By Keri O’Shea Why did Nazisploitation movies enjoy such a brief, if lurid moment in the sun during the European cinema of the 1970s? Perhaps the old adage ‘history is written by the winners’ applies as much to the arts as it does to other aspects of society; certainly, there has never been any great […]
By Ben Bussey It’s strange for thirty-somethings like myself to realise that many of you reading this now might not remember a time before everyone had access to the internet. Now that we’re all online every hour of the day, able to uncover just about any nugget of film trivia as soon as it comes to mind, […]
By Keri O’Shea On her way to her shift at a dead-end diner populated by a host of lurid, colourful characters, waitress Betsy runs into a spot of trouble: a misunderstanding between her and a local homeless guy results in a nearby stranger feeling the need to rush to her aid – nearly getting himself […]
By Keri O’Shea Frantic, clumsy, urgent, the first thing we see in 10 Cloverfield Lane is a young woman who turns out to be named Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) throwing several of her personal possessions into a box, before hurrying to her car with them and driving away at top speed. This act is not, […]
By Ben Bussey There’s always a special charm to horror movies set in amusement parks. The two institutions share a lot of common ground; we go there to let it all hang out, cathartically unload our anxieties, confront our fears in an ostensibly safe environment. Of course, we’ve all heard stories about rides going wrong, […]
By Tristan Bishop Your teen years can be a scary place, what with all those possibilities and unknown quantities rubbing up against hormonal explosions – things can get weird and extreme quite quickly, so it’s unsurprising that filmmakers tend to keep mining the teenage experience for horror films. Of course, the vast majority don’t really […]
By Keri O’Shea I’ll be the first to admit that I’m something of a fan of post-apocalyptic cinema: give me a filmmaker who can show us some unpalatable possibilities for humankind’s future via a dramatisation of just how frail our structures and norms are and, in an odd way, I’m happy. The opening scenes of […]
By Ben Bussey It can be an interesting business covering DVD and Blu-ray reissues of older movies. Sometimes we wind up with stuff we always meant to see but never got around to; sometimes they’re movies we’ve never even heard of before. But other times, they’re movies which really need no introduction at all – […]
By Keri O’Shea Whatever happened to the ‘new wave of French horror’, then? I guess the wave just broke. After dominating the horror scene just shy of a decade ago, turning everything, everywhere into a blue-filtered torture fest overlaid with religious anxiety and women in very functional underwear (okay, I’m paraphrasing, but still…) it seems […]
By Ben Bussey Taking a real-life location which – in living memory – has been the site of numerous suicides, and then using it as the setting for a horror movie, always felt like a very risky proposition. Had a Hollywood movie opted to produce a similar treatment of the English town of Brigend*, which infamously […]
In Keri’s earlier review of writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s headbanging horror comedy (consider hers an insider account of sorts, given Keri’s a lifelong metalhead and I’m not), Keri contemplates the ‘special relationship’ between heavy metal music and black magic. It’s fair to say there are similar links between heavy metal and horror cinema. Again, my […]