Honeydew is a film which represents certain challenges for a reviewer: this is because to describe anything of its plot – in a linear kind of way – would very likely be to misrepresent the vibe and style of the film. On paper, it fits quite neatly in the category of ‘backwoods horror’ which reminds […]
I’ll be honest; I’ve been dreading the inevitable ‘lockdown horror’ boom, and it’s something which is already happening: bored folks with cameras riffing on ideas about coronavirus is unlikely to bring us too many in the way of classics. Happily, Hall (2020) is not of this stripe. It’s born of coincidence rather than opportunism, a […]
Amelia Moses’s work ethic is certainly to be admired. I’ve not long since reviewed her feature Bleed With Me, and yet it seems that she’s released a second feature this year – Bloodthirsty, another worthwhile film which doesn’t quite match Bleed With Me in terms of warped interpersonal dynamics, but still has much to recommend […]
Many supernatural horror tales make the audience wait for any sort of ‘big reveal’, opting to use sound design, blink-and-miss-it visuals and false starts, tantalising the viewers before offering up the big scares. This is not the case with The Return (2020), a film in which the opening scene plunges straight into a nightmarish childhood…dream? […]
The year 1816 is often recalled as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death. Fallout from the eruption of the Tambora Volcano in Indonesia a year earlier led to freezing temperatures and disastrous weather patterns. In June of this “year without summer”, heavy rains near Lake Geneva drove a small group of vacationers to seek refuge within […]
Eraserhead is a film which has been around for over four decades now: its influences can be traced down through all of those decades, in projects by creatives as disparate as Frank Henenlotter and Peter Gabriel (I’d argue, anyway). So it’s difficult to know how to introduce the film, assuming anyone reading this feature hasn’t […]
A curious set-up introduces us to The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw: is it a period piece? It certainly looks like one, but the on-screen text explains that, although the Irish colony appearing in the film arrived in the US in 1873, they have remained isolated from the modernising world outside – through the Fifties, when […]
Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) is having an argument over the phone. His conversant assures him, “The world’s a different place. It’s not like it was back then.” Malik disagrees vehemently: “The world is exactly the same place it was back then. People don’t change, Liam. They just get better at hiding how they feel.” Indeed. Director Kurtis David Harder’s Spiral […]
David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel ‘Dune’ emerged in 1984 to a double whammy of both box office failure and a vicious critical drubbing. Not that these are in themselves perfect indications of a film’s inherent lack of value or cultural longevity; 1982’s Blade Runner was also a critical and box office flop, […]
Ghosts have feelings too. That’s been one of the most noticeable shifts in supernatural horror (and other genre-straddling) films in the past couple of decades, from the fairly high-profile film The Others at the start of the century, through to the likes of A Ghost Story, a largely-mute, but very poignant story from 2017. (There’s […]
Insomnia – hand in hand with its best friend, anxiety – is a bizarre experience. A fundamental inability to do the most basic, fundamental thing your body requires; like the snake which eats its own tail, the complex brain which requires rest and recuperation is the very thing which prevents that, via its own complex […]