By Keri O’Shea When a film is described by its maker as ‘modern Gothic’ then I have to admit, I’ll always jump at the chance to see it, even if I’m often disappointed. The term ‘Gothic’ is tough to define in many ways, but even if we can’t always agree what Gothic is, then we […]
By Keri O’Shea When creator Nigel Kneale brought Professor Bernard Quatermass to the screen in the late 70s, it was not the first time that this intriguing and rather under-appreciated figure had appeared; since the 1950s, when he was first introduced, he had become a quiet but interesting institution, a man whose scientific acumen was […]
By Nia Edwards-Behi Damned on Earth begins with a scene in which a woman runs through a wooded area as a lumbering, anonymous man chases after. She falls over a bit. Then she dies. The only narrative twist to this is that this isn’t a precursor to a bog-standard would-be slasher classic, but instead it […]
By Ben Bussey Back in March 2014 I saw a movie called The Invoking. It was a no-budget production from a young cast and crew, following a bunch of friends heading out to a remote, hitherto unknown location, where, following a liberal side order of personal drama, something vaguely spooky occurs. It bored the living […]
By Quin I have to admit that I had to look up the definition to the word “culling” and found that it meant “a selection from a large quantity; reducing the population of a wild animal (specifically an inferior or surplus animal) by selective slaughter.” In the final minutes of the film, the word is […]
By Jamie Brownlie To quote Operation Ivy, “Here we go again.” Six friends on vacation in Lithuania meet the exotic Luta at a party. Two of them decide to follow her back to the tattoo parlor where she works to get work from The Artist, the master tattooist. Torture ensues and it all caps off […]
By Tristan Bishop Freshness is a rare thing for us horror fans. The very nature of genre is repetition, after all – and so over the past hundred years of horror films, the same situations, characters, locations, set-ups and pay-offs appear again and again. A lot of films actively homage past pinnacles of the genre, […]
Review by Nia Edwards-Behi Crawl or Die has got one of those posters that immediately makes me roll my eyes. Girl, in her skivvies, dodgy Photoshop. That eye-roll reaches critical when I remember that this film used to be called Crawl Bitch Crawl, an even more terrible title now that I’ve seen the film. But, […]
By Svetlana Fedotov Comic anthologies are hard to pull off. There’s always someone that doesn’t pick up the slack in one of the stories, whether it’s the crap art or dull dialogue, and that one anchor can weigh down the entire ship. Luckily for The Island, while perhaps a mixed bag of story quality, it […]
By Keri O’Shea Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have picked up on the great excitement online regarding the upcoming addition to the Batman series of movies, Suicide Squad. The makers of Suicide Squad aren’t stupid, and they know that a glimpse here or a peek there will do most of their advertising […]
By Keri O’Shea That lesser-known member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Simeon Solomon, caused quite a stir when he exhibited his painting, entitled Habet! at the Royal Academy in 1865. Up until that point, he had been known for his religious tableaux and his sleepy, rather sexually ambiguous groups of figures – reclining lovers, figures […]