By Nia Edwards-Behi A blend of slasher and ghost story, Dark Signal is a competently made but uninspiring and frustrating film. It opens with a young woman being murdered by a serial killer. Elsewhere, strapped-for-cash mother Kate (Joanna Ignaczewska) joins her boyfriend, Nick, in an endeavour to steal back £40,000 he’s owed by a client. […]
By Quin The Unraveling is the first film written and directed by Thomas Jakobsen. However, he does have a huge list of post-production and editing related credits on IMDB for his work on stand-up comedy specials – quite a few good ones actually, like Mike Birbiglia, Aziz Ansari and Jim Jefferies just to name a […]
By Marc Patterson If you’re a hardcore horror junkie like me then you might often find yourself judging a film by its first five minutes. With Bite, don’t do that. The first seven minutes play out like a hundred other direct-to-video, low-budget, found footage schlock-fests that have been forced-fed to me over the years. I […]
By Ben Bussey The arrival of yet another no-budget zombie gore movie – even one that involves female wrestlers – is liable to be met with little more than a dismissive shrug by many of us. However, the UK DVD release of Fight Like A Girl is a more momentous occasion than we might realise. […]
By Tristan Bishop Discounting the big 80’s comedy hit Splash (and its sequel Splash Too) and a certain Disney film, mermaids haven’t really made much of an impact on the cinematic world. Sure, there was the bit in Cabin In The Woods, but that amounted to little more than a throwaway joke (albeit still the […]
By Ben Bussey It seems the grand old British tradition of cheap and nasty anthology horror is alive and well in the 21st century. We have of course seen our share of anthology horrors in recent years, the most prominent being the V/H/S and The ABCs of Death movies, but we haven’t seen much that really […]
By Tristan Bishop We’ve all, no doubt, seen enough of the post-apocalypse genre to last a lifetime, but what of the time leading up to the big event? Films dealing with the pre-apocalypse are few and far between, with only 1988’s excellent Miracle Mile and 1998’s Last Night sticking in the mind. These Final Hours, […]
By Ben Bussey Just about every megabudget major studio production to hit the multiplexes these days seems to come with the promise of it being part of a new cinematic universe. However, it’s not just the $100 million + blockbuster crowd who are at it, as anyone who’s been following the progress of microbudget British […]
By Quin I have long had an optimistic view of the found footage sub-genre. Even though I can count on five fingers the ones I’ve really loved, I recognize a found footage film really has the potential to deliver something innovative and truly frightening. However, after seeing Justin Doescher’s film The Break-In, I have to […]
The Ninth Configuration is a film which, at a glance, appears to offer something radically different from what you actually get. Look at the cover art below: above the title we have the name of William Peter Blatty, writer of legendary horror movie The Exorcist; the title itself seems arcane and almost inscrutable; and we […]
By Nia Edwards-Behi I’ve already had the pleasure of writing at length about one of my all-time favourite films for this website’s anniversary retrospective series, when in 2012 I wrote about The Last House on the Left’s 40th anniversary. Time goes on and now I’m very excited to have the pleasure of commemorating 45 years […]