Broken Bird (Frightfest 2024) Review

Sybil works at an undertakers. It’s a lonely job, with few perks. So she takes solace where she can. People pity the dead, but the dead are laughing in their sleep. Sybil (Rebecca Calder – House of the Dragon, Kandahar), charms her way through life, rarely straying from the societally […]

Members Club (Frightfest 2024) Review

Rob Simpson

Genre Film Festivals are a wide parish, and some movies appear at certain events to play the field – either to find the highest bidder to launch something onto the unsuspecting masses, or they’ve already got distribution and want to build up hype before their eventual release. Other titles aren’t […]

Derelict (Frightfest 2024) Review

Vincent Gaine

Derelict is a curious combination of gritty social realism and arthouse stylistics, the former coming from the locations, characters and narrative. Set, and largely filmed, in the English Midlands (but including Hereford, Manchester and London), we’re introduced (via the title card), to Abigail (Suzanne Fulton), who lives in a small […]

Azrael: Angel of Death (Frightfest 2024) Review

Simon Ramshaw

Silence is golden in horror right now. From the whole concept of A Quiet Place to a sequence in Alien: Romulus that thrives on sound levels rising no higher than a heartbeat, films are throwing themselves down a gauntlet in keeping their characters schtum to milk tension. E. L. Katz’s post-Rapture survival horror Azrael: Angel […]

Generation Terror (Frightfest 2024) Review

Rob Simpson

Horror is the subject of much scrutiny and, ironically, most of that comes from horror fans themselves, for as the adage goes, “No one hates wrestling more than wrestling fans”. A key aspect of this scrutiny involves breaking horror into decades, and enough sub-genres to make metal music green with […]

7 Keys (Frightfest 2024) Review

Lena doesn’t want to go home. She wants to run away from the troubles of her real life and recapture all the fun she’s missed out on. Using Daniel’s keys, the pair go on the ultimate tour of London – a wild weekend of getting to know each other intimately […]

Mermaid Legend (1984)(Frightfest 2024) Review

Ben Jones

Come the late ’60s the Japanese film industry was floundering, hurt by the rise in popularity of television and the constant influx of Hollywood movies to satisfy an ever present American contingent. Japanese films seemed tired and out of ideas, so budgets were cut and the rise of exploitation cinema […]