The Fix (2024)

The Fix (2024) starts with an advert: there’s apparently a product available which will enable people to ‘breathe the air again’. Uh-oh; so it sounds as though director Kelsey Egan’s interest in environmental sci-fi and horror is still intact, if being given a different level of reach here than in previous films, such as Glasshouse. […]

FFS Festival 2024: Shanghai Girls

“Our younger selves sing on in our hearts. We hear them still.” Thirty years ago, Luo Tong was a member of a choir which achieved a short-lived period of fame during the 1990s, thanks to their performances on a national stage. Now a filmmaker, Tong reunites with her fellow singers and teachers to reflect on […]

FFS Festival 2024: Revenge (2017)

Douchebag businessman Richard (Kevin Janssens) charters a helicopter in order to take his mistress Jen (Matilda Lutz) to his swanky holiday pad in the desert for some extracurricular activity. The next day, Richard’s friends Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive, with the three men intending to go off on a hunting trip. That […]

Making Vampires Grim Again: Life, Death & The Vourdalak (2023)

When we think about vampires, our expectations have inevitably been shaped by popular literature, which has in turn – for the last century – also found expression in cinema. In the nineteenth century, popular reading habits created a set of cultural expectations about vampires. The birth of horror fiction, which stemmed in turn from the […]

Dream Team (2024)

After biologist and coral smuggler Dr. Theresa Gorgeous dies in strange circumstances, Interpol agents Chase National (Alex Zhang Hungtai) and No St. Aubergine (Esther Garrel) head to Mexico to investigate a convoluted case that may be connected to Gorgeous’ illicit cargo. Can they solve the mystery before the body count spirals out of control? Described […]

Celluloid Screams 2024 35mm Grindhouse Screening: Pieces

*THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS* For this year’s mystery Celluloid Screams grindhouse screening, we were promised something equally as bonkers as the previous year’s Lady Terminator. I was also advised by someone on the CS programming team that I’d probably seen it, which somehow meant to fellow Screamers that I would be able to pluck the […]

WIN Speak No Evil (2022) on Blu!

Recently remade for English-speaking audiences, we should remember that the original Danish Speak No Evil (2022) – one of my favourite horror films in the year it came out – was and is good enough and ground-breaking enough to even merit a second version. Directed by Christian Tafdrup, he escalates themes which have appeared in […]