The Breach first published by SciFiNow The Breach begins where Sean S. Cunningham‘s Friday the 13th (1980) ends, with a canoe free-floating in the water – which is to say that as the vessel drifts downstream, the film is both advertising and literalising its own derivativeness. Yet the canoe is not conveying a traumatised final…
Pensive (Rupintojelis)had its UK première at the Glasgow FrightFest 2023. Pensive (aka We Might Hurt Each Other, aka Rupinotjelis) derives its title for the ‘Pensive Christ’, a stereotypical depiction taken from the iconography of sculpture. This shows Jesus with his body scourged and suffering, and his head usually in one or two of his upraised…
Nightsiren (Svetlonoc) has its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival 2023 “Even in modern Europe, in certain lonely villages, folklore and medieval superstitions are still considered a way of life,” reads text at the beginning of Nightsiren (Svetlonoc). The film opens with a primal scene: faced with the hair-pulling wrath of her abusive mother Alžbeta…
Monsters Club first published by Little White Lies, as entry 138 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column By the time Monsters Club came out, writer/director Toshiaki Toyoda and the actor Eita had history. After all, Eita made his big-screen debut in Toyoda’s Blue Spring (2001), and then had also starred in his 9 Souls (2003) and…
Old Man opens with a large painted image, as if from an illustrated children’s book. After showing a shadowy figure walking a forest path, the camera slowly tilts to take in, further up the mountain, a cottage with a smoking chimney. That cottage will turn out to be the film’s key location, its lived-in interior…
Nomi (Angela Way) has some dark feelings, even if she may be concealing them on her holiday in an isolated family property with friends. She still feels devastatingly sad about her mum and dad’s recent divorce, feels guilty that she is spending Christmas away from them, and feels bitter that she has had to pick…
The Ranger first published by SciFiNow ‘First-time feature director’ can be a loaded term. It often implies inexperience – yet Jenn Wexler has not only written, directed and produced two short films (Slumber Party, 2012 and Halloween Bash, 2013), but also produced several stylistically and thematically arresting indie titles by other directors, like Mickey Keating’s Darling…
For the love of cheap thrills: gonzo auteurism and The Evil Dead first published by Little White Lies Although he had been making amateur Super-8 films for years with childhood friend Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi had only just turned 20 when he started shooting his feature debut The Evil Dead in late 1979, and was, in…
Resolution first published by Little White Lies, as the 60th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Resolution comes with the strong sense of an ending. In fact, this is true right from its title, which points towards the notion of narrative complications resolved with a satisfactory dénouement – even as it simultaneously alludes, through a play on words, to the relative clarity of mediated images. In fact the film opens…
Arrow Video FrightFest 2018: Dead Night (2017) Most of the action of Brad Baruh’s Dead Night takes place over one long dark night on the 21st March, 2015 – Spring Break, technically, but still snowy in the Oregon hinterlands. Yet the film opens in the same place on 12 June, 1961, as a couple canoodling…
Wither (Vittra) first published by Grolsch FilmWorks A cabin in the woods. A toolshed. A cellar complete with trapdoor. Supernaturally suppurating co-eds requiring dismemberment. And a final boy (Patrik Almkvist) forced to confront his loved one (Lisa Henni) in the most horrific of circumstances. Yep, ‘wither’ must be Swedish for ‘the evil dead’, as this Nordic…