A confession: I am not familiar with the work of director Gaspar Noé, despite his presence as a notorious, divisive figure in the cult cinema scene. The verdict on 2002’s Irreversible was so split amongst people whose opinions I trust that I’ve still never sought the film out, and as such I’ve never caught up […]
If you’ve seen your share of historical martial arts movies, chances are you’ve heard the name Wong Fei-Hung. A real life pioneer of Kung Fu and Chinese medicine and all-around folk hero, he’s been heavily mythologised in Hong Kong action cinema, notable films including Drunken Master and Iron Monkey. However, where both those films followed […]
I start this review with something of a confession: it has only dawned on me in the past few years, really, that my liking for Dario Argento’s work is based on a very small number of his films. And it’s awful – as well as terribly unpopular these days, given the vicissitudes of the likes […]
When we think of horror films which trap our protagonists in the wilderness far from civilisation, these tend to be backwoods shockers in the Texas Chain Saw/Hills Have Eyes mould, pitting the softer city folk against brutal, frequently inbred country bumpkins. Alternatively, such a setting might see its human cast at the mercy of some […]
It’s been quite a year for British fans of Jackie Chan, thanks to the fine folks at Eureka Home Entertainment. Not content with reissuing the screen legend’s breakthrough film Drunken Master on Blu-ray back in April 2017, 2018 has seen the British label give similar treatment to Jackie’s benchmarks Police Story/Police Story 2, plus the […]
An athletic young man, Allan (Jason Beghe) is rendered quadriplegic and reliant on wheelchair use after being struck by a truck. He struggles to adjust to his new life, dependent on his domineering mother and uncaring ex-girlfriend to assist him. Luckily, he is given a life line in the form of a Capuchin monkey, trained […]
Jackie Chan, as anyone can tell you, pioneered the martial arts action comedy, punctuating awe-inspiring displays of physical daring and expertise with immaculate comic timing and irreverent sensibilities which have resonated with audiences worldwide for decades. From the late 1970s and well into the 80s, Jackie pumped out hit after hit in this format, several […]
You have to hand it to director and writer Fred Dekker. Not only has he made some of the most straightforwardly entertaining films of the past forty years or so, but those films are – for many people – forever wedded to the 1980s, so forming part of people’s nostalgia for a decade when many […]
Talk about a movie in which a car breaks down during a storm forcing its passengers to seek refuge in a spooky old house nearby, only to find themselves the guests of a deranged transvestite who intends to use them for nefarious means, and odds are most people will think you’re referring to The Rocky […]
James Bickert may well be the single best filmmaker in the contemporary US microbudget indie exploitation scene. The writer, director, producer and editor certainly isn’t the most prolific in his field, having made three films in the past decade (on top of his four earlier credits from the late 1990s, none of which I’ve seen), […]
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 […]