Knowing how to balance the horror and the comedy in a horror comedy is a fine art, and one which eludes many filmmakers; it’s not so with Vicious Fun, a film which gets it absolutely right. This is a dark, very funny battle of wills, with a sharp script and a great cast, revelling both […]
Possession horrors are almost always based around Catholic lore, and demons are dispensed with via Catholic means. But this, surely, isn’t the whole picture: other traditions and cultures must have their own spin on this kind of horror. Well, The Old Ways at least initially purports to provide a different spin on the genre; however […]
PG: Psycho Goreman is a film which pays homage all over the place. Whilst watching, I found myself thinking of all of the following: Jase and the Wheeled Warriors, Mac and Me, Power Rangers, Tokyo Gore Police and Bad Taste. It’s clear that director Steven Kostanski is both an ardent nostalgist and an SFX fiend; […]
I Care a Lot is a story of utterly dismal, conscience-free people doing spectacularly well for themselves; on several occasions, it mentions the old adage (or variants thereof) that, in life, you take or you are taken. It’s a light-touch but often galling examination of the ‘American Dream’ which, when it comes down to it, […]
Gatecrash (2020) has an interesting pedigree; based on a play, and directed by Lawrence Gough – who has spent far more of his time working on television than cinema over the past decade – it’s a film which contains aspects of both the stage and the small screen. That being said, there are some similarities […]
More and more, anxieties about what we’re sharing online and who is watching are making their way into cinema. Scouting for clicks and ‘likes’ is a new version of the Satanic pact, it seems; surely, a horror unfolding on a TikTok timeline cannot be far away. And the appearance of ‘influencers’ was simply bound to […]
The back story of Sator (2019) is a deeply interesting one. It’s a film seven years in the making, with director Jordan Graham doing far more than even most first-timer indie directors find themselves doing (right down to building a cabin used for one of the sets). Not only this, but the film has a […]
I’ve made my feelings about the contributors to director Rodney Ascher’s documentary about The Shining – Room 237 (2012) – quite clear elsewhere; I’m still far from clear on some of the ideas held by its interviewees, nor indeed how there is any link between skiing and the Minotaur, much less how it’s related to […]
It’s no great surprise that the early relationship between Mary Shelley (née Godwin) and Percy Bysshe Shelley has proven irresistible to filmmakers, given its importance to the development of horror. Perhaps my favourite version of the events at the Villa Diodati comes via Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), which presents a colourful, but nightmarish spin on […]
It’s not something I’d normally do but, prior to writing up my own review of the new Neil Marshall film The Reckoning, I took a peek at a few other reviews of the film. Almost without exception, other critics prefaced their review by mentioning how much they loved his work, how The Descent (2005) and […]
The Indonesian genre cinema which I know best is decades old now, but it certainly tends toward the unforgettable; during the country’s 1980s cinema boom, its genre film was clearly in love with the opportunities afforded by SFX (however rudimentary), leading to some incredibly lurid, overblown pieces of work, heavy with folkloric influences. In some […]