By Tristan Bishop Are you old enough (let’s say, 35 or above) to remember the days before DVD and the internet? Back in the pre-digital era, being a horror junkie could be tough work – we didn’t have scores of companies releasing pristine prints of obscurities on VHS tape (Redemption being the exception to the […]
Review by Stephanie Scaife The Desert is the first feature from German/Argentinean documentary filmmaker Christoph Behl and it has its world premiere at FrightFest last weekend. I went in knowing almost nothing about the film other than it being set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. Being a particular genre-weakness of mine, I decided […]
By Stephanie Scaife It’s that time of the year again: FrightFest is back and it is bigger than ever, screening a massive line-up of 51 films across 3 screens at London’s iconic Empire Leicester Square cinema. After sadly managing to miss the world première of The Dead 2: India, FrightFest 2013 began for me with […]
Review by Stephanie Scaife There is always at least one of the late night screenings at FrightFest that brings the house down and ultimately proves to be one of the highlights of the festival, and this year I wholly anticipate it being E.L. Katz’s directorial debut Cheap Thrills. It’s a blackly comic, gross-out morality tale that examines […]
By Stephanie Scaife You may be familiar with Bobcat Goldthwait through the likes of his pitch black comedies World’s Greatest Dad (2009) and God Bless America (2011), or as Zed in the Police Academy movies, so it may come as a surprise to find out that his newest picture as a writer and director is […]
Review by Tristan Bishop It’s surprising how few films there are about killer foodstuffs out there. Attack of The Killer Tomatoes (1978) comes to mind, as does Larry Cohen’s The Stuff (1985), but aside from that (and the less said about Charles Band’s Gingerdead Man the better), it’s a strangely underused concept. Happily the idea […]
By Tristan Bishop Welcome to the first of a new series in which yours truly will be sifting through the dregs of cinematic endeavour in the vague hope of finding gold (or at the very least something mildly amusing). I’ll be covering mostly horror, but also action, exploitation, sci-fi and some of the stranger genre […]
Review by Ben Bussey Damn you, found footage. I told you last time, never again. Every time you show up uninvited in the wee small hours, you worm your way in with your seductive wiles, and somehow I keep letting you in just because, even though you’ve hurt me time and again, there’s a small […]
By Stephanie Scaife Oftentimes when people ask me what I’m doing for the August bank holiday weekend and I say that I’m going to FrightFest, I get a puzzled look; then when I actually explain what it is, the look of bafflement is replaced with one of disdain. Essentially this is because most people would […]
By Comix Hellboy has been through a hell of a lot of things. From monsters and ghosts to love and death, the red beast has taken on the best and the worst the world has thrown at him. With this month marking the 20th anniversary of his creation, a new take on Hellboy will be […]
Review by Ben Bussey There’s nothing quite like a sequel that doesn’t understand why the first film worked. Sometimes the exact same team gets back together on both sides of the camera – say, Ghostbusters 2, Men in Black 2, Highlander 2, or even (shudder) The Hangover Part 2 – and, lacking any real motivation […]