Bite had its world première at FrightFest 2022 [fix] “It spins us all, and around and around we go,” says head of the house Gerald (Stuart Sessions), some way into James Owen’s feature debut Bite, as he proffers his wisdoms – to a captive audience – on the karmic wheel of Eastern religion. “Fight it,…
The Colony first published by VODzilla.co Released the same year as Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, The Colony similarly imagines a future ice age that has wiped out most of life on earth, leaving several frosty outcrops of survival to fight among themselves over dwindling scraps and encroaching disease. The vehicle of Jeff Renfroe’s allegory, however, is…
The Hills Have Eyes Part II first published by Little White Lies, as the 87th instalment of my Cinema Psychotronicum column When a person’s life is complete, it becomes all too easy to look back only to its high points, and to ignore everything else as mere bumps along a road to heady success. Wes…
“In the past 10 years, over 150 people have been reported missing on the Kennet & Avon Canal…”, states po-faced text at the beginning of director/producer/editor Charlie Steeds’ The Barge People, over black-and-white shots of the area and stills of corpses, all accompanied by the sound of an old-fashioned camera flash. This opening claim to…
First published by Little White Lies “He’s making the wrong turn,” complains Daniel (Dean Armstrong), “I knew it.” Even if his nine co-ed companions are devil-may-care fools, blithely happy to ride their snowmobiles into an oncoming blizzard with night falling, rule-bound, neurotic Daniel can read all the signs of trouble ahead – and his words…
Cannibal Holocaust first published by Little White Lies in 2011, when Shameless Screen Entertainment released their Blu-ray (and DVD) of the film After aerials of the Amazonian rain forest play out in montage over the opening credits of Cannibal Holocaust, we cut to the concrete ‘jungle’ of the Big Apple (also shown as aerials, from…
First published by Movie Gazette (link lost) While Arabs and the French are, for obvious political reasons, current figures of hate in the US, in general the Hollywood of today tries hard to be kind to different ethnic groups, handling with care its representation of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and Inuit –…