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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
When I read some of the blurb for Imperial Blue and saw that its story revolved around drug use, I expected to get one of two things: either a brutal crime drama, where cartel is pitched against cartel, or else a surreal, even overblown imagining of substance abuse on-screen. In truth, Imperial Blue contains some […]
By Helen Creighton At first glance, Certain Kind of Silence has the whiff of a certain kind of Stepford: vague parallels could be drawn between the classic 70s sci-fi The Stepford Wives and Czech director Michal Hogenauer’s tale of a young au pair slowly but inexorably drawn into an oppressive cult environment against her better […]
Tatsumi is a troubled young man. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, and we first meet him at an abortive encounter with a careers guidance officer which sees him, exasperatedly, told to go back to his parents. Yet he doesn’t ask for their advice, either: instead, he withdraws from the […]
Chloe (Lexy Kolker) isn’t allowed to play outside. Her front door is barricaded and sealed; every window is covered and she is under strict instructions not to ever, ever attempt to go outside. The world is a terrifying place, her paranoid father (Emile Hirsch) keeps on telling her. But Chloe has no sense of this […]
It’s been close to six years since I reviewed director Lawrie Brewster’s second feature film, the cryptozoological horror Lord of Tears; at the time, I was impressed with the film’s imagination and its sense of a reverence for classic horror fare, but found it a sometimes muddled film in which certain sequences should have been […]
Horror films have often invoked different kinds of physical media as conduits or access points for dark forces, and given the significance of music in our culture, it’s little wonder that records have figured fairly highly over the years, particularly in decades gone past. There have been some great stories which feature records, or other […]