Douchebag businessman Richard (Kevin Janssens) charters a helicopter in order to take his mistress Jen (Matilda Lutz) to his swanky holiday pad in the desert for some extracurricular activity. The next day, Richard’s friends Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive, with the three men intending to go off on a hunting trip. That […]
When we think about vampires, our expectations have inevitably been shaped by popular literature, which has in turn – for the last century – also found expression in cinema. In the nineteenth century, popular reading habits created a set of cultural expectations about vampires. The birth of horror fiction, which stemmed in turn from the […]
After biologist and coral smuggler Dr. Theresa Gorgeous dies in strange circumstances, Interpol agents Chase National (Alex Zhang Hungtai) and No St. Aubergine (Esther Garrel) head to Mexico to investigate a convoluted case that may be connected to Gorgeous’ illicit cargo. Can they solve the mystery before the body count spirals out of control? Described […]
*THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS* For this year’s mystery Celluloid Screams grindhouse screening, we were promised something equally as bonkers as the previous year’s Lady Terminator. I was also advised by someone on the CS programming team that I’d probably seen it, which somehow meant to fellow Screamers that I would be able to pluck the […]
Glue Trap (2023) opens in medias res, focusing on a sparring couple – Dan (Isaac Jay) and KJ (Brittany Bradford). At first, it seems like they’re in a therapy session; actually, it’s worse. They’re at a dinner party, and the host couple seems very happy, which only underlines their own issues. But some good comes […]
Recently remade for English-speaking audiences, we should remember that the original Danish Speak No Evil (2022) – one of my favourite horror films in the year it came out – was and is good enough and ground-breaking enough to even merit a second version. Directed by Christian Tafdrup, he escalates themes which have appeared in […]
Just One Drink may have been made in 2015, but it feels like a film from 2005, not least because its star – Barbara Nedeljakova – is the star of one of the biggest horrors of 2005, namely Hostel. She’s back to her old tricks in filmmaker Andrew de Burgh’s debut short film, which is […]
That’s that, then. That’s religion. It had a good run. Except, of course, if you happen to be religious, and will brush away any such declarations with the power of your faith. In a nutshell, that’s the premise behind, and the dispute within Heretic (2024) – a film which comes off as a kind of […]
Who’d be in a rock band these days? Not only do you have to contend with the sheer impossibility of making a living whilst you balance your social media profile against diminishing Spotify returns, but you may even find yourself in a horror film. Consider the surfeit of recent cinematic evidence – some good, some […]
As MadS (2024) opens, the camera pans back from what turns out to be an image of a woman’s agonised face; you could call it foreshadowing, or perhaps it’s just an incidental feature, an arty poster on the wall of an apartment being used for a drug deal, as a young man called Romain (Milton […]
1750, Austria: any film based on ‘historical records’ which starts as devastatingly as The Devil’s Bath does, at least, place its cards on the table. This richly beautiful, if always stark film examines the lives of women, and as much as it focuses on one woman, it allows us to pause long enough to extrapolate, […]