Last year’s Glasgow Film Festival has the peculiar honour, conferred entirely by the vagaries of timing, to have been the last large-scale British festival to take place before the Covid-19 took hold of the nation. One year on, the UK is still – or at least once again – in lockdown, and for the first…
The Glasgow Film Festival has always opened its doors to genre, but traditionally for its final Thursday evening, Friday and Saturday it invites the FrightFest crew to take over the Glasgow Film Theatre’s biggest screen, which is then flooded with wall-to-wall blood, mayhem and depravity. This year, for obvious reasons, things will be different. Travel…
Hunted begins with a campfire story. A mother, credited as ‘the huntress’ (Simone Milsoochter), tells her eight-year-old son Jeremy (Vladimir Ryelandt) of a time long ago when, in this very wood, giant wolves saved an innocent girl from being sacrificed and eaten by the priest Nicodemus and his starving army of peasant crusaders. This story’s…
Immortal (aka Immortel (ad Vitam)) first published by Film4 Summary: Enki Bilal brings the mannered universe of his own comic books to life, in a hybrid mix of real and virtual action. Review: New York, 2095. On the eve of an election, a giant stone pyramid has appeared, hovering over the cityscape, while Central Park has transformed…
Casshern first published by Movie Gazette In 1973, Tatsunoko Productions created an animated series for Japanese television called Shinzo Ningen Casshan, about a heroic superfighter named Casshan who defended the human race against wicked androids accidentally unleashed by his father’s experiments. It was pretty much your standard good-versus-evil anime, daft enough to find room even…
Butt Boy first published by SciFiNow As tech company manager Rick Sanders (Austin Lewis) leads his staff in a peppy motivational session at the beginning of Butt Boy, the camera circles to one man who stands out from his co-workers, a craggy island of disconsolate ennui floating in a sea of happy-clappy mirth. Played by…
Zombie For Sale (aka The Odd Family: Zombie On Sale, aka Gimyohan Gajok) (2019) first published by SciFiNow Back when the Korean New Wave was cresting, part of what made directors like Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, 2003), Kim Ji-woon (A Tale of Two Sisters, 2003), Jang Joon-hwan (Save The Green Planet!, 2003) and Bong Joon-ho (The…
Anderson Falls (aka Darkness Falls) first published by SciFiNow Strap: Julien Seri’s serial-killer thriller pits one father against another in a cat-and-mouse chase through toxic masculinity’s legacy. ‘Anderson Falls’ is the name of a wide cascade to be found in Bartholomew County, Indiana – but that is a long way from the urban LA setting…
VFW first published by SciFiNow Strap: Joe Begos pits old army vets against young drugged-up punks in this ultraviolent, postmodern, retrofuturist siege actioner. Every night, a group of ageing American ex-army men from the Vietnam – and in one case the Korean – War gathers at dingy VFW Post 2494, run by their fellow soldier…
In The Quarry (En el pozo) first published by SciFiNow In The Quarry (En el pozo) opens with nature: wide shots in montage of a lake, the moon in the daytime sky, rocky cliffs, a turtle near the shore. These are all desolate, arid spaces, devoid of human life. Yet the lake is in fact…
The Invisible Man first published by Dirty Movies Conventional stalk-and-slash thrillers make an ally of the darkness. After all, it is in the shadows that monsters hide, and that the imagination, starved of visual stimulus, fills the empty spaces with its own panicky projections. Written and directed by Leigh Whannell (Insidious: Chapter 3, 2013; Upgrade,…