Everyone and their mums will tell you that the slasher genre came into being in the mid-1970s; building primarily on the legacy of Hitchcock’s Psycho, such down and dirty independent productions like Last House on the Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre laid the groundwork for the innumerable stab-happy B-movies which came in the […]
I’ve read a lot of comics in my day, everything from light-hearted romance manga to the ultra-gore that is Garth Ennis’s Crossed, but there have been only handful of times when I closed the work and audibly said “now THAT was a good comic!” Most of them were handed out cautiously and most certainly after […]
It’s open to debate as to whether or not Jackie Chan has what we can definitively call a signature franchise; one single film series with which he is uniquely associated above all others. Some western audiences might say it’s Rush Hour, as that was the one that finally saw Jackie break through in Hollywood, leading […]
Anthology films – often three short tales with a common framework – are nothing new, even if the format isn’t used all that often today. We have, however, seen some interesting variations on the anthology film in recent years, perhaps most notably with The ABCs of Death in 2012, which made a minor stir and […]
It’s telling that The Meg director Jon Turteltaub has declared his intention on finally bringing the long-in development adaptation of Steve Alten’s novel to screens was to make “the second best shark movie of all time.” Yes, even in this age of perpetual remakes, reboots and regurgitations, it’s still universally accepted that no movie centred […]
Terminator is one of those movies that if you tell someone you haven’t seen it, it’s like telling them they just got fired from their jobs. A series of complex emotions cross their face like a robot learning how to feel before an inevitable tidal wave of “what?” and “how?” begin pouring out their exasperated […]
If you freeze-frame in the opening reels of Basket Case 2, a curious thing happens. You can almost – almost – sense the utter surprise on Frank Henenlotter’s part that he’s making a sequel to his surprise grindhouse hit at all. At the end of Basket Case, see, it seems that both Duane and Belial […]
When I heard that Mara was a horror story invoking sleep paralysis as a key element of its plot, as a sufferer I was immediately interested. Sleep paralysis is well understood in the modern age, just as sleep and dreams are generally, but anyone who has ever had a significant nightmare, or a waking nightmare […]
Paul Verhoeven’s first Hollywood production was in many respects a case of ‘start as you mean to go on.’ In line with the Dutch auteur’s later, more celebrated work – RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers (let’s put Showgirls to one side just now, although there’s a lot to be said for that one) […]
Some say that you haven’t lived until you’ve dropped a hit of acid on some Pink Floyd. They say that everything tastes better, looks better, and man oh man, does that bass guitar swim like a golden dragon in the plump, pink clouds of the early morning sun. Sometimes though, sometimes it’s not enough and […]
It’s a pleasure to find oneself watching a hitherto-unknown supernatural horror, just like The Changeling. Before Insidious and that Woman in Black remake were even a twinkle in the eye, before ghosts got riotous, filmmakers were giving voice to ghost stories which could be understated, yet complex enough to keep their secrets until the end. […]