Every fresh Nicolas Cage film comes with a rare weight of expectation, and 2022 saw that come to a head with a film whose title and content seemed to embody that thought. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – where the image of Nicolas Cage embraced its own meme – […]
From the Festivals
T Blockers (Frightfest 2023)(Review)
Alice Maio Mackay is a horror phenomenon. At 18 years old she has already directed three genre features in the span of three years, with another two pictures in post-production at the time of writing. More importantly, she’s an out-and-proud transgender woman who isn’t afraid to let the world know […]
Minore & The Weird Kidz (Frightfest 2023) (Review)
MINORE The poster for Minore promises a ‘new Greek monster movie’, and while that’s exactly what this film is, it is perhaps more interesting in its build up to the arrival of said monsters. The movie follows a sailor on shore-leave who visits a small Greek coastal town looking for […]
Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow (FrightFest 2023) (Review)
Jake West’s new documentary, Mancunian Man, opens with a quote from its subject, the late director, actor, bouncer and bodybuilder Cliff Twemlow: “It is far better to be a resident on the brink of hell than spend a whole life in pursuit of a mythical heaven“. Which is an odd […]
The Black Mass & Black Mold (Frightfest 2023) (Review)
The Black Mass January 14th, 1978. While a mysterious man shaves, a warped voiceover explains how murderers have no identifiable features, which means that anybody in your life could be demonic. That chilling realisation lingers as the unnamed man (Andy Sykes), walks into a store intending to charm people, pick […]
My Mother’s Eyes (Frightfest 2023)(Review)
For an entire generation of horror fans, the movies that came out of Japan around the turn of the millennium were crucial stopovers in our journey of cinematic discovery. They fell under the collective-yet-reductive umbrella of “J-Horror”, which had slowly burned out by the mid-’00s, but in 2023 the smouldering […]
To Fire You Come at Last (Frightfest 2023)(Review)
Throughout the English countryside, there are roads built for the dead. Very few of these paths still exist in any easily detectable way, with many of them now overgrown and forgotten to time, but there was a time when these “corpse roads” were a necessity for remote rural communities, marking […]
Enter the Clones of Bruce Lee & J-Horror Virus (Frightfest 2023) (Review)
The Frightfest line-up is often home to some exceptional documentaries that chronicle everything from cultural curios to cinematic movements. They act as a sort of cinematic sorbet from the fictional chills and thrills that surround them, and this year is no different with two strong examples being Enter the Clones […]
River (2023) Junta Yamaguchi with another ambitious time-twisting treat (Frightfest 2023) (Review)
Junta Yamaguchi is a filmmaker who loves repeating himself, which is understandable given that his feature film work so far has concerned itself with two-minute cycles and loops in time that infuriate and complicate in equal measure. It should be clear from the outset, however, that this is not necessarily […]
Raging Grace (Frightfest 2023): A Striking Genre Take on Immigration (Review)
In the last few years there have been a couple of interesting horror movies that focused on servitude like The Maid (2020), and Nanny (2022). Raging Grace continues this (hopefully growing), trend by following in Nanny’s footsteps and adding anxiety around immigration to the mix. The tale of an illegal […]