I think it’s fair to say that director M. Night Shyamalan has had a variable track record to date. After his big break, The Sixth Sense, made a new sport out of guessing-the-twist, he seemed to have landed straight at the top and seemed likely to stay there – but subsequent films saw this influence […]
I’ve always thought it’s a crying shame that we generally know very little about Russian cinema; although many fine examples have made it across to the West, we can be sure that many have not, and even those which have are often very under-appreciated. And so it is that it has taken me around a […]
There seems to have been something of a resurgence in print media – alongside many other pre-internet media – in recent years; titles which had quietly slipped off the radar are back, and the indie press, which many folk had anticipated would have disintegrated by now, is ticking along rather nicely. Even we (that is, […]
Texas, USA is a lot of things to a lot of people. To vacationers, it’s a land of pastures and steaks, to foreigners, it’s the crown of American civilization, and to writers, artists, and dreamers, it’s the last thundering vestige of the American southwest. But to locals, it’s simply God’s Country. A large and fantastical […]
Watching this movie, I felt as if I was getting glimpses of multiple alternate realities. One was a universe in which we didn’t generally regard the 1990s as a wasteland for the horror genre; another was one in which Michele Soavi became as major a Hollywood player as Peter Jackson. Watching The Sect, neither of […]
As most of you have heard by now, Adventure Time will be coming to an end in 2018. While that’s not until the far off future where flying cars and steam-powered monsters have taken over our everyday lives, it’s still going to leave a gap in our hearts that no amount of candy can fill. […]
The so-called ‘Satanic Panic’ of the Eighties (with some fallout in the following decade) is a curious phenomenon – one born out of a collision of new media, psychiatry, pop-psychiatry and pop culture. It’s one of those things which could – and did – run and run, borne aloft by its ‘hidden’ status (how do […]
By Ben Bussey As I’ve remarked many times when looking at reissues of old horror favourites, many of them feel like they need little or no introduction, and to my mind that’s certainly the case with Fright Night. Tom Holland’s 1985 directorial debut was among the first dozen or so horror movies I saw in my […]
By Nia Edwards-Behi Hong Kong martial arts films have always had an evident spiritual connection to the Western – similar narratives playing out in different settings and with different weapons: fists and feet instead of Colts and Winchesters. This connection is drawn to the surface to full effect in Benny Chan’s Call of Heroes, as […]
1971 saw something of a cinematic seismic shift in Britain, with three films seeming to trouble the censors and moral guardians of Britain more than any others before. Arriving in quick succession were The Devils, A Clockwork Orange, and Straw Dogs, three films which seemed to pave the way for a landslide of taboo-breaking and […]
Apologies if this is a bit of a trite analogy, but it’s hard not to note clear parallels between slasher movies and punk rock. Both genres emerged more or less at the same time, in the downbeat days of the mid-to-late 70s, and tapped into a similar vein of youthful discontent and rage. There was […]