For a filmmaker largely forgotten by the wider audience, the late Bob Clark’s directorial career had a surprising impact. With 1981’s Porky’s, he blew the doors wide open on the teen sex comedy boom; and I understand 1983’s A Christmas Story is something of a perennial festive favourite in the US (I myself have never […]
Any horror fan of a certain age can tell you that 1996 was a big year for Neve Campbell. Off the back of that year’s The Craft and (more pointedly) Scream, the then-23 year old Canadian actress was elevated from “one of the girls off Party of Five” to a genre movie star, a status […]
I gotta admit, when I first saw the title for Image’s newest vampire comic Dark Fang, I pictured a half-dressed, big-tittied vamp babe swinging a hatchet around and lamenting on being deathless or some garbage. Either that, or a comic about a fifteen year old going through some very rough puberty and bad fashion. Luckily, […]
Johannes Roberts has long been a director we’ve held in high esteem around these parts. 2010’s F was one of the most attention-grabbing British horror movies of the past decade, and he’s been steadily on the ascent in the years since. 47 Metres Down would seem to be his highest profile film yet, with a […]
Hammer is best-known for its Kensington Gore and its literary monsters, usually shot against a 60s-coloured 19th Century which is a distinctive aesthetic all of its own; the studio deviated from this formula quite considerably at times, though, in a range of films which seem to have divided critics ever since. Fear in the Night […]
I will confess that I have had no prior experience of director Yorgos Lanthimos’s work, but based on his most recent film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, I’d imagine that a little goes a long way. That isn’t to say that I wasn’t completely drawn in to this twisted story of unhappy families, but […]
Meiko Kaji is, from a Western perspective, one of the most unmistakable and recognisable Japanese actresses of all time, but this comes with a significant proviso. Most of us know just a tiny fraction of the films she has ever made; only a handful of these nearly one hundred films have really made it over […]
I have a real love/hate thing going with Japanese director Sion Sono. On one hand, his so-called ‘hate’ trilogy contains, for me, some of the most genius, subversive films I have ever been immersed in; they’re absolutely jaw-dropping, to the point that I don’t know if I can feasibly revisit Guilty of Romance for fear […]
There are very few independent comics that have survived to their 30 year mark like Usagi Yojimbo. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of anything outside of Love and Rockets and Judge Dredd, which makes the samurai-laden, anthropomorphic action epic that is Usagi that much more special. That being said, I have the distinct […]
It’s always a privilege, in these social media-saturated times, to walk into a film screening without the faintest idea of what it’s all about. As I hadn’t even looked at the Celluloid Screams programme before we sat down to watch Habit (and as I almost immediately mix up titles and synopses anyway) it definitely felt […]
Hard to believe it’s been a full decade since Grindhouse, don’t you think? Even stranger to think that a film which was deemed a box office catastrophe proved to have such a legacy, inspiring scores of low-budget filmmakers to try their hand at vintage-flavoured exploitation, to such an extent that ten years on grindhouse is […]