The word ‘host’ can refer equally to anyone accommodating a houseguest, to the organiser of a group webchat, or to a person who has become possessed. All these meanings will come into play in Rob Savage’s Host, in which six friends, bored by the isolation of lockdown and eager for any kind of stimulation, agree…
Like his feature debut The God Inside My Ear (2017), director/producer Joe Badon’s Sister Tempest (which Badon also co-wrote and co-scored with Jason Kruppa) is a delirious psychodrama in which a woman’s trauma-tinged descent into madness and self-knowledge plays out like multiple overlapping movies in different genres. “I, Anne Hutchinson, hereby promise you that I…
“Do you think there’s an alternate person in people’s reflections?” In Lake of Death (De dødes tjern), written and directed by Nini Bull Robsahm (Amnesia, 2014), this is the opening line, delivered by Bjørn (Patrick Walshe McBride) to his twin sister Lillian (Iben Akerlie), as the camera tilts up from their inverted images reflected in…
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Black Water: Abyss comes along. Well, the truth is, no one living in the Northern Territory where David Nerlich and Andrew Traucki’s original Black Water (2007) was set, or in Northern Queensland where Traucki’s belated sort-of sequel unfolds, ever thinks it’s safe…
Black Water first published by EyeforFilm Crocodile Dundee has a lot to answer for. In one sense, Paul Hogan’s breakout film of 1986, coupled with a series of commercials that he did for the Australian Tourist Commission at roughly the same time, helped put Australia on the international map – but by reducing the Australian…
It is night, and Jimmy (Aaron Thomas Ward) is carefully cleaning the car parked in the street (an activity suggestive of his own ‘clean’ status), and watching the estate beyond. If this looks like some kind of stakeout, a cut to the following day, and to a pile of cigarette butts discarded in the road…
Its title may suggest a kiddy monster movie, but writer/director Makoto Nagahisa’s feature debut We Are Little Zombies (Wî â Ritoru Zonbîzu) offers a rather different kind of child-oriented horror, where the ADHD ebullience and wild desultoriness of youthful energy serve, at least in part, to disguise a much deeper existential, explicitly Kafka-esque dread. We…
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (Nightmare Vacation 3) (1989) first published (in a shorter version) by Movie Gazette After running a girl down in a garbage truck (that sure signifier of trash aesthetics), outdoors-loving maniac Angela Baker assumes her identity in order to be admitted as one of the campers at the grounds where her…
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (aka Nightmare Vacation 2) first published by Movie Gazette Warning: contains spoilers about the first Sleepaway Camp film In the cinema of the 1980s, teenagers had one of two predefined rôles. Either they charmed, emoted and, let’s face it, annoyed their way through comedy dramas about love, class and young…
Sleepaway Camp (aka Nightmare Vacation) first published (in a slightly different verion) by Movie Gazette After a father and one of his young children are killed in a freak boating accident, the surviving child is sent to live with kooky Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould). Cut to eight years later, and Angela (Felissa Rose) is growing…
A man walks into a bar… It is the beginning of a gazillion jokes – although in the case of The Oak Room, it is a recurring, deadly serious scenario that stages the crisis of masculinity, the burden of guilt, and the hell that we create for ourselves on earth. The first man to walk…