Dragon Inn is one of the greatest martial arts films of all time, and it’s follow up from King Hu, A Touch of Zen – one of the genre’s greatest epics. The problem is, how do you follow a film as acclaimed as A Touch of Zen when critics love […]
Movies & Documentaries
Moonrise Kingdom: Revel in the artificiality! (Review)
Wes Anderson’s films always have a sense of existing outside of time, in an indefinably old-fashioned present. It makes a perverse sort of sense, then, that when he finally made one set in the 1960s it stood out for not having the Kinks and the Rolling Stones on the soundtrack. […]
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: A visceral indictment of war (Review)
Picture this. You’re one of a few surviving members of a World War Two Garrison stationed in New Guinea. It’s Japan in the late ‘80s, and you’ve gotten out bed after a horrific nightmare from the trauma of the war. Guilt, shame, and horror fester your mind: you’ve done something […]
A Good Woman is Hard to Find (2019): But Well Worth Seeking Out (Review)
In a supermarket on a sink estate in Belfast, a young single mother named Sarah is performing the weekly shop with her two small children. In her hand is a shopping list with all the necessities required for the family. However, when they reach the tills, Sarah is mortified to […]
And Soon the Darkness (1970): the horror of language barriers? (Review)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Two young English girls, Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) have gone on a biking holiday to France, and not the parts of France you’d normally holiday, this is the back end of beyond with nothing for miles but fields and […]
Fright (1971): Suburban 1970s Horror, British Style (Review)
Every Bank Holiday, every Christmas break, you’ll be painfully aware of Peter Collinson’s most successful film as a director – the Italian Job. Like William Girdler (Grizzly, The Manitou), he died way too young and left behind a fascinating body of work far more compelling than that which he is […]
Angel Heart: Dark Intrigue and Sinister Seduction (Review)
It’s a lonely place for someone like me over on Letterboxd just now. Whilst the bulk of the community celebrate the Halloween season with the Hooptober Horror Film Challenge I, never much of a joiner-inner, continue to watch whatever takes my fancy. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good […]
Suspiria (2018): the horror remake as high art (Review)
Horror remakes have been a hot topic for what feels like forever. Personally, nothing will reach the nadir of remakes whose sole purpose is so people don’t have to read subtitles. That happened on a near-monthly basis in the J-Horror cycle. Another wing of horror remakes is revisiting classics, there […]
Rabid (2019): mutating to its heart’s content (Review)
While writing his 1977 film Rabid, David Cronenberg had a crisis of confidence. In Chris Rodley’s book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, he remembers saying to his producer John Dunning: “…I just woke up this morning and realised this is ridiculous. Do you know what this movie’s about? This woman grows a […]
Werewolf (2019): Grimmer than the average WWII holocaust drama (Review)
Unlike what the title implies, Adrian Panek’s Werewolf (Wilkolak) isn’t a supernatural horror movie. It’s a cross between a World War Two Holocaust drama by way of Cujo or White Dog. I think what Panek is trying to emphasise with the title that pure evil doesn’t come from something alien, […]