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…
To Fire You Come At Last had its European première on Sat 26th Aug at FrightFest In 17th-century England, a body must be carried along the lichway across the moor to a church yard for burial. Still grieving the death of his 21-year-old son Aldis (Stephen Smith), Squire Marlow (Mark Carlisle) has hired four men…
Faceless After Dark had its world première on Fri 25th Aug at FrightFest Faceless After Dark opens with a picture of trauma. A woman (Jenna Kanell) sits, staring straight into the camera, her face anguished, with blood visible in her hairline. She is strobe-lit (in striking bisexual colours), and her distressing image is further disrupted…
“If we can be brave enough to put our finger on what’s uncomfortable in our lives,” says school counsellor Mr Hopkins (Mark Garfield) in writer/director Ian Mantgani’s short film Nosepicker, “we can start to shed our uncomfortable skins, and move past them into a new phase. Become more of who we are supposed to be.”…
A Wounded Fawn first published by SciFiNow A Wounded Fawn opens with a quote from Leonora Carrington about the sudden realisation of her embodied vulnerability – and later we will see a copy of Susan L. Aberth’s book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (2010), while a (long-dead) character (played by Katie Kuang) from the…
Death Proof first published by EyeforFilm, 5 September 2007 Comprising a double-feature of Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez‘s Planet Terror (as well as mock-up trailers during the intermission), Grindhouse was originally conceived as a grittily nostalgic revival of the whole ‘grindhouse’ experience – yet another groovy time-warp to add to the countless Noughties…
After a series of brightly coloured illustrations depicting vodou death spirit Baron Samedi together with, and then apart from, his beloved wife Maman Brigitte, Richard Elfman’s Bloody Bridget begins with its Van Nuys trailer park heroine Bridget O’Brian (played by Elfman’s wife Anastasia) performing a burlesque on stage with fellow artists Pepe (Marcos Mateo Ochoa)…
Little Bone Lodge had its world première at the Glasgow FrightFest 2023 “It’s said that mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children. She can be glorious, or terrible, benevolent, or filled with wrath. She’ll fight away the monsters with the fangs of a wolf and the teeth of…
Stone Turtle has its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival 2023 “Same island, different myths,” comments Samad (Bront Palarae). After all, Turtle Stone Island is said to be uninhabited, but he has found Zahara (Asmara Abigail), her young niece Nika (Samara Kenzo) and a few other women living there – and while he has read…
Bull first published by VODzilla.co Bull opens with three men in a grassy field at dusk, burying something that is still in flames, and then walking away from the smouldering remains. It is an image which will be carefully overturned by the message of the remaining film: that you cannot ever really turn your back…
Lady Street Fighter first published by Little White Lies, as entry 145 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column After graduating from UCLA Film School in the late Sixties, director James Bryan launched his career at indie cinema’s lowest end – a strange, psychotronic zone where exploitation reigns, sleaze flows and cult emerges – his trajectory and…