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 […]
Pop Culture
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 […]
The Convenience Store (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
The prolific Jirô Nagae makes his UK debut at Glasgow’s FrightFest with his 38th film, The Convenience Store, hitting productivity numbers that rival peak-era Takashi Miike. Working almost exclusively within horror, it was inevitable that his work would eventually reach the UK’s hungry genre audience. Japanese konbini (the Japanese term […]
The Restoration at Grayson Manor (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
Eighteen years after he brought body-snatcher horror back from the grave with his cult anthology favourite I Sell the Dead (2008), and fourteen years since he updated the summer-camp slasher for the found-footage era with his segment in the original V/H/S (2012), Irish filmmaker Glenn McQuaid has returned to reinvigorate […]
Red Riding (Glasgow Frightfest 2026)
The opening of Red Riding, and indeed the first act, may raise certain expectations in the viewer. The title, as well as an anecdote from a character, suggests that you are in for a particular type of film with various visual cues supporting this expectation, including artwork, a scientific explanation […]