Horror is an incredibly cyclical beast; the current cycle is a mix between the perpetual zombie and haunted house films. One of the more pre-eminent historical cycles is the bad seed, or to give it a more common name – scary kids. The 1960s and 70s saw the zenith with […]
Reviews
Shanghai 13 (1984): Lesser late-era from the master filmmaker, Chang Cheh (Review)
For UK home video aficionado’s two labels exemplified martial arts and Asian cinema, Tartan and Hong Kong Legends, both of whom now cease to be. Third Window and a band of small independents have taken some of the slack for Tartan’s demise, but for martial arts cinema, the only outlet […]
Kinetta (2005) Yorgos Lanthimos before he started weirding the world out (Review)
Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have the feel – though not the visual style – of watching CCTV footage of a rowdy Saturday night. You are always aware that terrible violence could erupt at any moment, but you don’t know when, and it’s all you can do to watch in a state […]
Greatful Dead (2013): Twisted Amelie turned Gallows Battle Royale (Review)
Emotional neglect is a significant problem in Asia, proven how suicide has inflated to epidemic levels on more than one occasion. With cinema reflecting the world we live it, emotional neglect, isolation and despair have gone on to become prevalent subtexts and thematic discourse within much of Asian cinema. So […]
I’m All Right Jack (1959): The cinema beginnings of a comedy titan (Review)
2014’s box office saw the Lego Movie gain the most money, jumping back, with Studio Canal’s latest release, to 1959 and it shows just how much the cinema landscape has changed. The biggest hit of 1959 in I’m all right Jack has concerns that are just as prevalent today as […]
Little Lost Robot (Out of this World)
Before production started on Doctor Who in 1963, the BBC commissioned an internal document assessing the difficulties of producing a science-fiction series. In particular, they were concerned that female viewers would be uninterested in such a show. Perhaps one reason why the show’s creator Sydney Newman pressed on was that […]
The Promised Land (1974): Fierce Polish Classic about as Anti-Capitalist as they come (Review)
Andrzej Wajda’s The Promised Land, based on the 1898 novel by Władysław Reymont, takes place at the peak of the industrial revolution and proceeds to vilify the crude beginnings of capitalism. Introduced into this fierce satire are three young friends, a Pole, a Jew and a German who pool their […]
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961): perfectly pitched 1960s British apocalypse movie (Review)
Given the recent unseasonably warm spell and the continuing discourse on global Warming, Val Guest’s 1961 sci-fi drama The Day the Earth caught fire takes on an eerily prescient quality. First Guest and Wolf Mankowitz’s London suffers an unseasonably warm spell, then cripplingly thick heat fog which segued its way […]
Blacula (1972) Dracula as the complete article of Black Horror (Review)
Blaxploitation habitually made itself a wide-open target for parody and mockery, take the newly released Blacula directed by William Crain, it sounds like a joke rather than something conceived from a creative mind with a status quo to challenge. Even the trailer made at the time of release called Blacula, […]
Youth of the Beast (1963): Seijun Suzuki for the masses (Review)
Yojimbo has got an awful lot of mileage on the clock what with it being remade and reinterpreted the world over. Whether that’s with Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars or the closer to home output with Japanese New Wave Wunderkind Seijun Suzuki and Youth of the Beast. The latter […]