Scott Adkins holds a pretty unique status among 21st century action heroes. Since breaking through with a small part in 2001 Jackie Chan movie The Accidental Spy, the British martial artist and actor has been widely acclaimed as one of the best in the business, clocking up an impressive body of work with over 40 […]
The cannibal movie cycle of the late Seventies and early Eighties will forever seem like a strange beast. Splicing stock footage of animals doing their thing with often garish animal cruelty, then layering in gore effects, nudity and any number of practices which would very likely fail to get past an ethics committee today, the […]
You know what’s cool? Vikings. You know what else is cool? Samurai. You know what’s the coolest thing ever then? Yup, Vikings fighting Samurai. And no, I’m not talking about that Cowboy Ninja Viking comic from nine years ago about a dude with a split personality (which will be a movie in 2019), but a […]
Horror has always been a heavily self-referential genre. It’s often suggested that Scream started this trend, but that’s patently untrue; go back decades and you can find no shortage of horror movies which openly point out and play with genre conventions, as well as directly addressing the audience in a fourth-wall breaking manner. The digital […]
Inspired by the success of Hammer’s lurid horror cinema in the 1960s, the ever-versatile Toho Studios made a sound business decision to make some vampire films of their own. Whilst there is a modest array of films based specifically on Far Eastern vampire lore, the productions overseen by director Michio Yamamoto are rather different, blending […]
More and more these days, we’re seeing academic studies of what is often regarded as genre cinema; this ties in with the rise and rise of film studies more generally, with horror finally being regularly recognised and brought into the fold. In the past few months alone, for instance, I’ve reviewed books on The Shining, […]
It’s a curious twist of fate/scheduling that writer-director Graham Skipper’s arcade game-themed horror should land on streaming platform Shudder in the same week that David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ gets its UK Blu-ray release. The Canadian body horror pioneer’s 1999 film would seem a likely influence on Sequence Break, given the gaming angle and the emphasis on […]
It’s odd to think that there was a time in which an abstract take on video game culture which features people entering a virtual reality by plugging an umbilical cord into a portal at the base of their spine might be considered a fairly safe, mainstream-friendly work of cinema. This, however, was pretty much the […]
It feels a bit weird and inherently dishonest to discuss any studio-backed superhero movie in terms of being a ‘surprise hit,’ yet this is how 2016’s Deadpool is generally regarded. Though being officially part of the X-Men franchise and sporting a whopping budget ($58 million may be low by modern blockbuster standards, but it’s still […]
Babam! Welcome to Flavor Town where the currency is flavor and everyone is rich! And no, I’m not talking about some crappy vape town where the air is thick with cotton candy flavored clouds and backwards hats, but a REAL flavor town, you know, like with food. Well, unfortunately, this isn’t a real place, but […]
Whatever the situation was immediately following its release, no single horror film in history seems to have attracted such a proliferating amount of critical commentary as The Shining. And, few films have lent themselves to so much of what many lay viewers would see as frankly barmy analysis; okay, if you’ve ever watched a certain […]