It’s official: cinema has ruined clowns. Which particular make-up-caked straw broke the camel’s back is up for debate, however; from The Man Who Laughs to Terrifier, it’s currently hard to imagine when the garishly-dressed grinning maniacs were more funny than scary. Yet audiences are forever drawn to the freaky little […]
Movies & Documentaries
A Forgotten Man (2022) The Seperation of Established History from Story (Review)
First things first. A Forgotten Man, despite its stage inspirations (Thomas Hürlimann’s Der Gesandte [The Envoy]), is a film made by a cinephile. The clue is the use of black-and-white, in most films now shot in monochrome, the art is often that of a below-average collagist. The awkward and unintended incongruity of […]
The Ginger Snaps Trilogy (2000-2004) Important piece of Disruptive Art, vital as Teen Horror icon (Review)
Somewhere between the meta-cinematic knowingness of Scream and the self-contained irony of Jennifer’s Body sits Ginger Snaps, a smart, sassy, trilogy of teenage girls dealing with lycanthropy. Or are they really dealing with teenage problems? Menstruation and other signs of puberty; sexuality and relationships; addiction and self-harm; colonialism and manifest […]
Door / Door 2 (1988/1991): the high art of gut-level sleaze (Review)
What kind of films would be produced by a production house called the Directors Company? In a Western context, you could hazard a guess: serious-minded auteur films, unblemished by the crudities of genre, devoted to an artist’s personal vision. The Directors Company that existed in Japan from 1982 to 1992 […]
Pandora’s Box (1929) Dare You Open, or Will You Pabst? (Review)
Achieving its UK Blu-ray debut this week courtesy of Eureka Entertainment’s “Masters of Cinema” series is G.W. Pabst’s 1929 classic Pandora’s Box. Arguably one of Weimer German cinema’s – if not silent cinema in general’s – greatest masterpieces, Pandora’s Box is the film that catapulted the Kansas-born, twenty-two-year-old, one-time chorus […]
Beach of the War Gods (1973) A Seven Samurai retelling with epic intensions (Review)
Beach of the War Gods is an accumulation of a career, but before we get there it can never be overstated just how much of a star Jimmy Wang Yu was for Shaw Brothers in the late ’60s going into the early ’70s. With his boyish good looks and his […]
Suitable Flesh (2023) The Spirit of Stuart Gordon in this tawdry, knowing Lovecraft adaptation (Review)
It’s remarkable how much untapped potential lies in the work of H.P. Lovecraft -one of horror’s slipperiest and most indefinable writers. His weird tales of eldritch oddities and cosmic calamities have been the influence for many on the page, but few successes on the screen – despite a recent (if […]
Messiah of Evil (1973) “They say that nightmares are dreams perverted” (Review)
In Messiah of Evil (1973), co-written, produced and directed by Gloria Katz and William Huyck, Arletty travels to the seaside town of Point Dume to visit her estranged father. Upon arrival, she finds her father’s house deserted and the town inhabited by sinister locals. As she tries to unravel the […]
From Beijing with Love (1994) The Universal Language of Stephen Chow (Review)
Mo lei tau is a relatively new genre in terms of it’s history within Hong Kong pop culture. Born in the late 70’s and early 80’s through the comedy of the Hui Brothers (Michael, Samuel and Ricky Hui), and whilst their brand of humour was never officially called “Mo Lei […]
When Evil Lurks (2023) A Spirited, Grim Take On the Possession Movie (Review)
Coming off the critical success of Terrified (2017), and his standout segment in the horror anthology Satanic Hispanics (2022), Argentinian director Demián Rugna is back with another instalment of his brand of mean horror with When Evil Lurks – meaner and grimmer than before. Hot off the film festival circuit […]