By Keri O’Shea Outside of the novella itself, Susan Hill’s quintessentially British ghost story The Woman in Black is perhaps best-known to most Brutal as Hell readers via last year’s film starring Daniel Radcliffe as the unfortunate solicitor Arthur Kipps, or maybe through Nigel Kneale’s (ahem, superior) televised version from 1989, but it has also […]
Review by Ben Bussey Once upon a time a young brother and sister were lost in the woods, happened upon a house made of gingerbread, got lured inside by its luscious goodies and wound up prisoners of an evil witch who wanted to eat them, until the kiddies turned the tables and shoved the old hag into […]
Review by Ben Bussey Remember that time-honoured and rather fuddy-duddy-ish maxim, ‘red and green should never be seen’? Well, I think it’s safe to assume writer-director MJ Dixon doesn’t, or if he does he’s made a concerted effort to thumb his nose at that particular convention of good taste. This alone demonstrates the debt his first […]
By Ben Bussey The Evil Dead remake is very nearly upon us, and emotions still run high on the subject. A good portion of fans remain as vocal in their contempt for Fede Alvarez’s film as when it was announced; others are more optimistic, persuaded by the grime and gore of the first trailers and images, up to and including the […]
By Keri O’Shea Warning – as this retrospective contains a detailed discussion of the film, it as such CONTAINS SPOILERS. Well, last time I checked, this website was still called Brutal As Hell – and so, it is fitting that we should take a moment to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the UK release of […]
Review by Tristan Bishop The horror anthology film has a long and chequered history – from the rightly-lauded Ealing Studios curveball Dead Of Night (1945) through the 60s/70s Amicus boom (which brought us classics like 1965’s Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors and 1974’s From Beyond The Grave, but also climaxed in one of the worst […]
Review by Stephanie Scaife I can clearly picture the artwork of the From Beyond VHS, as it was burned into my retinas as a child, peering at the lurid titles in the horror section of my local video store. So I’m genuinely shocked that it’s taken me approximately 20 years to actually get around to […]
Review by Ben Bussey Towards the end of this film, one of the few surviving characters asks another whether or not fate, destiny or whatever might have played a role in the preceding events, to which the other succinctly replies, “I think shit happens, and then you die.” In a way, this exchange quite neatly sums […]
By Stephanie Scaife I’d just like to start by saying that I fucking hate Valentine’s Day. This isn’t because I’m bitter but because I hate the marketing, the blatant fleecing all in the name of romance, the pink love hearts and special displays in stores hawking their finest selection of Nicholas Sparks books, Jennifer Aniston […]
By Keri O’Shea and Annie Riordan Keri: Happy Valentine’s Day. Is February still with us? It is? Jeez… Anyway, so far we’ve talked about our experiences as horror fans and misconceptions relating to that – but there’s no fandom without the films themselves after all, so it’s high time we talked about life on the […]
Review by Annie Riordan “Little Betty’s sleeping in the graveyard, living there in burgundy and white. Dead babies can’t take care of themselves, dead babies can’t take things off the shelf. Well, we didn’t love you anyway. Goodbye, Little Betty…” ~ Alice Cooper Wow, what a pretentious piece of shit this film is. Overlong, tedious, […]