It’s already been eight years, give or take, since Brandon Cronenberg’s first film, Antiviral (2012): a cold, unflinching and decidedly grotesque satire on celebrity culture, explored via the body horror genre which his father David helped to establish. Possessor (2020) picks up the questions of personhood which Antiviral posed and takes them still further, delivering […]
Having added The Droving (2020) as one of my favourite films of the year, it was great to catch up with Droving director George Popov for a chat about his career to date, priorities, future plans and the importance of working together to support film in these troubled times… WP – So you have made […]
American Psycho (1991), third novel of self-styled enfant terrible Bret Easton Ellis, was one of those books whose notoriety preceded it and swept it along. Becoming a kind of double-dare-you read in the same way that many films have become rites of passage, it no doubt found a sizable audience that quite simply wanted to […]
Hunted is a film not shy about signposting where it’s planning on going. That being said, it’s an impressively nasty film, showing a deft touch in terms of its structure and successfully keeping two different elements in check: on one hand it’s a deeply unpleasant game of cat and mouse through the woods, and on […]
It seems as though there has never been a stronger appetite for dramatisations of true crime. The fascination with serial killers has long been there, but in the last few years, the quality and the focus of dramatic retellings of same has definitely shifted; with The Serpent, we get a cleverly-constructed and very engaging series […]
Sophia Banks started her career as a stylist and designer, before starting her career as a film director with Making It On Time (2017), a short film for fashion designer Christian Siriano. Her last two short films have showcased an interest in science fiction; Unregistered (2018) premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and went the extra […]
Post-apocalyptic cinema tends to be full of sound and fury. Even if we don’t see the cataclysmic event which overthrows society, we certainly see the aftermath: ruins, road gangs, disease, deprivation. But what if the kind of deprivation shown to us was of a different kind? What if the loss incurred from such an event […]
Arkansas, 1999. Mandy (Angela Bettis) is the world’s most disinterested nurse at the local hospital, and we meet her just ahead of a double shift. This isn’t the only reason she’s a little curt, though. To give her credit, her apparent disinclination for nursing is multifaceted: she’s a drug addict who enjoys hoovering up any […]
My experience of Mexican cinema tends towards the non-mainstream, admittedly, but even based on the little I do know, it seems that lurching straight into the strange and the bloody unreasonable is a niche national pastime. And so we come to Violent Delights a.k.a Beber de tu Sangre, which certainly starts as it means to […]
Well, that was the year that was. Every year when I write up a ‘best of’ list, I can’t help but add a preamble about how things have been, what developments there have been and so on; never has there been a year like 2020, and no preamble can really do justice to the impact […]
It’s very sad to hear of the passing of Great Britain’s very own pulp horror legend Guy N. Smith. And yes, I do think that ‘legend’ is an appropriate term here. I’m ready to believe that Smith’s long writing career never made him a particularly rich man even if he did, happily, do well from […]