We’re at the penultimate serial of Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor, so it’s probably time to tackle the burning issue of his tenure head-on: is he a toff? The Third Doctor, his detractors say, is the establishment Doctor, “The Pompous Tory” in the words of seminal fan blog Adventures With the Wife […]
Pop Culture
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 […]
Doctor Who A-Z #72: Death to the Daleks (1974)
There’s a shift in Doctor Who towards the end of Jon Pertwee’s run which doesn’t actually affect much of what you’re watching, but it had a seismic impact on how people watched it. From 1963 to 1972, Doctor Who existed in an eternal present: the only recurring monsters were ones the average person in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #71: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974)
Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the final Doctor Who story to be released on VHS, implying that even late-in-the-range releases like a box set of Underworld and The Time Monster were considered a more desirable consumer item than this. This is a strange anti-accolade, and not just because of the […]
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 […]
Doctor Who A-Z #70: The Time Warrior (1973-4)
It’s not always easy to judge which Doctor Who stories are important – not at the time, and not even in retrospect. A retrospective view, for instance, will probably pick Dennis Spooner’s The Time Meddler as being the story which set the template for all modern-day stories set in Earth’s […]
Hold the Fort (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
William Bagley’s Hold the Fort had its world premiere at the 2025 Fantasia Festival, and two films in, the director of The Murder Podcast seems to be flying his flag for comedy horror with gleeful abandon. It’s a sub‑genre often deemed unbankable by the studio system and those who finance […]
The Well (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
Apocalypse cinema is fairly self-explanatory and, if you listen to certain fatalistic people in the media and on social media, we’re currently living through one. Post-apocalypse, in which the end has happened and society falls into a violent anarchy, has been endlessly mined as part of the zombie sub-genre – […]
Saint Clare (2024) Fun, Atmospheric Play on the Cycles of Vengeance
“Everything I have said and done is in the hands of god” Clare Bleeker (Bella Thorne), has been plagued with voices since she was a child. Righteous justice, only to be brought by her down on the heads of those who deserve. But how will she live with the shadows […]