It’s no secret that I’m a pretty big into anime and manga. I mean, not like ‘seen every episode of Dragon Ball Z’ big, but I know my way around the fandom. That being said, when I heard that my local theater was playing Studio Ghibli’s classic Laputa Castle in the Sky for a one-night […]
It’s a sadly familiar story for horror fans everywhere: an ostensibly new release pops up on your radar with a generic title and premise, and shortly after picking it up you learn it’s in fact a few years old already and has been sat gathering dust on the distributor’s shelf this whole time, none of […]
The way that I first found out about its existence no doubt did a great disservice to A Ghost Story. Remember that Guardian newspaper article from July, which argued for something called ‘post-horror’? Post-horror is, of course, simply the latest in a long line of terms invented by people who can’t quite accept that they […]
For those of us who are constantly on the lookout for movies which offer something we haven’t seen before, a Hungarian hitman thriller in which the central protagonists are disabled is most definitely a novel proposition. Writer-director Attila Till’s Kills on Wheels (AKA Tiszta Szívvel) offers up just this, and – as was perhaps inevitable – […]
Considering their importance to the subculture consciousness – y’know, having probably dismantled hippie culture ready for the start of the 70s – cinematic versions of (or interpretations of) the Manson Family murders have always been…problematic, shall we say. Some of the very vaguest of nods to the case have been played for great, exploitative fun […]
With some films it’s clear, even from the opening seconds, that they are not going to provide an easy viewing experience, and this is definitely the case with Malady (2015), a first feature-length from director Jack James which I’ll confess has left a rather unpleasant aftertaste with me. This emotional effect has been carefully constructed, […]
Shameless have been spoiling us lately with Blu-ray releases of gialli in their catalogue, previously released as DVD only. The latest is another of Sergio Martino’s distinctive gialli, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, which not only marks his first foray into the giallo, but his first collaboration with the iconic Edwige Fenech. While Bava […]
Whilst it’s over ten years since director Park Chan-wook began stepping back from the beautiful, but brutal revenge sagas which first brought him to our attention, it’s nonetheless fair to say that I was surprised by The Handmaiden, his most recent feature. Although in some ways you can see commonality – deceptive appearances, surveillance, sexuality […]
Sitting down to watch an ultra low-budget genre film from a first time feature filmmaker always feels something of a lottery. More often than not, sad to say, you wind up with something that really wasn’t worth anyone’s time, and it’s liable to leave you feeling either resentful or sympathetic to the individuals who put […]
I do claim to be quite the fan of silent German cinema, but truth be told I’ve barely scratched the surface, even when it comes to real masters of the time. Even so, I was very excited when Eureka announced their restoration and release of Der Müde Tod, also known as Destiny, an early outing […]
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m woefully ignorant of the diverse cinema of the former Soviet Union; this goes even for those filmmakers who bridged that East/West divide, such as the best-known of the bunch, I’d say, Andrei Tarkovsky. Stalker (1979) is the first of his films that I’ve ever seen and, yep, […]