There is a germ of a decent idea in Autumn Road, a film which comes across, at least at first, as a love letter to small town Halloween. Indeed, it’s an attractive film, with some great settings, and some careful sleight of hand which provides some interesting sequences. Unfortunately, all the Halloween aesthetics in the […]
The Wicker Man (1973) continues to hold its place as one of the best-beloved British horror films of the past fifty years, with new viewers and fans emerging as the years pass. This speaks to its many strengths, and the way in which it works on many levels, offering the potential for new readings and […]
Toil – in the Biblical sense – sets us going on the very first scenes in The Family. This is an immediately bleak, dirt-encrusted tale of life inside an insular and grimly religious household, with an undisputed – and cruel – patriarch presiding over the children’s labours. ‘Father’ (Nigel Bennett) is not averse to smothering […]
It’s not entirely clear what has happened to Sion Sono in the past decade. Shorn perhaps of whatever inspiration was behind discomfiting, outrageous gems like Guilty of Romance and Love Exposure, he seems to have dedicated himself to being a filmmaker making films about filmmaking, and on and on it goes – a kind of […]
In a darkly comic film which seems to strive to fit in as much practical gore FX as possible, The Chamber of Terror suffers to an extent for its ambition, but on balance, achieves much of what it sets out to do. You can’t really criticise its enthusiasm, even if there are a few missteps […]
There’s already been abundant proof of Edgar Wright’s love of horror, but his most recent film, Last Night in Soho, changes tack from what we may have seen already; it’s a ghost story, but it pushes at the boundaries of what a ghost story can be; it’s a kind of 60s-glam spin on The Mezzotint […]
In many respects, a good way to sum up the sylvan horror of Woodland Grey is with the old adage, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. It’s an unusual film, calling on some familiar horror elements, but then in other ways completely rejecting these, in order to create something far more introspective, […]
So, DUNE is finally out, the reviews are in, and the consensus is that critical darling Denis Villeneuve has pulled it off against all the odds. He has presented an adaptation of the once-termed ‘unfilmable’ 1965 novel Dune that has – incredibly – managed to please the full spectrum of viewers – the hard-to-please book […]
Note: unusually for the site this review contains mild spoilers – words failed me else – so read on with caution. On first consideration, Julia Ducournau’s new film, Titane (2021) is quite unlike Raw (2016), her last feature and, for most people, the most familiar point of comparison. To put it mildly, Titane is an […]
Given the success of Get Out a few years ago, it was inevitable that we’d get a few follow-up, socially conscious horror movies. Likewise, it was inevitable that some of these would fall short of Get Out: it turns out that balancing a political message with elements of fantasy is not all that easy to […]
There no other obvious way to start this review than by saying: Lamb is an odd one. Beautiful; sure. Evocative; yes. However, it only tantalises at the mythology or events which underpin the narrative, and as such the world it offers is a partial one. How forgiving you are of this will depend on how […]