Snapshot first published by VODzilla.co “I want Angela!”, declares free-spirited, successful model Madeline (Chantal Contouri) as she strides into the hair salon where the 20-year-old ingenue (played by Sigrid Thornton) works. This scene follows immediately upon the prologue to Simon Wincer’s Snapshot, in which Madeline arrived at a building at night, screaming desperately for Angela, while…
The Vault first published by Sight & Sound, October 2017 Review: The Vault opens with the sound of a distorted male voice reporting a robbery in progress and a hostage situation. The credits then play over a beautifully edited montage of overlapping images: headlines about the Centurion Trust Bank siege, blueprints (2D and 3D) of the…
Tramontane first published by Sight & Sound, October 2017 Review: “Send me an answer… and relieve me. Even if you wish to accuse me, don’t spare me. Send me an answer.” In the opening scene of Tramontane, a 24-year-old musician (Barakat Jabbar) sings this traditional song – whose lyrics are a plea for truth, however painful –…
Pet first published by VODzilla.co Pet opens with a bobbing shot of a tropical island and with the sound of seagulls, only for those squawks to resolve into the persistent beeping of an alarm clock, and for the image to reveal itself as a large wall poster placed over the sleeping – and now waking –…
Blood Feast first published by VODzilla.co “Well, Frank,” says Detective Pete Thornton, in Blood Feast, of their latest, impossible case, “this looks like one of those long hard ones.” “I know what you mean,” replies Pete’s captain (Scott H. Hall), as though registering, with a nod and a wink, the same sexual innuendo as the hepper…
The Void first published by VODzilla.co Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, the writer/director team behind The Void, are also two of the five personnel in Astron-6, a collective of Canadian filmmakers who specialise in closely parodying the very best worst aspects of Eighties genre cinema. You can see their hilarious handiwork in the Father’s Day (2011),…
Pieces first published by Little White Lies, as the 30th instalment in my Cinema Psychotronicum column It is 1942, in Boston. With Father off serving in Europe, Mother – in her pretty blue dress – is horrified to find little Timmy Reston assembling a jigsaw puzzle depicting the image of a nude pin-up girl. “You dirty…
Zombie Lake first published by Little White Lies, as the 29th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column So attractive have zombies proven over the decades – especially since George A. Romero reconceptualised, modernised and politicised them in his pioneering Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) – that they have not…
10 Great Movies Featured at the London Korean Film Festival 2016 first published by Scene360 Now in its eleventh edition, this year’s London Korean Film Festival boasts some 40 features, a smaller number of which toured beyond London to Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham, Glasgow and Belfast. Amid the usual programme of Korea’s latest hits and indie titles, shorts…
Body Melt first published by VODzilla.co After founding and leading the experimental multimedia outfit →↑→ throughout the late Seventies and Eighties, in 1988 Philip Brophy splattered his audiovisual assaults onto celluloid with his short feature Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat, an avant-garde reduction of everyday human experience to the ingestion, issue and exchange of bodily fluids –…
Strange Behavior firs published by VODzilla.co Michael Laughlin had already produced a number of films in the late Sixties and early Seventies – including Monte Hellman’s classic road movie Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) – when he decided to try his own hand at directing. The result was the determinedly odd feature debut Strange Behavior (aka Dead Kids),…