Max Reload and the Nether Blasters first published by VODzilla.co Meet Max Jenkins (Tom Plumley) – both a young orphaned Ferris Bueller-lookalike who lives in smalltown Middletown with his war veteran grandfather (Martin Kove), and a talented coder whose inability to work with others has held him back from getting the sort of work in…
The Horror Crowd first published by VODzilla.co Near the beginning of the documentary The Horror Crowd, its director Ruben Pla, talks to camera in a graffitied alleyway in Hollywood where, he states. “it all began for me.” Pla does not mean his career as an actor, which commenced over two decades earlier, but rather his…
The Grudge first published by Dirty Movies In 1998, for the TV anthology Gakko no Kaidan G, Takashi Shimizu made two very short (three-minute) shock films, respectively titled Katasumu and 4444444444, in which he introduced creepy, contorting revenant Kayako Saeki and her meowing son Toshio, laying the central groundwork for the grudge-bearing, implacably vengeful spirits…
Insidious: The Last Key first published by Sight & Sound, March 2018 Review: In the spaces between all stories there are yet more stories – which goes some way to explain Insidious: the Last Key, the latest, literally middling tale of mediumship in the Insidious franchise. Originally a pastiche of Poltergeist (1982) and other domestic horror…
In the middle of a calm ocean, shot wide, there is a tiny rowboat, with two figures sat aboard facing one another. As Tom Waits’ Starving in the Belly of A Whale fills the soundtrack, we see the pair’s images flicker, judder and fragment, before vanishing entirely, as though they were a momentary digital glitch in…
First published by Little White Lies, as Part 17 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “Our houses are such unwieldy properties that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.” It begins with this textual quote from Henry David Thoreau. An opening credits sequence follows, showing newspaper headlines about bizarre crime scenes – and then…