Karmadonna first published by Dirty Movies, for its screening at MotelX, 2025 Karmadonna opens with a close-up of a baby boy wrapped cosily in a red blanket, surrounded by adults who are all inhaling and exhaling smoke from their cigarettes. It is an image of helpless innocence already being corrupted by toxically selfish experience, and…
Evy (Nina Kira) and Justin (Adam DiMarco) are co-hosts of The Undertone, a podcast dedicated to all things unsettling and unexplained. As they live in different parts of the world, they record their sessions remotely, usually in what is for Evy the witching hour. Undertone is also the name of writer/director Ian Tuason’s impressive debut…
I Live Here Now screened at Imagine Fantastic Film Festival, 31 Oct 2025 It is clear from the very outset that I Live Here Now will be preoccupied with matters gynecological, as a frightened five-year-old Rose (Lili Watkins) is laid down on a treatment chair, her legs strapped into stirrups by two nurses, while her…
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…
Last Straw had its UK première at the Glasgow FrightFest 2024. Last Straw opens near its end, with an aftermath: a tableau in montage showing the interiors of a classic old (faded, even) diner, like a blast from the past of lost Americana. This is also, clearly, the scene of a recent massacre, with blood…
Cold (Kuldi) has its UK première at the Glasgow Film Festival 2024 Erlingur Thoroddsen’s Cold (Kuldi) has, appropriately enough, a cold open. For as it begins, we see Lára (Álfrún Örnólfdóttir) head out in a dressing gown to the balcony of her high-rise apartment and, with a dazed look on her face, lean forwards,…
Unwelcome first published by Little White Lies, 24 Jan, 2023 When Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) learns that she is pregnant, her husband Jamie (Douglas Booth) purchases a celebratory bottle of alcohol-free Prosecco from the corner store, unwittingly picking up a trio of violent thugs who follow him back home and break into the couple’s London apartment….
Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives had its world première on Mon 28th Aug at FrightFest Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives (Home Sweet Home – Wo das Böse wohnt) opens with a scene from near its end, as a woman runs outside in the dark, begging on her smart phone for an ambulance. The fact…
Director/co-writer/editor/cinematographer/producer Pierre Tsigaridis’ feature debut is not only, as its title baldly states, a tale of two witches, but also of two halves, formally separated into two numbered and headed sections, ‘The Boogeywoman’ and ‘Masha’, plus a prologue and epilogue. In Chapter I, 27-year-old, six-months-pregnant Sarah Johnson (Belle Adams), already uncertain about her relationship with…
Inside first published by SciFiNow In the opening scene of Inside, pregnant Sarah (Rachel Nichols) is driving in the rain, and chatting with her husband Matt about the name they should give to the child she is carrying in her belly, when the car collides head-on with another, flips spectacularly over, and suddenly Sarah is…
Ultrasound first published by Movies On Weekends “How does one thing have anything to do with the other?”, asks wheelchair-bound patient Glen (Vincent Kartheiser), hoping to see his immobility cured, but confused by the folder in front of him containing a script more of the movie than of the medical variety, and by the rôle-playing…