Editor’s note: this discussion of Men Behind the Sun contains spoilers. The Chinese film Men Behind the Sun (1988) is not altogether well known in the West, and has yet to enjoy the kind of lavish DVD or indeed Blu-Ray release which has usually happened for even the most censor-baiting movies by thirty years after […]
Spoiler warning. It certainly doesn’t feel like ten years has passed since Pascal Laugier’s divisive horror film Martyrs first arrived, but the more I reflect on the state of horror cinema at the time of its release, the more I feel inclined to agree that ‘the past is a foreign country’. In 2008, horror cinema […]
You know a film still has something, however many years pass, when you consider what would happen to it if it was pitched today. So at a guess, and alongside most of the best horror and exploitation films ever made, a film which involves exploding drug addicts and reanimated hookers via bad science would be […]
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 […]
By anyone’s standards, sixteen years is a hell of a hiatus for a filmmaker to take between films. Yeah, from time to time this happens (Herschell Gordon Lewis went a staggering thirty years between The Gore Gore Girls and his next film) but overall, it’s still unusual. After all, if you’d taken that long a […]
If you didn’t already know from your experience of watching Basket Case that bad things are almost certainly around the corner, then you could be forgiven for thinking that the beginning of Brain Damage (1988) features a perfectly respectable elderly couple, in a well-decorated New York apartment, doing something perfectly reasonable. Sure they’re feeding…something, but […]
A few years ago, at the Dead by Dawn horror festival in Edinburgh, I was invited to take part in a ‘play dead’ competition with the rest of the auditorium. Quite unusual as a pastime, you might think, even for a horror fest. Well, this was all off the back of a competition being held […]
Do you remember that brief time in the nineties when Melissa Joan Hart was the Queen of teen? With her fashion forward outfits and sharp take on teen/tween issues, she became an unofficial icon of young girls in ugly overalls everywhere, taking her unique brand of YOU-nique across the after-school TV plateau spanning from Clarissa […]
Times of great uncertainty and bloodshed have always seemed to bolster paranoia and irrational thought. Change offers to dispose of the unconscionable practices of the past, but even as old beliefs and practices are on the verge of being swept away, people still to seek them out, retreating into watchful suggestibility any time the pace […]
There has long been a relationship between horror cinema and the humble waxwork museum. Though now sadly fallen out of favour, waxworks were a de rigeur form of entertainment before cinema existed; the world-famous Madame Tussauds opened its first ‘chamber of horrors’ in 1802 after the successes of the French ‘Caverne des Grands Voleurs’, which […]
By special guest contributor Marc Lissenburg “What’s the scariest film you’ve ever seen?” It’s a query I am faced with on an alarmingly regular basis when folk learn of my fervent horror movie fanaticism. Despite the somewhat tedious probing, my enthused and instantaneous retort each time is – “THE EXORCIST!” Now I accept one man’s […]