As the poor, plot-irrelevant saps we meet briefly during Evil Dead Burn‘s pre-credits sequence die their genuinely horrible deaths, I almost had to laugh. Not because years of viewing increasingly horrific gore has burned away my nerve endings, though perhaps that is partly true; no, it’s the fact that the original Evil Dead (1981) was […]
In 1983, the Director of Public Prosecutions published its first list of movies which were tagged with the tabloid-friendly label of Video Nasties. These cinematic outliers were deemed to have to power to deprave and corrupt and, if the title in question had been successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, any dealer […]
Reality Killers (2005) begins with a caption which reads, “This film was mailed to us by an anonymous sender” and the viewer will instantly understand why, as the whole shebang is set up to be a whistle-stop tour of a very twisted individual’s collection of snuff videos. And, according to the IMDb summary, what follows […]
Any film which announces itself with a bright red, block-capitals title screen always speaks to high levels of confidence (go on, bet you can think of a few) and yeah, Jackalope (2026) fits this bill, too. If it’s guilty of anything, then it’s how it introduces a surfeit of ideas which it needs its audience […]
Starting out as a gruelling ethical quandary before progressing somewhere borderline fantastical, Child (2026) is without doubt a bleak film, but an innovative one, and it works effectively on its own terms, keeping a very humane, character-focused approach throughout its bizarre literal and metaphorical journey. We start with two doctors attending to what is clearly […]
Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec God of the Dead and page upon page of Aztec art depicting his historical ritual appeasement dominate the first minutes of Mexican director Mauricio Chernovetzky’s Sacrificios (2025), a study of Mexican religion, grief, fatherhood and guilt. After lingering across various drawings and sculpture, the camera pulls back to reveal a small boy, […]
We slowly pan back through a bedroom into a bathroom where a young woman sits, on the floor, bawling her eyes out: yes, Deepfake (2026) starts with a relationship breakdown, and the distressed dumpee Jane (Jessica DiGiovanni) is soon doing everything she can to rehabilitate her self-image and social standing, even if that largely seems […]
Part mystery, part broad strokes eco- or folk horror, Broken Beak (aka The Burning of Broken Beak, 2026) is flawed in execution, but not without engaging thematic and visual ideas of its own. Moreover, it my be flawed, but it isn’t flippant. We start by hearing the last mating call of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird, […]
We hear a link between music, chaos and quantum theory being suggested as Turn It Up! (2026) gets underway: someone is explaining to us, via a voiceover of sorts, that just the right kind of noise could, quite literally, open (interdimensional) doors. This is just before – in a fun, pace-setting title sequence – we […]
There’s a moment in Mark Jenkin’s new Cornish time-slip themed, 16mm folktale Rose of Nevada when the main character (Nick) finds a group of local fishermen in the newly invigorated fishing community he’s fallen through time into, all helping his crewmate to mend their vessel’s torn fishing net. As a traveller from a rather more […]
Did you order something? As she prepares a meal, a woman is disturbed by the arrival of a package. She collects it from the doorstep, and when she opens it, she immediately seems emotionally affected by what she finds inside. So much so, in fact, that she starts to asphyxiate herself with the bubble wrap […]