I Remember You (2017)

Being a tiny nation, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Iceland hasn’t yet featured very prominently, in its own right, in cinema. Its stunning and evocative landscapes have been used a thousand times in films which simply seek a striking location, but it’s comparatively rare to see Icelandic people, language and stories making their own way to […]

Borley Rectory (2017)

For many of us growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, being terrified by the Borley Rectory hauntings was practically a rite of passage. For my part, I must have been around nine years old, I’d guess, and found out about ‘the most haunted house in England’ from a Readers’ Digest Mysteries of the Unexplained […]

Red Christmas (2016)

Microbudget slasher movies from unknown filmmakers have always been ten-a-penny, and in the DV age they’re arguably all the more innumerable. Adding a recognised genre star always goes a long way to lifting such a film above the quagmire. Also, it never hurts to set your film on an annual holiday; all being well it […]

Doubleplusungood (2017)

The legacy of Catholicism in French and Belgian left-field cinema seems to mean a strange predilection for Christian themes, although it finds its form in curious ways. In recent years we’ve had Calvaire, made in 2004 (retitled ‘The Ordeal’ for English audiences, which neatly strips it of its Biblical meaning), the Christmas creation horrors of […]

The Babysitter (2017)

Sigh – yet another Friday the 13th comes around, yet for the eighth bloody year in a row we still don’t have another Friday the 13th movie. Okay, I’ll accept that perhaps not all readers will be as bummed about that as I am, but I also know that I’m not alone in missing the […]

Cold Moon (2016)

The words ‘from the writer of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas’ conjure certain mental images; you’re left picturing something that resembles… well… a Tim Burton film. However, Cold Moon – an adaptation of the late Michael McDowell’s 1980 novel Cold Moon over Babylon – is an altogether different kettle of fish, brought to life […]

Gerald’s Game (2017)

For anyone who keeps up with the contemporary film scene, there’s really no getting around the somewhat eerie prescience of Gerald’s Game landing on screens at this moment. It’s not just that it’s the latest high profile Stephen King adaptation during something of a renaissance for the famed author’s works on screen, landing in the […]

Downrange (2017)

Ryûhei Kitamura has had a pretty interesting and varied career. After directing his first films more than 20 years ago, the Japanese filmmaker really broke through with 2000’s action horror crossover Versus.  A few years and a few movies later (2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars among them), he headed stateside. Alas, despite the kinetic energy and […]