Little Doors US première at Fantastic Fest, 21st Sept 2026 “While we continue to see cities erupt in chaos, violence escalate, the fabric of society break down,” intones the crackly distorted voice of a radio host (Frank Mosley) at the beginning of writer/director/editor Anthony Oberbeck’s Little Doors, “what we have to ask ourselves is, do…
Turn It Up! international première at FrightFest, 29th August 2026 “A careful combination of vibrations could, if arranged in sequence, produce an unquantifiable amount of energy, tear at the fabric of the universe itself, and in all likelihood, sound pretty cool.” Turn It Up! opens with Dr Pretorious (Julian Richings) heard in voiceover talking about…
Hold The Fort first published by SciFiNow, for its world première Fantasia, 16 July 2025 “This is a cult,” says Jenny (Haley Leary), who with her husband Lucas (Chris Mayers) has only this day moved from the big city into their new, surprisingly affordable home in Gruber Hills, and have just arrived at a party…
Boston McConnaughey’s feature debut Alien Country hits the ground running, with James Walker (Jasen Wade) on his motorbike fleeing the police in a high-speed cross-country dash and, when surrounded, making his final getaway by using an alien device to open a portal. This act of improbable escapism, encapsulating the very essence of the film, in…
She Loved Blossoms More had its world première at Tribeca 2024, 9 June 2024 Yannis Veslemes’ She Loved Blossoms More opens with an impressionistic montage. We see an elegant old Parisian house with statuary guarding its front door, a long-legged spider crawling across an old staticky television set, a reel-to-reel tape recorder on which Logo…
The Universal Theory (Die Theorie von Allem) seen for the Imagine Fantastic Film Festival 2023 It is Hamburg, 1974, and a man named Johannes Leinert (Jan Bülow) is a guest on a talk show. He is a failed physicist who never attained his doctorate, and now the author of a book called The Theory of…
It’s not every film that is prefaced with text showing a legitimate toll-free number to call (in Canada) “if you or someone you know might be at risk of self-harm or self-injury” – but then, Dead Dicks opens with a graphic depiction of suicide, as Richie (Heston Horwin, Rock Steady Row), alone among the fractured…
Like many a psychological thriller, The Ascent (aka Black Ops, aka Stairs) features a primal scene that it visits at the film’s beginning, and then revisits and revises numerous times during the course of its characters’ journey towards a reckoning. In an Eastern European war zone, a British special ops squad of six – Will…
As films like Deathwatch, The Devil’s Rock, the Outpost franchise, Frankenstein’s Army, Overlord and many others amply demonstrate, films pitched as ‘trapped in a bunker with infernal abominations’ form a (literal) subgenre, exposing the monstrousness of the military mentality. Falling neatly into this category, Matt Mitchell’s original The Rizen (2017) showed cold warriors struggling to…