Review by Karolina Gruschka The Shout; what an odd little film. Watching it felt like listening to Pink Floyd: chilled, mystical, heavy, deep, dreamy, trippy, intricate, surreal, sophisticated, powerful, sensual. It is a story about the intimacy of marriage, about adultery, about power struggles, about subjective realities, about isolation, about madness, about mysticism, about sound. […]
By Keri O’Shea When you get press releases that proudly proclaim the presence of a soap star in a film’s cast, it gets you thinking about how ubiquitous soap operas are, still – especially if you don’t watch any of the soaps, ever. For instance, total strangers, when unsure how to make conversation, will usually […]
Review by Ben Bussey If you’re hoping for a concise, unbiased, even-handed appraisal of the conclusion of Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy, you may as well stop reading now. Twins of Evil is far too big a deal to me. For various reasons – some screamingly obvious, others somewhat less so – this 1971 vampire movie proved […]
Review by Stephanie Scaife Heli may seem like an unusual choice of film for us to cover here at Brutal as Hell, but although it may not be a genre film, it’s certainly brutal and it falls firmly into the extremely bleak camp of films-I-never-want-to-see-again, along with the likes of Requiem for a Dream and […]
Review by Tristan Bishop Even as a fan of director Jim Jarmusch – his 90s efforts Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog (1999) are among my favourite films – I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down in my seat at the prospect of Only Lovers Left Alive. The undoubtedly top-notch cast didn’t gloss over the […]
Review by Matt Harries In 2014 it is fitting that we focus on Catacombs – a supernatural thriller made way back in 1965, originally released in the States as The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die – for it was earlier this year in January that saw the sad passing of director Gordon Hessler, aged 83. Those […]
By Karolina Gruschka Cinema “Pionier”, ulica Krakowska in Strzelce Opolskie, Poland; built in the 1960s, it suffered a crisis it could never recover from, when home entertainment arrived in the East. Slowly, the building would decay to become the derelict and atmospheric cinema I so much loved in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It […]
Review by Ben Bussey There are few things more tedious than a film which takes the seeds of a potentially interesting idea, before promptly getting lazy and churning out something so bland, unimaginative and illogical it almost hurts. When such a middling production manages to procure the services of a genuine cinematic heavyweight like Rutger […]
By Ben Bussey and Keri O’Shea Here at Brutal As Hell, we have at least one bona fide Last House on the Left scholar in our midst: our beloved Nia, who penned a fairly epic tribute to Wes Craven’s breakthrough movie on its 40th anniversary in 2012. However, just to balance things out, the BAH […]
By Matt Harries (For the first part of Matt’s feature, click here.) Onwards, to 1978, and LSD’s uneasy relationship with public perception continues with a pair of little known films that act as the unwanted flashbacks of the acid generation. In Blue Sunshine, the plot revolves around the premise that a group of individuals who […]
Review by Karolina Gruschka Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Fairest of Them All… … Ingrid Pitt, that’s for sure! Not only one of the most attractive film sirens of all times, Ingrid was beautiful on the inside too. She embraced her iconic position in the horror genre and appreciated her supporters and fans. […]