Lena doesn’t want to go home. She wants to run away from the troubles of her real life and recapture all the fun she’s missed out on. Using Daniel’s keys, the pair go on the ultimate tour of London – a wild weekend of getting to know each other intimately […]
From the Festivals
Mermaid Legend (1984)(Frightfest 2024) Review
Come the late ’60s the Japanese film industry was floundering, hurt by the rise in popularity of television and the constant influx of Hollywood movies to satisfy an ever present American contingent. Japanese films seemed tired and out of ideas, so budgets were cut and the rise of exploitation cinema […]
The Last Voyage of The Demeter (Frightfest 2024) Review
I feel like I’ve been chasing The Last Voyage of the Demeter for the past year, as I heard of it last summer when it played in some US cinemas and thought it sounded really interesting. I then waited for the UK release – which got cancelled, and conceded it […]
Video Vision (FrightFest 2024) Review
When a film starts off with the credit “Less Tech More Life presents…” you can probably guess where it’s going to land on certain issues. Video Vision comes from writer-director Michael Turley, whose lesstechmorelife.com website hosts a manifesto on the need to “wake ourselves up from the digital spell we […]
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, […]
Ghost Game (Frightfest 2024) Review
For as long as there have been cameras, they’ve been used to “capture” ghosts. The invention of the daguerreotype in the 1800s brought with it the advent of “spirit photography” – an attempt to capture definitive photographic proof of the paranormal (or at least sell it as such), during the […]
THE DAEMON (Frightfest 2024) Review
It can be argued that film doesn’t work for someone not because of what it’s about, but how it’s done. Familiar, and even cliched features can receive imaginative and effective treatment that provoke emotions in people and draw us closer to the characters. The Daemon features many familiar tropes, but […]
House of Sayuri (Fantasia 2024)(Review)
Koji Shiraishi is one of the most prolific directors currently working, yet beyond cult hits like Noroi, Occult, and his ongoing series Senritsu Kaiki File, his work seems to have gone under the radar for those not intimate with Japanese horror. House of Sayuri has the potential to reach a […]
Parvulos (Fantasia 2024)(Review)
Isaac Ezban is a regular on festival circuits, with films like Evil Eye and The Similars establishing him as an interesting, if under-seen, contributor to Mexican horror. His latest film, Parvulos, is his longest feature at just under two hours, and he shows considerable ambition with this dystopian tale of […]