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, […]
In a dusty pub, an evidently already troubled man (Peter Mullan) is disturbed by the arrival of a stranger, who enigmatically requests an audience with ‘her’. A short conversation ensues and the younger man, Neil (Jeremy Irvine) is sent away, agitated, in evident grief. It seems that this situation, and even living in this place, […]
Getting a new job is a time to celebrate, right? Well, not always: you might be coming from a dark place, and going to a darker one. That’s the central idea behind short film The Queue, as we meet IT specialist Cole (Burt Bulos) just ahead of his first shift at a new company. Things […]
The Stoic Breeze may only be thirty or so minutes in length, but it is a film all about taking one’s time; by extension, it’s kinda all about time, and a person’s relationship with it, negotiated through the natural world. We start with a hand-held camera which very soon begins to feel like a character […]
Property (2022) is a film of mighty complexities and great heart, and as such, it outstrips a whole host of films which have tried and failed to sustain a similar balance. If some of its reasoning and momentum dissipate at certain points, then it’s never at the expense of the film’s involving, invoking, grim and […]