Amazon is not an organisation known for its tight budget, so it was no surprise to find out that its recent exclusive TV series The Wheel of Time – according to some sources – has cost an eye-watering $80 million to make. Based on a series of so-called ‘high fantasy’ novels by author Robert Jordan, […]
Anyone feeling a sense of deja-vu? Well, if at the end of 2020 anyone optimistically thought we’d be back to some kind of normal by now, it seems – sadly – it’s not yet to be. And perhaps it’s never to be at all…that’s not to suggest that we will forever be completely under the […]
The affectation and awkwardness of the dinner party has never been particularly appealing – and, if you already share those feelings, An Exquisite Meal (2020) is really not the film to change your mind. It’s a surreal, deliberately alienating glimpse at an especially abortive evening in. If your tastes can tolerate this particular kind of […]
The Darkness of the Road (2021) takes a few risks in how it composes its particular brand of existential horror. With a very limited set (long shots are curtailed by, well, the darkness of the road), a tiny number of characters and a disrupted narrative arc, the film sacrifices a lot of the usual plot […]
By the time Stagefright emerged in 1987, the Italian exploitation film scene that had managed to outlast most of its European counterparts was on its last legs. Within a few years, the slew of horror, action and sex films that had been churned out since the 1960s was reduced to a trickle, and then more or less […]
I’ve long had a rather dismissive attitude towards 1989 movie Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, a film that never struck me as a wildly attractive proposition. I’d managed to miss it as festival screenings and although I thought that I had subsequently seen it, rewatching the film proved otherwise (God only knows what film I’ve […]
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 […]