Lovely Molly published by Little White Lies When Lovely Molly opens with time-coded home video footage of the distraught heroine of the title (newcomer Gretchen Lodge) declaring to camera, “Whatever happened, it wasn’t me,” and then attempting to slit her own throat, viewers may well catch themselves experiencing the same suicidal impulse. After all, the whole…
First published by TwitchFilm “You have to keep it all in fantasy,” Chanel (Monda Scott) advises new pole/lap dancer Venus (Alexis Kendra). “You just have to be dripping with sex.” Chanel (not her real name) is instructing the novice in how best to fleece male clients of their money, but in fact it is love…
The Witch Who Came From The Sea first published by TheHorrorShow “Who is she?” asks Molly (Millie Perkins) of the female figure on the painting before her. “She’s a witch come out of the sea,” responds Billy Batt (Rick Jason), the ageing movie star who is hosting a party at his groovy Malibu pad, and who…
Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood first published by TheHorrorShow “I don’t understand anything that’s going on around here, Kit. I feel like a fly caught in a spider web.” Vena (Janine Carazo) and her parents have just moved in to a run-down amusement park. There ostensibly to set up a shooting gallery in an entertainment sector improbably…
The Premonition first published by TheHorrorShow “Something’s not adding up. There’s too many weird things going on. Like your wife bringing you to the lake. And this music. There’s a hidden key to this, buried underneath. I want to be there when it’s found.” The speaker is Detective Lieutenant Mark Driver (Jeff Corey), investigating the case…
The Other Side of the Door first published by Sight & Sound Review: In The Other Side of the Door, Maria Harwood (Sarah Wayne Callies), suicidal with grief and guilt at the drowning of her young son Oliver (Logan Creron) in a car accident, takes the desperate measure – following advice from her housekeeper Piki (Suchitra…
Anguish first published by TwitchFilm A mother Sarah (Karina Logue) and her teenaged daughter Lucy (Amberley Gridley) are out driving. “It’s not fair!” complains Lucy, upset about the boundaries being imposed on her adolescent conduct – which leads Sarah to cite the traditional saying amongst the womenfolk in her family: “If your aunt had a moustache,…
First published by EyeforFilm In Fateless (Sorstalansag), Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz adapts his 1975 debut novel, which was based on his teenage experiences as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. It is certainly a harrowing film, but not so much for the dehumanising brutality that it depicts as for the uncompromisingly rounded perspective…
First published by EyeforFilm “Oh, the times, they are a-changin’”, goes Bob Dylan’s lyric over the opening credits of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, and it turns out to be true in more ways than one. Not only is the sequence a dazzlingly economic photomontage of the emergence and eventual dissolution of comicbook-inspired masked vigilantes ‘the Minutemen’…
First published by EyeforFilm Remember the scenes of mass destruction in and around Metropolis with which Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013) ended? Well, it turns out that Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) was in the thick of it, watching from the ground up as the city fell about him from the sky down. From his…
First published by EyeforFilm Filmmakers love to look back to the movies that were the bread and butter of their formative years, helping make them who they are today – and so inevitably, much as the spirit of the Seventies (along with that period’s electoral scandal, oil crises, Middle eastern terrorism, protracted wars broad) returned…