Revenge (2017)

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 […]

Dead Love (2018)

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 […]

Blood Clots (2018)

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 […]

The Meg (2018)

It’s telling that The Meg director Jon Turteltaub has declared his intention on finally bringing the long-in development adaptation of Steve Alten’s novel to screens was to make “the second best shark movie of all time.” Yes, even in this age of perpetual remakes, reboots and regurgitations, it’s still universally accepted that no movie centred […]

Mara (2018)

When I heard that Mara was a horror story invoking sleep paralysis as a key element of its plot, as a sufferer I was immediately interested. Sleep paralysis is well understood in the modern age, just as sleep and dreams are generally, but anyone who has ever had a significant nightmare, or a waking nightmare […]

Rondo (2018)

How much can one ninety-minute film reasonably do within its timeframe? Can a film successfully go from awkward laughs to gore, from femmes fatales to OTT-ultraviolence, and from slacker humour to shock? Rondo (2018) believes it’s not only possible, it’s all part and parcel of its overall appeal. Both the ethos and the resulting movie […]

Dead Night (2017)

When a new horror movie lands with a painfully generic title and reports of a troubled journey to the final cut, this tends to leave you with pretty low expectations going in. Dead Night premiered at 2017’s Fantastic Fest, then known as Applecart; a title I’m glad they ditched, as a) it could easily be […]

The Butterfly Tree (2017)

There’s a lot to be said for films that wear their heart on their sleeve; plenty of the most affecting and memorable titles in cinema are the work of filmmakers with an intensely personal vision. Writer-director Priscilla Cameron (making her feature debut here) certainly seems to be coming straight from the heart with The Butterfly […]

King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen (2017)

The annals of cult film history are littered with instantly recognisable names whose many illustrious works could be named at the drop of a hat by anyone with a reasonable knowledge of the material. However, there are plenty of other names who don’t have quite the same level of recognition, nor are any of their […]

The Night Eats The World (2018)

Zombies, as anyone who’s been following the trends of horror cinema so far this century will be aware, came dangerously close to over-saturation in the past decade. (I’d say ‘done to death,’ only… y’know.) However, the mid-2000s living dead frenzy in the wake of Shaun of the Dead, The Walking Dead, World War Z etc. […]

The First Purge (2018)

Any way you look at it, The Purge is one of the most distinctive cinematic franchises of the past decade. For one, in amongst the slew of films that are quite clearly horror yet inspire umpteen pseudo-high brow think pieces declaring they’re not horror really, The Purge is one property of which we might genuinely […]