All killer, almost no filler: FrightFest Halloween All-Dayer 2018 first published by Sight & Sound Includes capsules of: Reborn, Parallel, Mara, Peripheral, The Unthinkable, Abrakadabra Now an all-dayer rather than an all-nighter, taking place three days after the actual Halloween (or almost a year before the next one), and situated for the first time in the…
The Laplace’s Demon first published by SciFiNow The Laplace’s Demon begins in a manner not unlike the Creation of the Universe according to Gnosticism and the Lurianic Kabbalah: with a breaking of the vessels. A group of seven scientists are developing a computer programme to predict precisely how many shards will be created when a drinking…
White Chamber first published by SciFiNow Strap: Paul Raschid accommodates war’s horrific paradoxes in a plain white room. “The United Kingdom, Soon”, reads the text that opens White Chamber – and already the film’s ironies and contradictions are setting in. For in this near future, the Kingdom is the opposite of United. Civil war divides the…
CTRL fist published by SciFiNow At the beginning of CTRL, Christian Lex (Saabeah Theos) and her boyfriend Dru (Hainsley Lloyd Bennett) are heading to the luxurious fifth-storey apartment of Lex’s brother Leo (Julian Mack), a reclusive computer geek with a strong streak of misanthropy, to celebrate his birthday. As the couple ascends, floor by floor, we…
Political panic: the timeliest terrors at FrightFest 2018 first published by Sight & Sound Includes capsules of: The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, CTRL, Rock Steady Row, White Chamber, The Cleaning Lady, Braid, Tigers Are Not Afraid, The Witch In The Window As the genre which most…
We Go On first published by VODzilla.co Miles Grissom (Clark Freeman) is a man full of fear. He is afraid of heights, of crowds, of rot and, above all, of cars. When we first meet him in the opening scene, he is behind the wheel of an accelerating vehicle with failing brakes, and unable to…
Cannibal Ferox first published by Little White Lies, as the 63rd entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Once upon a time, in the Seventies and Eighties, there was a boom in cannibal films. These were mostly cheap Italian productions, although they sometimes boasted international casts, and were often shot in Asia or South America. Born…
Doom Asylum first published by Little White Lies, as the 62nd entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Picture the scene: it’s 1987, and the slasher – the subgenre that dominated the horror landscape for the first half of the Eighties – has also been steadily killing itself off, one film after another, until there are…
Deathdream first published by VODzilla.co “Why is he so different? He won’t talk with us. He won’t eat with us. He sits out in the yard all day long, or up in his room. Why won’t he at least let us tell anyone that he’s home?” This is what Charles Brooks (John Marley) wonders about…
La Grande Bouffe first published by VODzilla.co Written in 1785, but not published until 1904, the Marquis de Sade’s notorious novel The 120 Days of Sodom became an instant cause célèbre for its sometimes moralising, sometimes glorifying depiction of four well-to-do middle-aged gentlemen enacting a four-month orgy of lust, perversion and murder upon an ensemble…
The First Purge first published by Little White Lies “Is it the end or the beginning?” The world has changed. It is not just that James DeMonaco is no longer at the helm of the Purge series (although he is still writing it), but also that when his The Purge (2013), The Purge: Anarchy (2014)…