Make Believe Film Fest 2024: A Most Atrocious Thing

How do you signal to your audience that things are going to head south pretty fast – other than by titling your film A Most Atrocious Thing, that is? Turns out it’s by showing us almost instantly a sign reading Danger! Contaminated Water! Then a deer drinking from this water, before cutting straight to some […]

Legions (2022)

It’s made clear pretty quickly in Argentinian demonic horror-comedy Legions (2022) that we are covering a long period of time – a then and a now. As a voiceover introduces us to a shaman, someone with magical know-how in his lineage, we’re shown life as it was, in a remote village operating by traditional rules […]

Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It (2020)

Like a lot of audience members presumably, this reviewer had no idea what to expect from a Kazakh horror-comedy. But it turns out that, however geographically far Kazakhstan might be from many of us, there are many universal features which we can all enjoy; this is an earnest, often puerile and occasionally very gory little […]

15 Things You Didn’t Know About Bigfoot (2019)

Brian Emond is, or was, a ‘content producer’ from Brooklyn who always badly wanted to rise up through the ranks to real journalism. And, as he tells us early on, journalists are always looking for their exclusive – but don’t always end up telling the story they expected to tell. It’s a premise which guides […]

12 Hour Shift (2020)

Arkansas, 1999. Mandy (Angela Bettis) is the world’s most disinterested nurse at the local hospital, and we meet her just ahead of a double shift. This isn’t the only reason she’s a little curt, though. To give her credit, her apparent disinclination for nursing is multifaceted: she’s a drug addict who enjoys hoovering up any […]

You Might Be The Killer (2018)

As has oft been noted, one of the great pleasures of attending film festivals, getting early looks at films which have yet to (or in some cases, never really do) reach a wide audience, is being caught by surprise by material of which you knew little or nothing beforehand. This is particularly the case when […]