8:37 Rebirth opens with a bang that will reverberate throughout the film. In a Turkish-owned corner store in the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia, we see nine-year-old Sergei Radic (Benjamin Walker) staring in horror, and 18-year-old, bloody-faced Jared Peters (Kylar Johnson) holding a gun. At first the incident itself is not shown, just its immediate…
Our Evil (Mal Nosso) first published by SciFiNow The feature debut of writer/director/producer/editor Samuel Galli, Our Evil (Mal Nosso) is a film of two halves. In the first, hulking, bald, middle-aged Arthur (Ademir Esteves) wakes at 2.32am, searches the dark web, skimming over items like ‘credit card cloning’ ‘cannibalism’ and ‘necro’ to open a section…
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne first published by Movie Gazette Maria Casarès, who fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and then fled to France where she became Albert Camus’ lover and the star of his plays, is perhaps best known for her portrayal of Death in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) –…
American Badger first published by VODzilla.co The badger, we are told at the beginning of Kirk Caouette’s sort-of sequel to his Promiseland (2019), is a solitary, anti-social creature that will fight viciously when backed into a corner – the American variety more than its European counterpart. The hitman Dean (Caouette) gets his nom de guerre…
Red Road first published by Film4 Summary: The first part of a loose Glasgow-set trilogy, Andrea Arnold’s feature debut is a psychosexual thriller about loss, lust, and the red red road to redemption. Review: Jackie (Kate Dickie) is a CCTV operator, watching remotely over a northern section of Glasgow, recording any trouble, and calling in the…
Dreamland first published by Little White Lies, as entry 101 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “We’re in a different world,” says a grizzled hitman (Stephen McHattie) of his surroundings near the end of Dreamland. He is not wrong, and the clue is in the title. For Bruce McDonald’s film falls into a body of works…
“This story isn’t about truth, or love – this story is about sin.” says Aubrey Miller (Brenna Llewellyn) in voiceover near the beginning of The Sinners (aka The Color Rose). The film opens in medias res: Aubrey is on her knees praying when a car pulls up behind her, and six young women in masks…
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…
Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi) first published by EyeforFilm Vengeance always begets more vengeance. Park Chan-wook never intended that the bleak social commentary of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002) and the Oedipal extravagance of OldBoy (2003) should be conceived as related projects, but after Korean journalists hounded him over his new-found obsession with violent revenge, he…
A heavily bearded man (Timothy Davis) wakes up covered in newspapers on a park bench, with absolutely no idea who he is or how he got there. Eight years later, and still remembering nothing of his past save for a red-and-white-hued dream about holding a rabbit, this John Doe has become John Hutton – now…
The Ninth Configuration first published by Little White Lies, as the eighth part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “You’re going to die up there.” In William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, whose script William Peter Blatty has adapted from his own 1971 novel, the possessed 12-year-old Regan (Linda Blair) creepily directs these words at an astronaut in attendance…