Anxieties about illness, technology and the conspiracy theories which operate in between have proven a rich source for filmmakers post-Covid. You could even suggest that this has grown into a specific subgenre. Buying Time (2024) adds to this number: it’s a super low-budget outing, with all of the attendant challenges and issues that low budget […]
Emma (Bethlehem Million) is in the proverbial cinematic pickle, having been sacked from her job, instantly hitting the “necking sauvignon blanc straight from the bottle” stage and being given notice by her roommate because of unpaid rent. However, friend of a friend James (Marc Senter) offers her the chance to make a welcome pile of […]
There’s not a lot of greenery in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, but we get a few flashes of a more abundant way of life as, at the very start of the film, we meet the heroine of Fury Road in her childhood days. This is the mysterious Green Place, then, and it’s somehow been […]
On her twenty-seventh birthday, Elizabeth Cadosia (Lani Call) inherits her grandmother’s dilapidated schoolhouse. Soon after Elizabeth moves in, she begins to experience disturbing visions and the subsequent discovery of various artefacts around the place reveals that her grandmother was a practitioner of black magic. Will Elizabeth follow in those footsteps too? The blurb for this […]
Are the undead growing less vicious? Once upon a time, they’d be up and at you the second they were resurrected, but a few films of late have taken a drastically different approach, repositioning the dead as a moral and philosophical quandary – which brings us straight to Handling the Undead, a film which very […]
The best way to sum up Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker is to say that it’s mesmerisingly weird – both in its plot and in its origins. It was directed by William Asher, who is better known for gentle TV comedy series such as I Love Lucy and Bewitched: this film is – to say the […]
As the film begins, it seems that two different spheres – the domestic and the world outside the home – are being drawn into sharp relief here; navigating these two spheres, and the risks attendant on each, does indeed form a key part of In Flames. We are first faced with a young woman, who […]
A genre-splicing look at broken people and relationships, The Seductress From Hell has a wealth of creative visual ideas, but its rather flustered approach to storytelling (and its script issues) do unfortunately hamper the film’s overall success. In essentials, this is a revenge flick – albeit some of the targets are more collateral than anything […]
Much is made in supernatural horror of what is seen or unseen, but so much of what scares us is down to what we hear – or think we hear. Using that idea, Last Words (2023) is an effective short film which, although it tantalises several ideas regarding the source of its horror, is ultimately […]
There’s nothing more galling in life than a dwindling promise, and sadly, that is a real problem for Pandemonium (2023). What begins as a rather beautiful, stark and savage riff on what happens to us after we die disintegrates into a mess of clumsily-stitched parts, united for the most part only by two ideas: death […]
There are a couple of mysterious proverbs – at least they seem to be proverbs – at the beginning of All You Need is Death. ‘Love is a knife with a blade for a handle’; ‘Love goes in at the eye’. Taken together with the version of a certain Beatles track used for the title, […]