Overboard (1987)

A mid-80s comedy about the charming pastime of gaslighting, Overboard is, in retrospect, an extremely… odd Hollywood picture, whose more bizarre elements are carried by the charm of its lead performers, Hollywood golden couple Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. It’s a film that seems an off-piste choice for Severin Films to release on Blu-ray, but […]

The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch (1968)

The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch can not be accused of misrepresenting itself with that title; it’s an engaging, fairytale-like film which overlays a warped family dynamic with ‘old dark house’ style horrors, though it never becomes a full-blown horror, balancing its supernatural scares with something far more saccharin. Tonally, it works, and […]

Cannibal Man (1972)

The Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia is a mercurial, intriguing figure. His work has long been underappreciated, neglected, or simply misunderstood – amongst both Spanish audiences and English-speaking cinephiles. Severin Films are remedying this with several Blu-ray releases of de la Iglesia’s pictures, including his most (in)famous – and arguably, for many years, his […]

Interview: Tony Hipwell, director of Standing Woman

At the risk of repeating myself, as I’m sure I have down through the years on the site, short films are often where it’s at in terms of promising new ideas, styles and approaches. When I watched Standing Woman as part of FrightFest’s recent short films digital package, I thought how well the film encapsulated […]

FrightFest 2021: Gaia

It’s perhaps little surprise, as discourse about man’s relationship with the natural world becomes more and more urgent, that the phenomenon of ‘eco-horror’ is appearing more on screens, too. Whilst audiences have long been warned not to go into the woods, it’s the natural world itself which now poses the threat. But Gaia (2021) is […]

Phantasmagoria (2017)

Phantasmagoria is a film which shows, from the very beginning, that it has no truck with conventional storytelling. And how you feel about that will depend on your taste for this level of experimental fare – not just in the sense of a film dispensing with signposted narrative, or character, but also in how you […]

Born For Hell (1976)

Chiefly circulated amongst fans of extreme cinema in a version culled from its US VHS release, under the tacky title Naked Massacre, the 1976 picture Born for Hell offers an intriguing look at the case of Richard Speck, who during a single night in 1966 murdered eight student nurses in a Chicago townhouse – through […]