“And for what? For a little bit of money? There’s more to life than a little bit of money ya know.” Despite the works of the Coen brothers spawning their own massively popular sub-genre of comedy crime caper shenanigans, nobody ever surmised the absurdity and the nonsensical allure of the […]
Jake Kazanis
Essex Boy, Gus Van Sant loyalist, Shyamalan truther, gets unreasonably sad if I don't watch a film every day.
Chainsaws Were Singing (Fantastic Fest 2024)
I mean what more can you say? If you hadn’t guessed already, Chainsaws Were Singing is a madcap comedy splatterfest from the country that brought you… anyone else seen November? That’s a good one, and in fact is also a certifiably odd film and yet it doesn’t come close to […]
Red Rooms (2024) A Transcendental Interrogation of True Crime Obsession (Review)
French language courtroom dramas are having a real moment recently, with 2022 seeing Mati Diop’s masterfully haunting spiritual enigma Saint Omer, then in 2023 we got almost the polar opposite with Justine Triet’s Oscar and Palme D’or-winning marital drama murder-mystery blockbuster (or at least it felt like that in its […]
Starve Acre (2024) Countryside Chiller is a Blast from the Past (Review)
The proud county of Yorkshire seems to be in the middle of a horror resurgence as, following the low-key chiller The Moor we now have this, an oak-aged folk-horror that isn’t shy about its classical influences from British horrors of yore. Director Daniel Kokotajlo’s mix of occult, supernatural, and psychological […]
Cadejo Blanco (2021) Twisted Coming of Age Tale set in Gangland Guatemala (Review)
A ‘cadejo’ is a mythic creature in Central American folklore that refers to a dog-like creature that comes in two forms; either the white (blanco) cadejo that protects humans from danger and the black (negro) cadejo that attacks them. This Guatemalan crime drama from American writer/director Justin Lerner clearly posits […]
Strange Darling (Frightfest 2024) Review
As the sappy Everly Brothers classic that scores this film’s opening goes, love hurts, and right off the bat it should be prefaced that Strange Darling is a film you should go into completely blind. It’s the sort of energetic, attention-dominating indie thriller that boasts a major twist every other […]
Dead Mail (Frightfest 2024)(Review)
From American writer-director duo Kyle McConaghy and Joe DeBoer comes this strange, 1980s-set low budget indie film that manages to defy easy categorisation, standing alone as a revival of dirty ’70s exploitation dramas (think John Flynn or Sam Peckinpah), and ’80s analogue nostalgia. Dead Mail jumps right into the action, […]
What Remains (2022) A Bummer Scandi-noir from the Skarsgårds (Review)
At the height of a glorious summer I’m sure many people are thinking “You know what? I’m really in the mood to see a brooding, muted, Scandinavian true crime drama about a serial child-killer that’s set in the dead of winter”, and would you believe it? Icon Films have us […]
The Exorcism (2024) Russell Crowe Goes Method in Meta-horror Mix-up (Review)
Let’s get the obvious out the way first; no, The Exorcism has no connection to The Pope’s Exorcist, the uniformly-titled occult horror released only last year where Russell Crowe played an exorcist and also shares a near identical poster. In fact, this uncanny case of cinematic deja-vu is one of […]
The Moor (2024) – Thick in atmosphere, thin on character (Review)
The Moor is the debut feature-film from Chris Cronin, and it stays true to the UK’s rich history of regional folk horror while making damn sure to get the most out of the locality it’s named after – specifically Yorkshire. Horror has a long history rooted in the area, from […]