Mum & Dad first published by Film4 Summary: Steven Sheil’s feature debut is a Heathrow-set riff on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, bringing some peculiarly English cuts to the butcher’s table. Review: “I grew up in the shadow of Heathrow airport,” writer/director Steven Sheil tells the audience of Film4 FrightFest 2008 by way of an introduction to…
Some Like It Rare (Barbaque) had its UK première at the Glasgow FrightFest 2022. Review first published by VODzilla.co Fabrice Eboué’s Some Like It Rare (originally called Barbaque) opens with meat – or more specifically a prime, marbled fillet of beef being lovingly sliced, hand-massaged and packaged by butcher Vincent Pascal (played by Eboué) while…
Honeydew first published by VODzilla.co Honeydew opens with a wheat field. “Honour God with your bodies,” a red-haired girl then says indoors, as she reads into a tape recorder from Corinthians 6 about the coming end days, and simultaneously devours a breakfast of meat, eggs and sauce before her. In the background, a loaf of…
Two Heads Creek first published by VODzilla.co “Horror movie right there on my TV”, run the lyrics to Australian rock band Skyhooks’ 1975 hit Horror Movie, heard three times (including a wildly choreographed karaoke version) over the course of Two Heads Creek. The truth is, much of the horror in Jesse O’Brien’s feature really is…
The Host first published by VODzilla.co “This is a very unusual and very disturbing case.” So says the perplexed psychiatrist (Derek Jacobi), pouring himself a stiff drink before returning to his desk to face an unseen patient. “You seem to have been having dreams. Anxiety dreams…. Please tell me everything, from the beginning.” Indeed, amid…
Writer/director/producer Drew Hale’s feature debut Cut and Chop opens with Tom (played by Hale) sitting on the sofa reading Robert Lewis’ Method – or Madness? (1958), his girlfriend Esmerelda (Kari Alison Hodge) lying asleep beside him with her legs stretched over his lap. The title of this book, collecting Lewis’ famous series of lectures on…
Luciana Garraza and Eric Fleitas’ Scavenger opens with the scene that will come to define most of its characters. A family’s staticky home video shows little Laura (Laura Villafañe) and her older sister (Moira Lis Segura) playing together on Laura’s birthday as their mother (Vanessa Alba) carves open a chicken for their dinner, and…
An embryo is the collection of cells making up an organism before it is ready to be born or hatched – and the term is sometimes used, by a metaphorical extension, to refer to a rudimentary or beginning stage. So while the title of Patricio Valladares’ low-budget sci-fi horror might be taken to refer to…
Pollyanna McIntosh has been playing ‘The Woman’ – a feral cannibal with a vicious streak to match her strong mothering instinct – for a decade now. In 2009, she starred in Andrew van den Houten’s Offspring, and in Lucky McKee’s The Woman (2011) she was the lone survivor of her tribe and, in her encounters…
The very form of the title Human, Space, Time and Human (Inkan, gongkan, sikan grigo inkan) evokes Kim Ki-duk‘s Spring, Summer, Autumn Winter… and Spring (2003), and promises a similarly cyclical view of human experience. This time, however, life unfolds not on and around a monastery floating on a remote lake, but on a shabby…
Cannibal Ferox first published by Little White Lies, as the 63rd entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Once upon a time, in the Seventies and Eighties, there was a boom in cannibal films. These were mostly cheap Italian productions, although they sometimes boasted international casts, and were often shot in Asia or South America. Born…