By Keri O’Shea As a general rule of thumb, I tend to avoid English language versions of J-horrors. Sure, the Far East has provided rich pickings for cautious filmmakers and those who fund them, but almost as soon as Ring happened, Japanese horror became a victim of its own success; no sooner had Sadako become […]
Review by Annie Riordan So I’m going camping this summer. Actually, I went camping last summer, but it doesn’t count because #1 – I didn’t know I was going camping and #2 – it turned into an epic clusterfuck, which ended with me wading through knee-high pools of rainwater in my pajamas in search of […]
By Ben Bussey Warning: spoilers, sideboob and man-ass ahead… ‘Sex sells.’ The old maxim has always rung true, and no doubt always will. However, back in the 1990s that time-honoured notion was taken to an altogether different level. The major movie studios had not yet developed that obsession with making everything PG-13/12A rated, so a […]
Review by Nia Edwards-Behi I confess to not being particularly familiar with Charles Band’s body of work. I know I’ve seen a Puppet Master film, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you which one. All I know is that I didn’t like it, but I can’t remember why I didn’t like it, […]
Review by Mike Snoonian In the fall of 2009 Zombieland stormed cinemas, posing as the only credible threat to Shaun of the Dead’s claim for the best zombie comedy throne*. Featuring the best use of Bill Murray since Osmosis Jones Kingpin, crackerjack performances from its core cast (including a pre-Social Network Jesse Eisnenberg shedding the […]
By Keri O’Shea Daniel Gates is what you would call a fixer – a man of ways and means, someone who works to acquire rare artefacts for people whose conventional methods have turned up nothing. He does this for a steep fee, of course, but he is good at what he does. When he successfully […]
Review by Ben Bussey One thing we can categorically state about Britsh writer-director Steven Sheil is that he is doing his utmost to avoid pigeonholing. Having made his name with the dingy kitchen-sink ordeal horror of Mum and Dad, which was set for almost the duration in a squalid two-up two-down in the shadow of […]
Review by Tristan Bishop Medical-themed horror is all around at the moment, from the diseased queasiness of films like Errors Of The Human Body and Brandon Cronenberg’s brilliant Antiviral, to the body-modification themes of American Mary. The morbid fear of hospitals, illness and surgery is a universal one, and has been represented in film since […]
By Keri O’Shea By sheer coincidence, two of the films which I most enjoyed at this year’s Dead By Dawn festival are all about the subject of friendship, and how that friendship endures under, shall we say, a series of unfortunate events. The first of these is of course The Battery, which uses a zombie […]
By Oliver Longden It is fair to say that time has not been kind to The Leopard Man. 70 years after its release it looks hokey, unevenly acted and has a twist ending that looms like a Titanic-sinking iceberg over the second half of the movie. Yet despite its flaws, or perhaps because the distance […]
Review by Ben Bussey High Rising Productions have long been a familiar name in the horror scene. The team of writer/director Calum Waddell and editor Naomi Holwill have been responsible for the bulk of the extra features on the exemplary Arrow Video range, grabbing interviews with the cast and crew of too many cult favourites to […]