Celluloid Screams 2025: The Return of the Living Dead (40th anniversary)

Freddy (Thom Mathews) is a new employee at the Uneeda Medical Supply Warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky. Supervisor Frank (James Karen) attempts to give this thoroughly unglamourous form of employment some umph by taking Freddy to the basement, where drums of a toxic gas called 2-4-5 Trioxin have been stashed by the military. Frank accidentally breaks […]

Celluloid Screams 2025: Queens of the Dead

Dre (Katy O’Brian) is an event organiser, DJ and general fixer at Bushwick’s Yum club, which is all set to bring in the punters with a drag show featuring top notch headliner Yasmine (Dominique Jackson). However, the draw of a more lucrative gig for Glitter Bitch Vodka has Yasmine heading for the hills – well, […]

Celluloid Screams 2025: We Bury the Dead

Australian apocalypse cinema has turned up some excellent examples over the past decade or so; that’s even without naming a certain franchise, itself named for a certain seminal character, which re-emerged in 2015. These Final Hours (2013) – which I now realise I reviewed a decade ago at the same festival – places modern Australia […]

28 Years Later (2025)

I have limited preamble for this review of 28 Years Later; let’s call it shock. Like many other film fans, I really liked 28 Days Later, despite sharing in the laugh at the end of Shaun of the Dead about its key plot point, because it had enough energy, initiative and charm to carry it […]

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 […]

Devil’s Advocates: I Walked with a Zombie by Clive Dawson

Ah, it’s been a while since I reviewed a Devil’s Advocates title. For anyone not currently in the know about this series of books: they’re each focused on an influential horror film, each book has a different author, and offers different kinds of focus and perspectives, but without fail you can expect a detailed, academic-lite […]

Celluloid Screams 2023: We Are Zombies

Welcome to a world in which zombies roam. What, another one? Yes, but this time there’s a major difference. These folks are not driven by the desire to chow down on human flesh. In fact, uttering the z-word has become something of a societal taboo, with campaigners pushing hard for the rights of the country’s […]

The Sadness (2021)

There has inevitably been a surge in ‘lockdown horrors’ over the past couple of years. It’s a fairly broad church, with some of these films simply being made under lockdown conditions, whilst others directly address the threat of novel viruses – but nearly every one of these films has directly or indirectly addressed the things […]

Virus: 32 (2022)

Funny how it’s turned out, but zombie horror has been with us so long and appeared so often now, that it all feels oddly comforting. For the most part, tropes which are maddening from other genres seem more than acceptable when there are zombies in tow: it doesn’t even really seem to matter that much […]

Bong of the Living Dead (2017)

I feel as though I’ve been here before. Not just because there was a film called Bong of the Dead a few years ago, which my co-editor Ben reviewed, nor indeed because this very day he has reviewed another stoner horror (4:20 Massacre) but also because I’ve also reviewed a film which sounds very similar to Bong […]