Some films excel at that kind of grimy, disconcerting quality which Possum (2018) has in abundance. Every frame of this film makes your skin crawl: it’s a love letter to abandoned places and anonymous spaces, swept through with dead foliage and rot. This, in and of itself, makes the film fairly challenging viewing, even whilst […]
A noir-ish montage of images and a voiceover ruminating on the immorality of Hollywood introduces The Queen of Hollywood Blvd, a self-professed crime drama which promises to pitch a hard-bitten club owner against the tactics of a gang of organised criminals. On paper, the film does just this – but the style and tone involved […]
How does a film which, from its mere conception, is a blatant cash-in on other established properties go about making itself seem something more than the blatant cash-in it is? As soon as word got out that Sony had given the green light to a solo movie based around Spider-Man bad guy Venom, it was […]
There have been many horror films about environmental havoc over the years, but it seems as though frogs have not figured prominently in these. Aside from the game-changing (or even life-changing) Hell Comes to Frogtown and a short cameo in Baskin, frogs have been largely overlooked, so I’ll admit: the press information for Strange Nature […]
Sequels and remakes have been a thing forever, but it’s only comparatively recently that the term ‘reboot’ was added to the cinematic vernacular. Admittedly, the line between this new-ish descriptor and the aforementioned established film categories is often hazy, but it would seem to effectively mean either taking the story and/or characters in question back […]
The gradual decline of the found footage horror movie is not entirely down to oversaturation. There are larger cultural reasons why the format doesn’t totally work anymore, the principle issue being that it’s just not as accurate reflection of our current video culture as it once was. The days of average joes lugging around camcorders, […]
How many of us really felt we needed another Predator movie? It’s been 31 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger and co first battled that ugly motherfucker in the South American jungle, and while the 1990 sequel has its share of devotees, I daresay most would agree John McTiernan’s original has never been topped. For myself, my […]
The Western, pioneered by the likes of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, is a format which has spawned cinema around the world, with recognisably Western-style filmmaking appearing everywhere, even in the likes of the Convict Scorpion films in Japan during the 70s. However, I think it’s probably fair to say that South Africa isn’t greatly […]
Coralie Fargeat’s aptly-titled rape-revenge film caused quite the stir on the rounds of genre festivals last year, and has also had the honour of its own UK tour thanks to Birds Eye View’s Reclaim the Frame series. Revenge is a rape-revenge film made by a woman, which I suppose might, for some, make it a […]
Loss tends to leave us with a significant hole to fill in our lives, and, if we’re not careful, it may well leave us open to manipulation. This is the crux of new US indie Dead Love (originally entitled A Song For The Living), which centres on Grayson Low as Brandon, a young musician and […]
Anthology films – often three short tales with a common framework – are nothing new, even if the format isn’t used all that often today. We have, however, seen some interesting variations on the anthology film in recent years, perhaps most notably with The ABCs of Death in 2012, which made a minor stir and […]
