The BBFC-esque send-up at the beginning of Fried Barry – with a ‘warning’ of all the adult content to follow and the pointer that film certification is there to help us make informed decisions – suggests from the outset a film stacked with OTT content which is also ready to send itself up. In the […]
Horror has often examined the role of addiction: lots of its best-known antagonists have laboured under something of this kind, and it’s fertile ground for taking a closer look at people, their motivations and their flaws. This is the rationale behind short film Boo (2019), an economical exercise in filmmaking which shows a careful hand […]
In case you, like me, have some holes in your world history and were hoping that Don Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz) was invented for this film- I’ve got some bad news. Monteverde is a dead ringer for Guatemalan leader and General José Efraín Rios Montt, who is very real indeed. Montt led the military government from […]
The first character we meet in We Die Alone is Aidan (Baker Chase Powell); he’s preparing for a date, and he’s nervous – so nervous that he is practising the same line, over and over. We never see him get to the restaurant; his nerves are so bad that he stands the girl up, receiving […]
There’s a case for the poster for Horrors of Spider Island appearing under the dictionary definition of ‘exploitation film’, so perfectly does the movie encapsulate everything about the genre. On this basis, the only surprise about the new Severin blu-ray is why it has taken the label so long to release it, as perfect a […]
By pure chance, several of the most recent films I’ve watched have had elements in common: a certain kind of body-mod sci-fi has cropped up in films such as Parallax, with its riff on memory and mental states, and again in Peripheral, where one woman takes on futuristic tech in an attempt to maintain her […]
‘Koko-di koko-da’ – this is a tune sung by an oddly jaunty showman making his way through the woods with a group of equally odd companions, as the opening credits introduce us to this film. Koko-di Koko-da is an often challenging, if always creative watch which uses unorthodox means to explore very real experiences. Our […]
1BR, which I reviewed recently, was one of those great screeners which managed to surprise me whilst clearly also paying due respect to existing genre features. This is a skill which not everyone can demonstrate, much less in their debut feature, so I reached out to the director, David Marmor, to find out a little […]
Screenplay writer Nigel Kneale has a superb pedigree as a purveyor of the strange and the supernatural. Never is this made clearer than in his adaptation of the 1983 Susan Hill novella The Woman in Black. In fact, even mention this TV film to fans of a certain age and/or persuasion, and they will immediately […]
I’ve enjoyed following director Paul Hyett’s work to date: The Seasoning House and Howl both made great use of confined locations and escalating ordeals, whilst I had some misgivings with the latter film; we have something different altogether with Peripheral, however, as we delve into ‘tech terror’, combining age-old anxieties with the shock of the […]
In a world of Elevated Horror, Intelligent Horror, Woke Horror and horror that desperately wants to be ‘of the moment’, there’s a definite pleasure to be had from seeing a film that does not hold both the genre and its audience in thinly-veiled contempt. The joys of Mr Vampire are, for the most part, lightweight […]