Love them as we may, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are perplexing figures at times. Given their obvious, long-proven skill as both performers and writers, it’s hard not to be struck by how often they lend their talents to projects that are clearly beneath them; this is especially true of Pegg, who may have carved […]
A confession: I am not familiar with the work of director Gaspar Noé, despite his presence as a notorious, divisive figure in the cult cinema scene. The verdict on 2002’s Irreversible was so split amongst people whose opinions I trust that I’ve still never sought the film out, and as such I’ve never caught up […]
I have to say right away, it takes some balls to slap a title like that on a low-budget indie horror from a largely unknown cast and crew. It’s almost as if writer-director Justin McConnell and company are inviting the likes of me to snidely declare that it’s far from a life-changing experience. By extension, […]
The first clue that all is not well with friends (and fast food connoisseurs) Tan and Javid is that, as they leave a Berlin kebab restaurant which has apparently not passed muster, they have to step over a lot of dead bodies as they go. In a neat move, then, Snowflake establishes key elements in […]
If you’ve seen your share of historical martial arts movies, chances are you’ve heard the name Wong Fei-Hung. A real life pioneer of Kung Fu and Chinese medicine and all-around folk hero, he’s been heavily mythologised in Hong Kong action cinema, notable films including Drunken Master and Iron Monkey. However, where both those films followed […]
This feature discusses the series in full and as such may contain spoilers. Mike Flanagan gets it. He gets the power of horror, and he doesn’t seek to delegitimise that power by needlessly talking it up or talking it down; with his work adapting Stephen King, his films such as Oculus and (the rarely-mentioned, but […]
I start this review with something of a confession: it has only dawned on me in the past few years, really, that my liking for Dario Argento’s work is based on a very small number of his films. And it’s awful – as well as terribly unpopular these days, given the vicissitudes of the likes […]
You have to hand it to Keanu Reeves. He may have been a huge star ever since breaking through as one half of the affable, dim-witted metalhead duo in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure a full three decades ago, yet for the longest time he was widely deemed impossible to take seriously as a dramatic […]
The festive season has always been a popular setting for horror movies. This may in part be a natural evolution of the old tradition for setting ghost stories on Christmas Eve, but I daresay it’s more of a Grinch-like reaction against the crassness, commercialism and artifice of the event in modern culture; how, as much […]
Sergio G. Sánchez, writer of The Orphanage and The Impossible, takes on his first major, widely released work as director on this family-based mystery with a hint of a ghost story in the mix. Given the writer-director’s heritage, and the fact that the marketing emphasises the involvement of producers behind both The Orphanage and Pan’s […]
Whilst for many of us post-apocalyptic narratives may be synonymous with zombies and/or marauding biker gangs in extravagant costumes, pare it back and they typically come down to the same key idea: being the last person alive in a world that is no more. From Robert Neville of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, to Max […]