Piper first published by SciFiNow A car speeds alongside woods in the rain at night. Inside Kerry Weiss (Alma Rix) tries to stay in command of the vehicle, while preventing her manically humming young son Matty (Jékabs Grigalis) from throwing himself onto the road. At the Hamelin hospital, Kerry – and Kerry alone – sees…
Pandemonium first published by SciFiNow “I’m not in denial anymore,” says Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj) – whose very name is an anagram of denial – to Nathan (Hugo Dillon) very near the beginning of Pandemonium. Nathan has just awoken lying in the middle of an isolated road that snakes through misty mountains, unable quite to believe…
The Wait (La Espera) seen at Panic Fest 2024 “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food. The tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” This textual…
Cheat had its world première on Thurs 24th Aug at FrightFest Cheat – co-written and co-directed by Nick Psinakis and Kevin Ignatius (The Long Dark Trail, 2022) – opens in 1888 with Farmer Miller (Will Bunk) carrying his unconscious daughter Clara (April Clark) to a barn, hanging her upside down inside, and as she wakes,…
Amulet first published by Sight and Sound, March 2022 Review: As a soldier digs a latrine in the woods near his remote border post in an unnamed, war-torn Balkan country, he unearths a small statuette of a pagan mother goddess – the titular ‘amulet’. This prologue to actress Romola Garai’s feature debut as writer/director introduces…
The Man From London (A Londoni Férfi) first published by Film4 Summary: Hungarian auteurist couple Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky fill their spare waterfront noir with the shadowy morality of crime and punishment. Review: “Don’t follow me too soon… Wait a good two minutes.” These are the first words heard in Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s…
Tailgate first published by VODzilla.co “Ladies, don’t pay it any mind. That man never finished high school. And now he’s getting older, his job gets taken over by younger people. At home he probably has no authority over his wife and children. So the only thing left to him is his pride. Do you understand…
To the accompaniment of fey flutework from composer Katisse Buckingham, the opening credits of writer/director Jud Cremata’s feature debut Let’s Scare Julie offer elegant animated design in the style of Saul Bass. Here the name of each cast member appears, only to be erased by a red bar, until it becomes clear that these bars…
The Dead Ones first published by Rue Morgue The Dead Ones opens with a film-within-a-film – a video uploaded to youtube entitled ‘Locker Room Dungeon Boy’ which depicts vicious bullies forcing the underwear-wrapped head of a male schoolmate down a toilet as they repeatedly call him ‘faggot’. The video has 11,240 views – a very…
The Night Of first published by RealCrime Magazine When scuzzy, ambulance-chasing lawyer John Stone (the excellent John Turturro) – think Breaking Bad‘s Saul Goodman, only with a better moral compass – goes home at night to his apartment, he relaxes in front of the television to watch CSI-like forensic detective shows. In The Night Of, written by…
First published by EyeforFilm “The highest reach of injustice is to be deemed just when you are not.” This quote from Plato, appearing in text form at the beginning of writer/director/producer Andrew de Burgh’s Just One Drink, also establishes the short film’s central theme: the ambiguous guises of righteousness that injustice can adopt. We also…