Review by Quin In general, I am not a fan of blending comedy and horror. I think horror is best when there is non-stop tension with as little relief as possible. Now of course there are many exceptions to this rule. I enjoy comic relief when it’s used sparingly, and the more subtle it is […]
By Kit Rathenar You’d think it wouldn’t be that difficult to review a film festival when you’ve got a reviewer actually living in the right town and another one available a mere hour up the road. However, apparently the gods had a grudge against Brutal As Hell when it came to this year’s Bram Stoker […]
Review by Ben Bussey If you’ll forgive me for opening on something of a negative note: one rather noticeable problem on the horror festival scene this year – and I do mean across the board, not just at Abertoir – is the absence of any one film that’s well and truly set the (mimes quotation marks) horror […]
Review by Tristan Bishop The horror remake machine trundles along with no sign of slowing down, but as much as the horror fan’s learned reaction to the word ‘remake’ is the same as that of the term ‘found footage’ to a Brutal As Hell writer, remakes are not always a bad thing. Before you crucify […]
By Keri O’Shea Y’know, it’s a funny thing. For a genre which has always gone so firmly hand in hand with fantasy, there’s always been a small, but stubborn undercurrent to horror which obsesses over the antithesis of that fantasy – the portrayal of ‘real events’. Whether it’s rumours of real footage being hidden in […]
Review by Ben Bussey 2013 is well on its way to becoming the year I start liking found footage again. I’ve never been particularly enamoured with the format – I always disliked The Blair Witch Project, for one thing – but there have indubitably been at least a few truly great horror movies made in […]
Review by Abbie Stutzer Cannibal Diner is nothing special. It’s a run-of-the-mill “murderous mutant family” horror film. It’s filled with gross-out gore and most of the deaths are relatively tame, and not creative. Lame! (I mean, you’d think mutants would think of creative ways to kill young co-eds, whilst wasting away in their toxic, industrial […]
By Keri O’Shea When we think about the portrayal of the eponymous Vikings on screen, we tend to associate them with battle epics – simply put, hear ‘Viking’ and assume that blood, guts, rape and pillage can’t be far behind. Well, to a certain degree, the shoe fits; the first Naval superpower didn’t always make […]
Review by Ben Bussey It’s one of the age-old questions of science fiction: where does machine end and life begin? At what point might artificial intelligence equal or even overtake that of humanity; and if/when it does, what will be the outcome? Countless sci-fi works over the decades have tackled these questions, and now writer-director […]
Review by Ben Bussey Mavericks, rebels, iconoclasts, non-conformists; these are labels we tend to throw around romantically, typically in reference to those we class as heroes. Then there are such labels as freak, weirdo, nutcase, menace; more often than not these can be applied to the exact same people, depending on whether or not we agree […]
Review by Comix I got to admit, when I first saw the title “Clown Fatale” and the tag “sexy female clowns mistaken for contract killers,” I wasn’t completely sold. I was imagining an awful, tit-filled comic stuffed with shitty art, shitty story, and shitty dialogue. Well, at least two of the three. Needless to say, […]