Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (Seperti dendam, rundi harus dibayar tuntas) first published by Little White Lies “Only a man who can’t get it up can face death without fear.” This line comes from near the beginning of Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, just after we have seen the film’s young…
Hékate UK première at Sohome Horror Pride Virtual Film Festival Hecate is an ancient Greek goddess typically depicted – sometimes in triple form – with dogs, keys and torches, and associated with crossroads, witchcraft, poisons, night and the moon. Although this feminine deity is never mentioned in Nadia Benedicto’s Hékate beyond its title, her presence…
We Had It Coming opens with two programmatic sequences. In the first, Katja (Sofie Holland) is woken by the sound of a hardcore porn clip landing on her phone – a video in which, by implication, she features. She then, after grimly donning the transparent platform shoes that are part of her work costume, hangs…
Violation first publsihed by Through The Trees, 13 September, 2020 Co-written and co-directed by Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Violation opens with the contrasting sounds of loons and baroque music, as a woozily abstract blurring of blues and greens slowly resolves itself into the image of a misty stone bridge over a woodland river. This…
Hard Candy first published by Film4 Summary: Ellen Page turns the tables on Patrick Wilson in this controversy-courting feature debut from David Slade, part exploitation thriller, part morality tale. Review: After exchanging risqué messages with a much older man for three weeks in an internet chatroom, finally 14-year-old Hayley (Ellen Page) agrees to meet him in a coffee…
Rape-revenge is a powerful mythic structure. Through its apparently elegant binary simplicity any number of messy polarities (although most typically those of gender inequality) can be both framed and complicated. Part of what muddies these waters is the viewer’s awareness of the twinned, if not quite symmetrical, wrongness of both sides of the equation: rape…
One Deadly Summer (L’été meurtrier) first published by Movie Gazette One Deadly Summer (L’été meurtrier) begins as a portrait of life in a small village in 1970s France. The narration of local fireman Pin-Pon (Alain Souchon) introduces us to his French-Italian family and describes his awkward crush on Elle (Isabelle Adjani), a pretty girl who…
Storm Warning first published by Film4 Film summary: Australian director Jamie Blanks goes back to source for this gory redneck revenge shocker, scripted by Everett DeRoche. Review: These days, Australian cinemagoers have the likes of Greg Mclean (Wolf Creek, Rogue), the Spierig Brothers (Undead, Daybreakers), Andrew Traucki and David Nerlich (Black Water) to scare them out…
Father’s Day first published by VODzilla.co In 1980, Troma Entertainment released Charles (brother of Troma co-founder Lloyd) Kaufman’s Mother’s Day – a rape revenger made very much in Troma’s cheap-and-sleazy in-house style of schlock and gore. So one might be forgiven for assuming that Father’s Day, made for Troma by the Canadian comic collective Astron-6…
I Spit On Your Grave 2 first published by GroslchFilmWorks “You don’t know where you are? You’re in Bulgaria.” By this stage in I Spit On Your Grave 2, the remake sequel that nobody really wanted, American would-be fashion model Katie (Jenna Dallender) has been bound, gagged, raped, made to witness murder, drugged, raped again and…
From its opening wide shot of the desert, writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s feature debut Revenge allows the ochre of the rocky landscape and the deep azure of the sky dominate. Orange-and-teal is the contrasting colour palette favoured by this millennium’s commercial film posters and even the films themselves – which is to say that Revenge appears…