out, then rest assured, this is as good an approximation as you are likely to get. This film is incredibly dark throughout, threaded through with ambiguities which grow the more you […]

Mayhem Film Festival: Extra Ordinary (2019)

As the point has been made several times before on this site, horror comedy can be a risky venture; when it goes wrong, it can be either not that funny, nor really capable of showing any love for the horror genre either. Happily, neither of these charges can be levelled at Extra Ordinary. The film […]

Raindance 2019: Friedkin Uncut (2018)

By Matt Harries Despite professing to not be a political film maker, William Friedkin demonstrated his social conscience at the very beginning of his directorial career. The People Vs Paul Crump was Friedkin’s 1962 debut and follows the story of the titular Crump, sentenced to death by electric chair for his part in a bungled […]

Raindance 2019: Dark, Almost Night (2019)

Winter in Poland. A woman is taking the train from Warsaw back to her dilapidated home town, a part of the world evidently undergoing a spate of child disappearances, given the newspapers and news bulletins we soon encounter. This is Alicja (Magdalena Cielecka), a journalist, who has chosen to return to her old home in […]