Spirit of Independence 2024: Trancers

Angel City, the year 2247. Trooper Jak Deth (Tim Thomerson) is a gruff cop whose dogged, extracurricular pursuit of the last remaining members of a zombie-like cult has landed him in hot water with his superiors. Detective McNulty (Art La Fleur) warns Jak that trancer hunting is out of bounds, so Jak reacts in the […]

FrightFest 2024: Saint Clare

“Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God”: a young woman, lying on her bed, intones this sentence over and over, like a mantra, as Saint Clare (2024) begins. This is apparently a Joan of Arc quotation, but it’s hopefully no spoiler to point that Joan figures but little in […]

FrightFest 2024: The Dæmon

A wonderfully desolate beach and the surrounding countryside clash with a ramshackle nearby house and its sole occupant (Nick Searcy), whom we see frantically writing – against the clock, as some kind of supernatural phenomena seems to be goading him, making him hallucinate, fear for his sanity. So who is this letter for? We get […]

FrightFest 2024: Broken Bird

If Broken Bird (2024) begins unusually literally, then it soon becomes something far more complex and symbolic than that: its depiction of the nervy, prim Sibyl (Rebecca Calder) suggests from the earliest moments that something about this character is barely restrained, and that we will discover more anon. But in getting there – despite a […]

Saint Drogo (2023)

Caleb (Brandon Perras-Sanchez) and Adrian (Michael J. Ahern) are a couple whose relationship is heading for the rocks, so they take a make or break trip to an off-season Provincetown in Cape Cod, where the atmosphere seems off from the start and an oddly friendly local called Eric (Matthew Pidge) assumes both the role of […]

Fantasia 2024: Párvulos

To some extent, Párvulos suffers by its promotional material, which seems to promise something mysterious and dark, swirling ominously in the washed-out, arthouse colour palette which we saw in the first stills. In truth, and beyond that muted colour palette, the film is nothing like that. In fact, arthouse, in terms of theme and approach […]

Fantasia 2024: Black Eyed Susan

A viewing of Black Eyed Susan (2024) will, if you have any stomach to get through its blisteringly unpleasant quandaries and implications, leave you with many questions. However, for all of that, the one resounding question for this reviewer is: are we ten years away from this kind of scenario, or five? Let me explain. […]