Bowels of Hell (Privadas de suas vidas) had its world première at IFFR 2026, 4 Feb In the opening scene of Bowels of Hell (Privadas de suas vidas), Maria Luiza (Martha Nowill) – known to everyone as Malu – sits in medium shot, staring head-on into the camera, and waits. In this moment it is…
Jimmy and Stiggs had its UK première at FrightFest 2025, Saturday 23 August Anyone who has seen Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) will instantly recognise the opening of Joe Begos’ latest feature Jimmy and Stiggs. For it begins with a POV shot (complete with mannered blinks) from someone smoking a joint on the balcony…
The Noisy Mansion screened at the London Korean Film Festival, 10th Nov, 2024. This is a different, longer version of the text from my live introduction. Every apartment block is a microcosm of society at large: there are upper, middle and lower levels; residents don’t always like, or even know, each other; petty disputes between…
Evil Dead Rise first published (in a slightly different version) by Sight and Sound, 18 April 2023 Review: From the initial twisting POV shot that races along a creek through woods to a lake, and across its surface right up to Teresa (Mirabai Pease) on the pier, we are clearly in Evil Dead land. This,…
You wait years for a spider movie, and several scuttle along. Recently we have seen spiders attack the (apartment) block in Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested (Vermines, 2023) and an outsized arachnid on a spaceship in Johan Renck’s Spaceman (2024) – and now Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting combines the two, as an asteroid-borne Alien egg shoots through a…
Hemet is a real place – a smallish city whose location in the San Jacinto Valley is shown on a map at the beginning of Hemet, Or The Landlady Don’t Drink Tea. Yet in Tony Olmos’ mannered feature, Hemet is also a dystopia and an allegorical space, where the horrifying divisions of today’s America are…
Late at night in the backstreets of Tokyo, a woman (Hanaka Mizuki) arrives with a wheeled suitcase at a dingy, ‘creepy’ rental apartment, where, terrified, she is attacked in the dark by a fleshy, half-glimpsed creature. This is the bakemono, or ‘monster’, of the film’s title, explained in text as a composite of bake, ‘changing’…
Knocking first published by VODzilla.co “There is knocking. I hear knocking sounds in my ceiling. Someone needs help. I think someone needs our help.” Molly Aronsson (Cecilia Milocco) is speaking to Per (Albin Grenholm), who lives one floor up from the apartment into which she has recently moved. Per is not the first or the…
Final Days (Alone) first published by VODzilla.co With zombie films, it is often the little differences that count. The fact that Johnny Martin’s Final Days (aka Alone, aka Pandemic) concerns a young man having to survive alone a global pandemic that reduces its victims to flesh-eaters might recall Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007), loosely…
Barking Dogs Never Bite (Flandersui gae) first published by Little White Lies “What a nice day!,” says Ko Yoon-ju (Lee Sung-jae), looking out his apartment window at the beginning of Barking Dogs Never Bite. “I’d like to go hiking and take a nap on the mountain.” A lazy, broke humanities grad overlooked for tenure, and…
The Night Eats The World first published by SciFiNow Everything you need to know about Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie) is carefully laid out in the prologue to The Night Eats The World (La nuit a dévoré le monde) – the feature debut of director Dominique Rocher which he co-wrote with Jérémie Guez, and Guilaume Lemans. Returning…