Together (2025)

Fantasy advertisement for celibacy Together (2025) starts with a search team in the woods, looking for two people – two names are being called, but two people go undiscovered. Almost immediately, we see what the search team does not, as the camera pans down below ground level, where some search dogs seem to have found […]

Dracula (2025)

Here we are again, then. The year is 1480: Wallachian marital bliss (which seems to involve assaulting lots of cushions) gets rudely interrupted by the prospect of holy war. So off goes Prince Dracula (who keeps referring to himself as ‘Dracul’), campaigning against the invading Turks. However all his thoughts remain with his beloved Elisabeta […]

Double Feature: Pearl (2022) and Maxxxine (2025)

By guest contributor Chris Ward So here we have two parts of a trilogy originally released during the past three-or-four years getting a boutique 4K UHD re-release by Second Sight Films, and why not, because Second Sight have also put out the bulk of the director’s back-catalogue in a similarly lavish fashion over the past […]

The Running Man (2025)

Is it me, or do even the most improbable dystopian situations feel a whisker away these days? Perhaps The Running Man (2025) feels oh-so close at hand because the novel on which it’s based, with its novel-contemporary analogue tech and big budget gameshow format blends so nicely with our world, billionaire media conglomerates with their […]

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025)

Ah, here we go then. An older man who seems to be living and bill-dodging at a hotel on the French Riviera (Fabio Testi) becomes fixated by a young woman on the beach; the diamond jewellery in her nipple (!) prompts him on a fractured and somewhat looping trip down Memory Lane, as he recollects […]

Dangerous Animals (2025)

As Dangerous Animals gets going, we first observe tourists and sightseers Greg (Liam Greinke) and Heather (Ella Newton) popping up on a Queensland quayside, hoping for a ‘marine experience’ with a local: they’ve just missed their organised tour doing something similar. The gaffer, Tucker (Jai Courtney) is straightaway signposted as a bit of a wildcard, […]

Short Film Focus: Hand (2025)

Amber (Sharlene Cruz) is woken in the early hours of the morning to an upset call from her boyfriend, Justin (Dario Vazquez), but what is he ‘so sorry’ about exactly? We don’t discover that immediately, but we can soon glean that he’s not hurt or sick or anything like that: judging from Amber’s furious response […]

Celluloid Screams 2025: The Return of the Living Dead (40th anniversary)

Freddy (Thom Mathews) is a new employee at the Uneeda Medical Supply Warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky. Supervisor Frank (James Karen) attempts to give this thoroughly unglamourous form of employment some umph by taking Freddy to the basement, where drums of a toxic gas called 2-4-5 Trioxin have been stashed by the military. Frank accidentally breaks […]