One of the first things I do when a film festival drops its programme is scan the catalogue for the titles that leap off the page, which is almost like picking goofy horse names for the Grand National – sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. For Missouri’s Panic Fest, […]
Pop Culture
Doctor Who A-Z #112: State of Decay (1980)
The fact that Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes’s version of Doctor Who was curtailed by force rather than run into the ground means it never had to go through the usual cycle of backlash and reassessment. Rather than fans getting sick of it, it was snatched away from us, meaning […]
Doctor Who A-Z #111: Full Circle (1980)
The Season 18 title sequence might just be Doctor Who’s weirdest. Not because it’s scary or experimental or anything like that – it’s just the culture shock of seeing something that’s so incredibly ’80s with Tom Baker’s face stuck in the middle of it. Despite my personal aversion to New […]
Doctor Who A-Z #110: Meglos (1980)
The first line of dialogue we hear on the planet Tigella is “It’s going to blow!”, and most fans begin watching Meglos thinking the exact same thing. It’s nobody’s favourite Season Eighteen story, and incoming script editor Christopher H Bidmead has always been upfront that he commissioned it in a hurry and […]
Doctor Who A-Z #109: The Leisure Hive (1980)
The tonal and stylistic gap between The Horns of Nimon and The Leisure Hive is enormous, and in fairness these stories were never meant to air one after the other. Season Seventeen was famously supposed to end with Shada, a six-part Douglas Adams story that was cancelled, half-recorded, after strikes […]
Outside the Blue Box: Dream Demon (1988)
My original plans to cover Dream Demon (1988) for “Outside the Blue Box” were made in the hope that it would coincide nicely with The War Between the Land and the Sea, which – at the time – was the only piece of Whoniverse media with a confirmed release date […]
The Plan (Slamdance Film Festival 2026)
Sometimes, friends are exactly what you don’t need. For every smidgeon of love and support, there’s a wave of loyalty and peer pressure that comes with it, taking a bad thought and turning it into a frightening reality. A very 2020s version of that precise tension is found in Jessica […]
Experimental Shorts (Slamdance 2026)
An annual series of notes from underground, the Slamdance Film Festival’s experimental shorts strand is a reliably good weathervane of where the cutting edge of cinema is. Perhaps none of the directors assembled here will be the future of cinema in the sense of winning Oscars, being hired by Disney, […]
Violence (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
Movie titles have long fascinated me as beyond the first-impression factor, they’re the most immediate point of marketing, and a good title hints at what’s to come. One of the films playing at this year’s Glasgow FrightFest is Connor Marsden’s Violence, and at first glance the name suggests slasher one-upmanship […]
BRB (Slamdance 2026)
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. When Bob Clark made A Christmas Story, he could afford to hinge whole subplots on the Little Orphan Annie radio show or leg-shaped novelty table lamps, safe in the knowledge that these items of retro kitsch had no further market value. Nobody was […]