Funky Forest: The First Contact first published by Little White Lies, as entry 149 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Funky Forest: The First Contact (Naisu no Mori THE FIRST CONTACT) opens with the image of a cute-looking UFO. White, with two blue portholes that look like eyes, it is perched on the barren surface of…
Shapeless first published by Movies On Weekends Shapeless opens in the bathroom of a run-down New Orleans apartment, and will return there repeatedly. This is the most private space of Ivy – the place where her naked body is exposed, at least to her own unforgiving eyes, and also evacuated. Played by Kelly Murtagh (who…
Little Alexia (Adèle Guige) is in the back seat of a moving car, making vroom vroom engine sounds as though she were one with the vehicle. To counter this noise, her father (Bertrand Bonello) keeps turning up the music on the radio – so Alexia, still wanting her father’s attention, starts rhythmically kicking the back…
Laguna Ave has its world première at FrightFest 2021 In the opening scene of David Buchanan’s Laguna Ave., a man in a balaclava sneaks into a building at night, and steals a hard drive and a mug with the name Russell on it from one of the offices inside, before very carefully and deliberately taking…
Blue My Mind first published by SciFiNow It opens with a little red-haired girl on a rocky beach looking out to sea. Later we see that same girl Mia (Luna Wedler), now a teenager, in the new apartment (still visibly under construction) where she has just moved with her parents. And we see her frequently on…
Tokyo Ghoul first published by Sight & Sound, March 2018 Review: Though hardly a household name in the West, the Tokyo Ghoul mythos is ‘big in Japan’: first a success as Sui Ishida’s serial manga (from 2011), next as Shuhei Morita’s animated television series, and then as prequels and sequels in both those media, as well…
Replace first published by SciFiNow Young Kira Mabon (Rebecca Forsythe) and Jonas Swierczynski (Sean Knopp) are on their fifth date, and Kira has decided to spend the night with him. On their way to Jonas’ apartment for the first time together, with their whole future ahead of them, they banter about the different ways that ageing men…
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 –…
May first published by VODzilla.co “What’s wrong with my eye, mama?”, asks young May (Chandler Riley Hecht) in the opening line of the film that shares her name. “Doctor says it’s lazy eye,” replies her mother (Merle Kennedy), “but we’re going to make you look perfect.” Any quest for perfection is both quixotic, and filled with…
Art has always loved to explore the proximity of love and death; and horror – the genre most closely associated with death – has often taken a positively hyper-erotic approach to its preoccupation with our innate impermanence. More specifically, sexually transmitted horror can be traced back at least as far as David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975),…
First published by EyeforFilm Evidently 2008 was a good year for disembodied monster penises in horror. Cult director Frank Henenlotter set the ball(s) rolling with Bad Biology, a transgressive midnight movie featuring, amongst other entertaining abominations, a man whose steroid-injected shlong takes on a life of its own. Similarly Adam Fields’ One-Eyed Monster sees the enormous…