When I read some of the blurb for Imperial Blue and saw that its story revolved around drug use, I expected to get one of two things: either a brutal crime drama, where cartel is pitched against cartel, or else a surreal, even overblown imagining of substance abuse on-screen. In truth, Imperial Blue contains some […]
By Helen Creighton At first glance, Certain Kind of Silence has the whiff of a certain kind of Stepford: vague parallels could be drawn between the classic 70s sci-fi The Stepford Wives and Czech director Michal Hogenauer’s tale of a young au pair slowly but inexorably drawn into an oppressive cult environment against her better […]
Tatsumi is a troubled young man. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, and we first meet him at an abortive encounter with a careers guidance officer which sees him, exasperatedly, told to go back to his parents. Yet he doesn’t ask for their advice, either: instead, he withdraws from the […]
Western audiences have had their pick of Japanese crime thrillers in recent years, as more and more films, old and new, have received releases. This means perhaps that a new generation of audiences has become enraptured by the idea of Japan’s seedy underworld, with its molls and its gangsters, its ultraviolence and its gore. That […]
‘This book is just a little collection of memories, a scrapbook, if you will. No book, however comprehensive, could do justice to, or fully encompass, this man’s life. This is a thumbnail sketch of the Anton LaVey I knew.’ (Boyd Rice) I was surprised and interested to find out that a new book on LaVey […]
The dour, yet pacy and surprisingly graphic take on Stephen King’s novel IT was a pleasant surprise when it hit our cinema screens a couple of years ago, and the promise of a second, and closing chapter has been something which fans of the film have kept an eye on ever since. Picking up, as […]
For a brief, shimmering moment, it almost looked as if the oft-maligned SyFy might finally have cast aside its long-held status as the home of subpar genre material, and had finally developed into a platform for genuinely well-made and entertaining films from creators who were really putting forth the requisite effort. The moment I’m talking […]
For most readers of this site, director Alexandre Aja is probably best known for his work within the horror genre. When Switchblade Romance (or High Tension) burst onto the scene in 2003, it very much formed part of the new wave of unflinchingly nasty European ordeal cinema; films made since then, such as The Hills […]
Placing monsters on screen – as in your vampires, or your aliens, or so on – has its own share of challenges, but at core, there’s a fairly obvious requirement to, well, get the monsters on screen. When you are aiming to represent monstrous behaviour or thoughts, however, this can be rather more tricky, even […]
Reflections on the twilight years of any great artist or company tend to be tinged with sadness and regret, lamenting on how the mighty had fallen, how their latter day work could only serve as a pale reminder of how great things had once been. Conventional wisdom would seem to dictate that this is how […]
By Helen Creighton Power corrupts. Superpowers corrupt absolutely. That’s the message of the 2006 comic series ‘The Boys’ – a 72-issue story arc about superheroes gone bad and the people who fight them, and now a TV series for people who don’t like superheroes, or are at least bored with the current, ever-spawning, squeaky-clean superhero […]