Once more unto the minefield that is the indie horror scene. Director Eric Pham brings with him a degree of cult cred due to his association with Robert Rodriguez, having worked in visual effects on a number of RR movies including Sin City and Grindhouse; and his lead actor here, Elle LaMont, is also from […]
There’s always plenty to be said in favour of taking a distinctly unusual premise and building an unconventional film around it, which challenges conventions about storytelling and character. On occasion, such an approach has resulted in truly striking, in some instances genuinely groundbreaking cinema. However, it can also result in works that simply feel tedious, […]
A teenage girl, angry at her father for wanting to remarry, invites her schoolfriends to spend the summer break with her at her maternal aunt’s house in the countryside. Once there, the girls realise not all is right with the house, and they need all their wits about them to escape the terrible place. A […]
My relationship with the Hellraiser sequels is ambivalent at best, hostile at worst; as I’ve said previously, the first Hellraiser is rather important to me, and I’ve always yearned for a fully-realised entrant into the mythos to appear, but with the exception of Hellbound – itself a brilliant horror movie – I’ve always ended up […]
With the Paranormal Activity series still fairly fresh in the memory, and the ongoing box office success of the Insidious and The Conjuring franchises, the ghost movie has seemingly never been more popular – and arguably never in greater need of a shot in the arm. We all know the routine: dark rooms, lengthy silences, […]
To say that this film arrives with a weight of expectation on its shoulders is putting it mildly. For starters, The Shape of Water is the latest film from Guillermo del Toro, widely regarded one of the greatest, most singular cinematic visionaries of our time, not to mention one of my own personal favourite filmmakers […]
A lot of brilliant animators and creators have emerged from the Studio Ghibli workshop, but very few have attempted to capture the magic of Ghibli or make it their own as much as producer Yoshiaki Nishimura. Founder of Studio Ponoc, a contemporary to Studio Ghibli, Nishimura took several members from the Ghibli arthouse and launched […]
How short can you – legitimately – make a cinematic scare? There are people who would say that a second is enough, but these people are probably discussing jump-cuts. Jump-cuts aren’t scary; jump-cuts are the equivalent of someone screaming BOO! into your ear to trigger a reflex reaction. Most people need – and expect – […]
I try to make it a point never to openly roast films just for the fun of it; whatever I say about a project, I try to ask myself whether I’d be happy to say it in front of the filmmaker themselves, and I try really hard to remember that real people out there might […]
The last time I saw Danielle Harris run around a hospital looking anxious for 90-odd minutes, it was in 2014’s See No Evil 2, an utterly bland and formulaic slasher sequel. However, while new release Inoperable offers up the same leading lady and a similar hospital setting, story-wise it’s a somewhat different kettle of fish. […]
The ‘mockumentary’ format has been used to interesting effect over the years; note that I said ‘mockumentary’ rather than ‘found footage’, a sub-genre which usually conjures more questions than it can ever answer. There are some important distinctions between the two. Strawberry Flavored Plastic dodges the most typical question asked during found footage, which is […]