Deathstalker had its North American première at Fantastic Fest 2025, 20th Sept “A cauldron brimming with stale filmmaking, stone-faced acting and primitive editing. Aside from the nasty rapes (I lost count after six) and the endless violence, Deathstalker drips with derivative dullness. The movie is so bad that the director can’t even give you a…
A Blind Bargain had its world première at FrightFest, 1.25pm Mon 25 Aug With sporadically released features like That Little Monster (1994) and The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2012) – and a slew of short films – to his name, Paul Bunnell has made a specialty of resurrecting past periods and forgotten forms, in…
Contraband first published by Film4 Dress the familiar tropes of a crime thriller in the dour earnestness and drab local colour of Europe’s north, and the result is ‘Nordic noir‘: Norway’s Insomnia (1999) and Headhunters (2011), Sweden’s Millennium trilogy, Iceland’s Jar City (2006) and Reykjavik Rotterdam (2008), and Wallander and The Killing (for Swedish and…
Handsome Guys screened at the London Korean Film Festival, 2024. My programme note (slightly expanded). “This used to be a home to an American missionary,” the realtor tells carpenter Jae-pil (Lee Sung-min) and Sang-gu (Lee Hee-joon) of the dilapidated countryhouse that the stepbrothers are about to buy and refurbish so that they can enjoy a…
Dawn of the Dead (2004) first published by VODzilla.co It is 2004. The dust has barely settled from the impact of 9/11 three years earlier, and America is now at war abroad while struggling to achieve a bunkered return to normalcy at home, with a deep sense of anxiety and alarm, terror and trauma remaining….
Back in the early Eighties heyday of the slasher, the genre was dominated by male writers and directors, but there were notable exceptions. One of these was The Slumber Party Massacre, released in 1982. This was originally written by feminist activist Rita Mae Brown as a horror parody (under the working title Sleepless Nights), and…
Child’s Play first published (in a shorter version) by Sight & Sound, August 2019 Review: Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play opens with a diptych of scenes: first a to-camera announcement from Henry Kaslan (Tim Matheson), founder and CEO of Kaslan Corporation, about his company’s range of high-tech Buddi dolls, which learn from their environment and can,…
Suspiria first published by Little White Lies ‘Simulacrum’ is the single word that elderly psychologist Dr Jozef Klemperer (played by one Lutz Ebersdorf, in fact a pseudonym for Tilda Swinton) writes in his case notes as he listens to an unhinged Patricia Hingle (Chloë Grace Moretz) rave in his apartment cum consulting room. In this…