Nostalgia seems to be generational. Much as the 1980s saw an influx of renewed interest in the culture of the 1950s, and the 90s seemed to be all about attempting to relive the 60s, so too has our current decade seemed often overly fixated on looking back to the 80s. This trend that it has […]
Some films excel at that kind of grimy, disconcerting quality which Possum (2018) has in abundance. Every frame of this film makes your skin crawl: it’s a love letter to abandoned places and anonymous spaces, swept through with dead foliage and rot. This, in and of itself, makes the film fairly challenging viewing, even whilst […]
A noir-ish montage of images and a voiceover ruminating on the immorality of Hollywood introduces The Queen of Hollywood Blvd, a self-professed crime drama which promises to pitch a hard-bitten club owner against the tactics of a gang of organised criminals. On paper, the film does just this – but the style and tone involved […]
With such recent high profile success stories as It, A Quiet Place and Hereditary, the world at large is finally opening up to horror movies of a more sombre, introspective nature than the mainstream crowds tend to expect. Of course, anyone who keeps abreast of international indie horror and the festivals should already be well […]
An athletic young man, Allan (Jason Beghe) is rendered quadriplegic and reliant on wheelchair use after being struck by a truck. He struggles to adjust to his new life, dependent on his domineering mother and uncaring ex-girlfriend to assist him. Luckily, he is given a life line in the form of a Capuchin monkey, trained […]
How does a film which, from its mere conception, is a blatant cash-in on other established properties go about making itself seem something more than the blatant cash-in it is? As soon as word got out that Sony had given the green light to a solo movie based around Spider-Man bad guy Venom, it was […]
There have been many horror films about environmental havoc over the years, but it seems as though frogs have not figured prominently in these. Aside from the game-changing (or even life-changing) Hell Comes to Frogtown and a short cameo in Baskin, frogs have been largely overlooked, so I’ll admit: the press information for Strange Nature […]
Jackie Chan, as anyone can tell you, pioneered the martial arts action comedy, punctuating awe-inspiring displays of physical daring and expertise with immaculate comic timing and irreverent sensibilities which have resonated with audiences worldwide for decades. From the late 1970s and well into the 80s, Jackie pumped out hit after hit in this format, several […]
Sequels and remakes have been a thing forever, but it’s only comparatively recently that the term ‘reboot’ was added to the cinematic vernacular. Admittedly, the line between this new-ish descriptor and the aforementioned established film categories is often hazy, but it would seem to effectively mean either taking the story and/or characters in question back […]
The gradual decline of the found footage horror movie is not entirely down to oversaturation. There are larger cultural reasons why the format doesn’t totally work anymore, the principle issue being that it’s just not as accurate reflection of our current video culture as it once was. The days of average joes lugging around camcorders, […]
You have to hand it to director and writer Fred Dekker. Not only has he made some of the most straightforwardly entertaining films of the past forty years or so, but those films are – for many people – forever wedded to the 1980s, so forming part of people’s nostalgia for a decade when many […]