The Toxic Avenger first published by Little White Lies, 29 August 2025 “Just play the fucking hits,” is the advice given by grotesquely combed-over, club-footed Fritz Garbinger (Elijah Wood) to members of local band The Killer Nutz, some way into The Toxic Avenger. He is talking about an open-air performance that they have to give,…
The Incredible Shrinking Man (L’homme qui rétrécit) screened at Imagine Fantastic Film Festival, 2 Nov 2025 “Simply looking at the sky makes us feel dizzy, incredibly tiny, a drop in the ocean, a speck of dust on a stone, infinitesimal. That is what we are.” So goes the voiceover of Paul (Jean Dujardin) at the…
The Turkish Coffee Table (Cam Sehpa) had its UK première at Halloween Frightfest, 1st Nov 2025 The clue is in the title. Can Evrenol’s The Turkish Coffee Table (Cam Sehpa) is not just a remake, but a relocation, of Caye Casas’ The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor, 2022). Even if the first thing that…
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…
The Ring first published, in slightly altered form, by Daily Info, 22 Feb 2003 Want to see a great horror film about a videotape which brings death to its viewers exactly seven days after they watch it, and about the desperate attempts of a young mother to unravel the tape’s mysteries before she, her son…
The Manchurian Candidate first published (in a slightly different version) by Movie Gazette, 11 December, 2004 John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), based on Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name, was a bleak, hallucinatory conspiracy thriller about a soldier who returns a decorated hero from the Korean War, but has in fact been…
Final Cut (Coupez!) first published by SciFiNow Final Cut (Coupez!) opens with a conflicted young woman (Matilda Lutz) fending off a young man (Finnegan Oldfield) with an axe, while trying to reconcile herself to the fact that he is no longer her boyfriend but a braindead zombie. It is a hackneyed, clichéd scenario, the patchy…
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…
Funny Games (aka Funny Games US) first published by Film4 Summary: Michael Haneke rewinds and replays his games of cinematic violence in this doubly uncompromising English-language remake of his 1997 film. Review: When directors remake their own films for an English-speaking audience, there tends to be an element of cultural reduction, or ‘dumbing down’ – after all,…
Pet Sematary first published by VODzilla.co True story (with an old spoiler or two): in Stephen King’s best-selling novel The Shining (1977), the hotel chef Dick Halloran is summoned from his Florida vacation by the psychic powers that he shares with Danny Torrance, and rescues little Danny and his mother Wendy from terrifying supernatural events…
Rabid is up front about what it is. Before we have seen the first frame of narrative, plain yellow text on a black background reveals that what we are watching is “Based on the Original Film by David Cronenberg.” Yet remakes are a complicated business. They can be painstakingly faithful to their model, like Gus…