If you have come to Projected Figures expecting accountancy, you are in the right place. Accountancy is what film writers do: counting minutes, counting words, reducing all cinema’s abstract expressions to calibrations, evaluations and calculated formulae on a simplified, and simplifying, worksheet. Critics, you see, operate a kind of reverse-alchemy, transforming vibrant sights and sounds into bland verbiage and, if you’re…
Kindred Spirits has its world première on Sunday 16 June at Cinepocalypse 2019 The filmmaking careers of both Lucky McKee (May, 2002; The Woman, 2011) and Chris Sivertson (The Lost, 2006; I Know Who Killed Me, 2007) both began in 2001 when they co-directed and co-wrote the shot-on-video All Cheerleaders Die – which they remade…
All Cheerleaders Die first published by Grolsch FilmWorks Before Chris Sivertson and Lucky McKee became, separately, the best big-screen adaptors of Jack Ketchum’s writings – the former with The Lost (2006), the latter with Red (2008) and The Woman (2011) – the two writer/directors debuted together with a little-seen, shot-on-video feature All Cheerleaders Die (2001),…
People On Sunday (Menschen Am Sonntag) first published by Movie Gazette Despite its title, People On Sunday actually begins on the day before. When taxi driver Erwin Splettstößer arrives home from work on Saturday evening, his partner, the languid model Annie Schreyer, wants to go to the cinema to see the latest Greta Garbo picture,…
Dead Ant (aka Giant Killer Ants) first published by SciFiNow This fourth feature from Ron Carlson (All American Christmas Carol, 2013; Tom Cool, 2009; Midgets Vs. Mascots, 2009) opens with a before-and-after sequence: a young woman buys peyote from Native American Bigfoot (Michael Horse) and his diminutive sidekick Firecracker (Danny Woodburn), with a warning of…
The Terror Of Hallow’s Eve first published by SciFiNow “Does this make you feel tough? Does this make you want to be a big bad monster?” It is Halloween, 1981, and 15-year-old “mamma’s boy” Tim (Caleb Thomas) has just been caught with a horror magazine by local bullies Brian (JT Neal), Spaz (Mcabe Gregg) and…
Ravers first published by SciFiNow Becky (Georgia Hirst) is a journalist dying to get a big scoop, but hampered by her crippling aversion to, quite literally, getting her hands dirty. A clean freak whose obsession with wet wipes and liquid cleansers has already driven her girlfriend Charlotte (Eve Connolly) away, Becky takes an uncharacteristic decision…
Hammer Horror: The Warner Bros Years first publshed by SciFiNow Founded in 1934 and responsible for films in many genres, Hammer Film Productions is best known for its horror output, starting with the adapted-from-television SF of The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and then overarched by a run of titles, rooted in Victorian Gothic, that often star…
A Bluebird in My Heart first published by SciFiNow The feature debut of writer/director Jérémie Guez (who also co-wrote Dominique Rocher’s The Night Eats The World, 2018), A Bluebird In My Heart (Tu ne tueras point) is adapted from ex-con Dannie M. Martin’s hard-boiled novel The Dishwasher (1995). Its English title, however, is a refrain…
Killing God (Matar a Dios) first published by SciFiNow “It’s me or the omelette,” says middle-aged Carlos (Eduardo Antuña), about twenty minutes into Caye Casas and Alberto Pintó’s Killing God (Matar a Dios). Carlos’ wife Ana (Itziar Castro) is insisting that his father Eduardo (Francesc Orella) eat the last slice of Spanish omelette that she…
Crystal Eyes (Mirada de cristal) first published by SciFiNow There was a time when giallo was the height of fashion. In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, Italian thrillers were the very model of genre chic, bringing a splash of style, panache and colour to the Hitchcockian whodunnit, and showing the aesthetic angle – the ‘good side’…
Waterworld first published by Little White Lies, as the 73rd part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column After an altered version of the Universal ident shows the world’s continents receding slowly into the blue mass of the oceans, Waterworld launches us into a future where the polar icecaps have melted and the landmasses have been submerged….