Cursed first published by Movie Gazette, 20 April 2005 On LA’s Mulholland Drive on the night of the full moon, Ellie (Christina Ricci) and her younger brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) collide with another car when they swerve to avoid an animal. The siblings are scratched, and the other driver (Shannon Elizabeth) is torn apart, by…
Glorious has its world première at Fantasia 2022, and is coming to Shudder later this year Rebekah McKendry’s Glorious begins with its protagonist Wes (Ryan Kwanten) in a dark place. It is not just that he has had a bad breakup with his girlfriend Brenda (Sylvia Grace Crim), but also that we first see him,…
Dark Nature has its world première at Fantasia 2022 “There’s no coming to consciousness without pain and discomfort,” Dr Carol Dunnley (Kyra Harper) tells Joy (Hannah Anderson) some way into Dark Nature, as she leads Joy and three other damaged women on a therapeutic weekend trek through Little Deer Lake in the Canadian Rockies. “People…
All Jacked Up and Full of Worms has its world première at Fantasia 2022 Sometimes a film comes with a title that seems mystifying, but turns out to be disarmingly literal. Writer/director Alex Phillips’ feature debut All Jacked Up and Full of Worms might appear enigmatic from the outset, until you realise that it is…
The Summoned has two openings: a prologue in which a male figure is impressionistically shown out of focus burying a human body in a makeshift graveyard alongside other, similarly rough-hewn graves; and a summoning. The latter comes in the form of an official letter from Dr Justus Frost (Frederick Stuart) inviting Joplyn ‘Lyn’ Rose (Emma…
Arrow Video FrightFest 2022 announces its programme of features for August Clowns in control making all our lives a hellish circus. A deadly pandemic which, no matter how many times it seems to have been put down, keeps popping back up to kill again. A disastrous climate meltdown playing out before our very eyes. The…
Rituals and cycles of grief: 10 picks from FrightFest 2021 first published as a preview piece for BFI Includes capsules of: Post Mortem, Slapface, Offseason, Nocturna: Side A – The Great Old Man’s Night, Hotel Poseidon, Dawn Breaks Behind The Eyes, The Unburied, Coming Home In The Dark, Ultrasound, Broadcast Signal Intrusion Grief is an…
30 Days Of Night first published by EyeforFilm Since their very first on-screen appearance, cinematic vampires have proven surprisingly flexible when it comes to their own prescribed conventions. Count Orlok in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) may have been drawn directly from the pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but in FW Murnau’s film neither garlic nor…
Back for its silver anniversary, the Fantasia International Film Festival will once again be bringing its eclectic mix of genre and Asian cinemas to Montréal. This year’s event will include new titles from filmmakers as wonderful – and wonderfully varied – as Andy Mitton (The Harbinger), July Jung (Next Sohee), Mickey Reece (Country Gold), Takashi…
Gasoline Alley opens in a Los Angeles bar, where Jimmy Jayne (an excellent, lived-in turn from Devon Sawa), drinking alone in the wee hours, is approached by a pretty woman, Star (Irina Antonenko). “I just sensed you were a man running from shadows,” she says to him, as though he were a grizzled noir antihero…
By Night’s End opens with an external wide shot of a suburban, single-storey home at night. A ‘For Sale’ sign in the yard is briefly illuminated in red and blue by a passing patrol car, and then a man approaches from the foreground and enters the house. Shortly afterwards we see him again, half-jogging half-limping…