News of a new Candyman film came as quite a surprise; the 1992 film, like a good ghost story itself refracted over time through a Clive Barker short story and a novel before becoming a screenplay, has over the years become a classic, a piece of supernatural cinema which has deeper significance seething underneath all […]
Blue Whale is a film which very much starts as it means to go on, throwing the audience into a high-paced, often frenetic online world where we quickly meet two teenage sisters – Yulya and Dana – who are fighting over a device, dropping it and breaking the screen as their long-suffering mother attempts to […]
Any expectations I had for Martyrs Lane (2021) were very quickly blown out of the water; it’s a ghostly tale which in many ways feels like it comes from an earlier time, having more in common with the subtle horrors of the 60s and 70s than the flashier, quick edits of modern cinema. This is […]
An exploration of Indigenous folklore and myth offers rich and often unknown, or lesser-known potential for horror stories. Don’t Say Its Name (2021) interweaves aspects of folkloric belief with real-time concerns and anxieties afflicting a small First Nations community; in doing so, it has many merits, though in time resorts to very broad strokes and […]
The production of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the Pagsanjan region of the Philippines left behind a local filmmaking infrastructure ripe for exploitation. During the 1980s, numerous filmmakers capitalised on this. Severin Films have released one such film, Alan Birkinshaw’s 1982 picture Invaders of the Lost Gold, on Blu-ray for the first time. Made […]
By guest contributor Caitlyn Downs The Fantasia 2021 Radical Spirits shorts block showcases six films that focus on belief systems and ancestral connections, using genre as a gateway to the unique nature of spirituality and ritual. Often complex and frequently contested, these films all offer powerful representations of concepts frequently difficult to put into words. […]
Short films are always a highlight of the film festival calendar, and as we’ve been saying on this site for years, it’s such a shame that they don’t often get seen outside of the festival circuit – with the odd exception, such as ABCs of Death. Hopes were high that this would kickstart a new […]
Hotel Poseidon (2021) begins with an almost-mute man listening to some strangely motivational speech-making from the room next door; hard to imagine why someone would be quite this optimistic, given the dilapidated environs, but then this is a strange film and Hotel Poseidon itself is an odd, decrepit place, the sort of place Possum‘s Philip […]
This kind of crime thriller isn’t standard fare at Warped Perspective, but Baby Money has a great deal to recommend it: it’s well-paced, well-developed and carries enough surprises to maintain interest. Beginning with a young woman, Minny (Danay Garcia) having an ultrasound scan, it’s clear immediately that this is a wanted baby but – Minny […]
By a strange coincidence, I sat down to watch a screening of Agnes (2021) almost exactly fifty years since the release of The Devils (1971), Ken Russell’s incendiary historical horror about possession in a 17th Century convent. Since then, misbehaving nuns have featured in cinema fairly regularly, though often (if not always) appearing in more […]
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that adapting Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as a drama project would be completely mad idea, and you’d be correct. Step forward a group of bus drivers and amateur dramatics enthusiasts from Dorset, England, who were determined to do just that (and for the record, they considered doing Kill Bill). The documentary […]