Everyone and their mums will tell you that the slasher genre came into being in the mid-1970s; building primarily on the legacy of Hitchcock’s Psycho, such down and dirty independent productions like Last House on the Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre laid the groundwork for the innumerable stab-happy B-movies which came in the […]
It’s open to debate as to whether or not Jackie Chan has what we can definitively call a signature franchise; one single film series with which he is uniquely associated above all others. Some western audiences might say it’s Rush Hour, as that was the one that finally saw Jackie break through in Hollywood, leading […]
Anthology films – often three short tales with a common framework – are nothing new, even if the format isn’t used all that often today. We have, however, seen some interesting variations on the anthology film in recent years, perhaps most notably with The ABCs of Death in 2012, which made a minor stir and […]
It’s telling that The Meg director Jon Turteltaub has declared his intention on finally bringing the long-in development adaptation of Steve Alten’s novel to screens was to make “the second best shark movie of all time.” Yes, even in this age of perpetual remakes, reboots and regurgitations, it’s still universally accepted that no movie centred […]
When I heard that Mara was a horror story invoking sleep paralysis as a key element of its plot, as a sufferer I was immediately interested. Sleep paralysis is well understood in the modern age, just as sleep and dreams are generally, but anyone who has ever had a significant nightmare, or a waking nightmare […]
Paul Verhoeven’s first Hollywood production was in many respects a case of ‘start as you mean to go on.’ In line with the Dutch auteur’s later, more celebrated work – RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers (let’s put Showgirls to one side just now, although there’s a lot to be said for that one) […]
It’s a pleasure to find oneself watching a hitherto-unknown supernatural horror, just like The Changeling. Before Insidious and that Woman in Black remake were even a twinkle in the eye, before ghosts got riotous, filmmakers were giving voice to ghost stories which could be understated, yet complex enough to keep their secrets until the end. […]
How much can one ninety-minute film reasonably do within its timeframe? Can a film successfully go from awkward laughs to gore, from femmes fatales to OTT-ultraviolence, and from slacker humour to shock? Rondo (2018) believes it’s not only possible, it’s all part and parcel of its overall appeal. Both the ethos and the resulting movie […]
When a new horror movie lands with a painfully generic title and reports of a troubled journey to the final cut, this tends to leave you with pretty low expectations going in. Dead Night premiered at 2017’s Fantastic Fest, then known as Applecart; a title I’m glad they ditched, as a) it could easily be […]
Umberto Lenzi turned his hand to many different kinds of genre film during his career, so it’s perhaps little surprise that he looked to the kind of cannibalism movies being made by his peers (such Ruggero Deodato), making two of them in very rapid succession, after almost a ten-year break between these and the first […]
There’s a lot to be said for films that wear their heart on their sleeve; plenty of the most affecting and memorable titles in cinema are the work of filmmakers with an intensely personal vision. Writer-director Priscilla Cameron (making her feature debut here) certainly seems to be coming straight from the heart with The Butterfly […]