It’s always a privilege, in these social media-saturated times, to walk into a film screening without the faintest idea of what it’s all about. As I hadn’t even looked at the Celluloid Screams programme before we sat down to watch Habit (and as I almost immediately mix up titles and synopses anyway) it definitely felt […]
Hard to believe it’s been a full decade since Grindhouse, don’t you think? Even stranger to think that a film which was deemed a box office catastrophe proved to have such a legacy, inspiring scores of low-budget filmmakers to try their hand at vintage-flavoured exploitation, to such an extent that ten years on grindhouse is […]
I’ve followed the careers of directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead with interest ever since I covered their challenging and innovative feature debut, Resolution, back in 2012. I loved the way that the film combined interesting characters, plausible dialogue and a type of slow-burn horror which was quite unlike anything else I’d seen. It’s rare […]
For a great many years now, slasher movies have frequently done their best to subvert expectation, particularly when it comes to the young women who typically wind up on the end of the masked killer’s implement of choice. Why, it’s been almost 25 years since the first scene of Jason Goes To Hell pulled off […]
Being a tiny nation, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Iceland hasn’t yet featured very prominently, in its own right, in cinema. Its stunning and evocative landscapes have been used a thousand times in films which simply seek a striking location, but it’s comparatively rare to see Icelandic people, language and stories making their own way to […]
For many of us growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, being terrified by the Borley Rectory hauntings was practically a rite of passage. For my part, I must have been around nine years old, I’d guess, and found out about ‘the most haunted house in England’ from a Readers’ Digest Mysteries of the Unexplained […]
In a historical context, The Vikings might be deemed a bit of a curiosity, walking a tightrope between the grandiose historical epic and the B-movie swashbuckler. Given that its leading men Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis reunited two years later for Spartacus, it’s easy to dismiss The Vikings as little more than a dry run […]
Microbudget slasher movies from unknown filmmakers have always been ten-a-penny, and in the DV age they’re arguably all the more innumerable. Adding a recognised genre star always goes a long way to lifting such a film above the quagmire. Also, it never hurts to set your film on an annual holiday; all being well it […]
The legacy of Catholicism in French and Belgian left-field cinema seems to mean a strange predilection for Christian themes, although it finds its form in curious ways. In recent years we’ve had Calvaire, made in 2004 (retitled ‘The Ordeal’ for English audiences, which neatly strips it of its Biblical meaning), the Christmas creation horrors of […]
Sigh – yet another Friday the 13th comes around, yet for the eighth bloody year in a row we still don’t have another Friday the 13th movie. Okay, I’ll accept that perhaps not all readers will be as bummed about that as I am, but I also know that I’m not alone in missing the […]
Movies in which East meets West have always been a somewhat tricky proposition. Historically, representations of Asians in American (and, for that matter, British/European) films and television have tended to hinge on stereotypes; generally either the impeccably wise asexual Kung Fu master, or “Miss-a Gorightry, I plotest.” The 1970s, being of course the most progressive […]