Tatsumi is a troubled young man. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, and we first meet him at an abortive encounter with a careers guidance officer which sees him, exasperatedly, told to go back to his parents. Yet he doesn’t ask for their advice, either: instead, he withdraws from the […]
Western audiences have had their pick of Japanese crime thrillers in recent years, as more and more films, old and new, have received releases. This means perhaps that a new generation of audiences has become enraptured by the idea of Japan’s seedy underworld, with its molls and its gangsters, its ultraviolence and its gore. That […]
The dour, yet pacy and surprisingly graphic take on Stephen King’s novel IT was a pleasant surprise when it hit our cinema screens a couple of years ago, and the promise of a second, and closing chapter has been something which fans of the film have kept an eye on ever since. Picking up, as […]
For a brief, shimmering moment, it almost looked as if the oft-maligned SyFy might finally have cast aside its long-held status as the home of subpar genre material, and had finally developed into a platform for genuinely well-made and entertaining films from creators who were really putting forth the requisite effort. The moment I’m talking […]
For most readers of this site, director Alexandre Aja is probably best known for his work within the horror genre. When Switchblade Romance (or High Tension) burst onto the scene in 2003, it very much formed part of the new wave of unflinchingly nasty European ordeal cinema; films made since then, such as The Hills […]
Placing monsters on screen – as in your vampires, or your aliens, or so on – has its own share of challenges, but at core, there’s a fairly obvious requirement to, well, get the monsters on screen. When you are aiming to represent monstrous behaviour or thoughts, however, this can be rather more tricky, even […]
Reflections on the twilight years of any great artist or company tend to be tinged with sadness and regret, lamenting on how the mighty had fallen, how their latter day work could only serve as a pale reminder of how great things had once been. Conventional wisdom would seem to dictate that this is how […]
By Matt Harries With the weather in this country finally starting to resemble the heat and humidity of last year, summer, it seems, is finally well underway. Swiftly following on from the critically-praised Midsommar is a second piece of folk-horror for these warmer months. But while Ari Aster’s film is replete with the fertile imagery […]
If it comes in miniature and could conceivably be evil in nature, chances are Charles Band has probably used it as the basis for a schlock horror film (even ‘worry dolls’ have gone very, very wrong in his hands). And, in terms of success stories, the Puppet Master franchise has probably been one of his […]
There’s hardly any need at this stage to say that the late Jess Franco was one of the most prolific low-brow filmmakers we’ve ever known, but the terrific plus side to his frenetic pace of work during a nearly sixty-year career is that, for most of us, there’s still a wealth of film titles out […]
By Guest Contributor Matt Harries In an era where a phrase such as ‘world building’ has entered the lexicon of the expectant cinema-goer, it is all too easy for the brightest lights, most groundbreaking camera work and most stupendous action sequences to steal the hearts and minds of the viewer. Conversely, it seems that all […]