Hallmark films have a reputation for being obvious, laboured, schmaltzy and (perhaps impressively), both cheesy and corny, which makes them a fairly soft target for humour, and one that gets skewered in Five – a comedy horror from writer, director, and actor Dani Barker. The story follows the (mis)fortunes of […]
From the Festivals
The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan (Frightfest 2025)
Andy Milligan was my cinematic find of 2024. I went into Seeds blind, knowing only that I had been asked to talk about it for the Calibre 9 From Outer Space podcast. What I discovered was the work of a real artist. Certainly, the dialogue sounded like it was recorded […]
Frightfest 2025 Day 1 (Getting There, Appofeniacs, What She Doesn’t Know, Transcending Dimensions & In a Cold Vein)
Getting the nightbus isn’t the best way to get to anything, never mind your first in-person Frightfest, but when you are 247 miles away from the event and trying to be efficient, there are few better ways to go. So, its 12:45 am and I’m waiting outside the local BBC […]
Sane Inside Insanity: The Phenomenon of Rocky Horror (FrightFest 2025)
In 1975 the world was introduced to a weird and wacky musical film called The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but before that was the underground punk rock musical loved by misfits and those who felt misplaced in society. Now it’s a cultural phenomenon that fills out cinemas and theatres across […]
Marshmallow (Frightfest 2025)
For many genre film enthusiasts in the UK, the mythic and beloved all-American horror setting of the summer camp is something akin to an alien world, and while similar experiences exist for young people here, they’re often provided through schools or organisations like the Scouts or Guides. This is why […]
Transcending Dimensions (Frightfest 2025)
When did spirituality stop being cool? Our collective faith in faith seems to have taken a beating from the moment we stopped believing in religious middle-managers who got outed for the narcissists and manipulators they often were … but as a species and as individuals, does that cut us off […]
Buffet Infinity (Fantasia 2025): Innovative and Hilarious Genre-Shifting Filmmaking
If you’ve seen classic Adult Swim videos like Too Many Cooks or Unedited Footage of a Bear and wondered what they’d be like as a feature film, then look no further than Buffet Infinity, which I can only describe as Adult Swim meets Welcome to Nightvale. If you’re familiar with […]
Burning (Ot) (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
The famous quote about movies is that they are an “empathy machine”, and personally I believe that is at it truest within the genre space – whether it be marginalised voices or something from an otherwise culturally “uncharted” part of the world – horror has it all. Whenever I see […]
Noise (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
Horror works when it taps into something primal that you can feel in your bones. As dramatic as that sounds, it doesn’t need to something hard, deep or physical, it can invoke something mundane, twist it and there we have it – the uncanny. The uncanny is not only where […]
Dog of God (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
The awards success of Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow over the last year has really put the Latvian film industry on the map in a big way, animated entirely through Blender, it’s been called one of the best films of the decade so far and is the highest-grossing Latvian film of all […]