Review by Ben Bussey Early on in this documentary, John Landis reiterates something he’s said many times about Ray Harryhausen over the years, explaining why he thinks the stop-motion master occupies a truly unique position in film history: this is the fact that he is the only notable case of technician as auteur. Really, would […]
Review by Kit Rathenar I wasn’t sure what to expect from British retro indie horror The Fallow Field, the feature-length debut of director Leigh Dovey, but let me say at once that I ended up being pleasantly surprised by it. Steve Garry stars here as Matt Sadler, a man having a very bad life. When […]
By Keri O’Shea I have to say, I was somewhat blind-sided by the press release for The Bay – enough so that it completely took my mind off the fact that I was about to watch a found footage film, a sub-genre I have ranted about at length in the past. Perhaps this was even […]
Review by Tristan Bishop If you’re a horror fan advancing in years you may remember the dark days of the early-to-mid nineties, where genre product was at its lowest ebb since the late 1940s. The late 80s comedy horror craze had run its course, and before (love it or hate it) Wes Craven’s Scream revitalised […]
By Keri O’Shea Some of you may remember, a few weeks back, we featured a nifty and very gory short film by the title of Brutal Relax? Well, wouldn’t you know, but filmmakers Adrián Cardona and David Muñoz have only gone and taken their madcap visions of the walking dead back to the time of […]
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 […]