Fast Charlie begins near its end, as Charlie (Pierce Brosnan) is held at gunpoint in an isolated junkyard, himself unarmed and literally with his pants down. As he reveals in voiceover, this is not quite how he had pictured his final moments to be – but having lived a violent life as a gangland fixer,…
“Are you good?”, teenaged Tony (James Paxton) will be asked by his best friend Forrest (Dillon Lane), in the first of three formally headed sections (‘Chapter 1 Wolf Like Me’, ‘Chapter 2 Casa Dracula’, ‘Chapter 3 Ghouls’ Night Out’) that make up Brad Michael Elmore’s Boogeyman Pop, the follow-up to his striking debut The Wolfman’s…
“Just because somebody leaves us, it doesn’t mean they don’t love us,” Natalie Paxton (Kestie Morassi) tells her nine-year-old daughter Rose (Taysha Farrugia) some way into Surrogate. Nat is consoling Anna for the unexpected death of their beloved dog Indy, but her words might apply equally to Rose’s father, who disappeared from the picture before…
Hanky Panky has its world première at the LA Comedy Film Festival, 2023 The first words heard in Hanky Panky set the tone. “Aw fuck!” says the man racing in panic across a field of snow, as he struggles both to escape and to get a phone signal. Finally connecting with emergency services, he manages…
“What if I told you there was something else here in the house, and it’s not me?” says Sonya (Georgia Eyers) to her visiting mother Laura (Angela Punch McGregor) near the beginning of Violett. This is the perfect set up for a small-town Australian gothic, where in fact it is not always so easy to…
The Shift opens with several things: firstly, a textual quote (“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall depart”) which, like all the quotes that regularly punctuate the film, is excerpted from the Old Testament Book of Job; secondly the image of a man emerging bloody, as though reborn, from the middle…
Fixation had its UK première at Soho Horror Film Festival 2023 In keeping with a psychological preoccupation already implied by its title, Fixation opens both with a vague textual trigger warning, and a primal scene. In the latter, little girl Dora Ann Rollins (Ariella Cannon) dances alone to a song with joyous abandon before a…
The Hyperborean had its international première at Soho Horror Film Festival 2023 “I’m the patriarch of this family, I have a unique perspective on all this, and I’ve got the most to lose,” says ‘whisky magnate’ Hollis Cameron (Tony Burgess) about halfway through The Hyperborean. “In the basement what we have is criminal exposure –…
Derelict was reviewed from an exclusive preview screener prior to its 2024 festival run The opening sequence of Derelict resonates with its title. For it shows empty spaces at dawn: a forlorn field, and by it an old, graffiti-covered building, perhaps once used for stables, but now long abandoned. Its sole occupant is merely a…
“I grew up watching movies like Rambo and listening to pop songs like Tom Jones,” says Hong J. Kim about halfway through A-Town Boyz, “And I thought America is so free. I want my son to live as freely and be tough.” Kim emigrated to America in 1984 when South Korea was still under General…
Walk Up screened at the London Korean Film Festival 2023. This is a transcript of my onstage introduction. Since his debut feature The Day a Pig Fell into the Well came out back in 1996, polyhyphenate filmmaker Hong Sang-soo has become a darling of Korea’s indie scene. It can be hard to keep up with…