Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Two young English girls, Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) have gone on a biking holiday to France, and not the parts of France you’d normally holiday, this is the back end of beyond with nothing for miles but fields and […]
Reviews
Fright (1971): Suburban 1970s Horror, British Style (Review)
Every Bank Holiday, every Christmas break, you’ll be painfully aware of Peter Collinson’s most successful film as a director – the Italian Job. Like William Girdler (Grizzly, The Manitou), he died way too young and left behind a fascinating body of work far more compelling than that which he is […]
Angel Heart: Dark Intrigue and Sinister Seduction (Review)
It’s a lonely place for someone like me over on Letterboxd just now. Whilst the bulk of the community celebrate the Halloween season with the Hooptober Horror Film Challenge I, never much of a joiner-inner, continue to watch whatever takes my fancy. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good […]
Suspiria (2018): the horror remake as high art (Review)
Horror remakes have been a hot topic for what feels like forever. Personally, nothing will reach the nadir of remakes whose sole purpose is so people don’t have to read subtitles. That happened on a near-monthly basis in the J-Horror cycle. Another wing of horror remakes is revisiting classics, there […]
Rabid (2019): mutating to its heart’s content (Review)
While writing his 1977 film Rabid, David Cronenberg had a crisis of confidence. In Chris Rodley’s book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, he remembers saying to his producer John Dunning: “…I just woke up this morning and realised this is ridiculous. Do you know what this movie’s about? This woman grows a […]
Werewolf (2019): Grimmer than the average WWII holocaust drama (Review)
Unlike what the title implies, Adrian Panek’s Werewolf (Wilkolak) isn’t a supernatural horror movie. It’s a cross between a World War Two Holocaust drama by way of Cujo or White Dog. I think what Panek is trying to emphasise with the title that pure evil doesn’t come from something alien, […]
Journey to the Beginning of Time: an astonishing arsenal of animator’s tricks (Review)
This is the fourth time Second Run have put out a film by the Czech director and animator Karel Zeman, and just like the others – A Jester’s Tale, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen and Invention for Destruction – this one makes me wish I’d seen it as a child. It’s […]
Shock Corridor: Sam Fuller at his goofiest and most biting (Review)
Samuel Fuller is a curious character, he constantly straddled the divide between being a director who peddled films with something to say and films that skew more towards the B-Movie space. He had one foot in each world, often at the same time. White Dog is about institutional racism whilst […]
Freaks (2019): a sci-fantasy allegory of two different wholes (Review)
Whether you have been before or not, a highlight for the UK genre fans is Frightfest – “the Woodstock of gore“, a certain Mexican Oscar-winner has described it as. It does have a reputation as being a film festival of nothing more than 5 days of back to back horror, […]
High Noon: A Story That Still Happens Everywhere, Every Day (Review)
Released for the first time on Blu-ray in the UK this week via the Eureka label, 1952’s High Noon is, as the tagline has it, ‘The story of a man who was too proud to run’. That man is Will Kane, the marshal of Hadleyville, a small town in New […]