A brother and his younger sister wander through searing heat to a big old farmhouse, a long way from their urban security. It is a set-up all too familiar from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) – except that the roadkill seen at the beginning is a kangaroo rather than an armadillo, making…
Pappy’s World (2018) It is Christmas, and while her Grandpa (Fred Polone), an Uncle Remus figure with fake grey beard and tattered straw hat, lies snoring in a chair, a girl (Jaz Frazier) uses his cane to reach the forbidden wrapped box at the top of a teetering pile of presents. Inside she finds Pappy…
In keeping with its title, Transmission opens with a televisual nightmare: a disturbingly hypermanic barrage of images on a flickering screen, as though channels were being surfed by a madman. That television sits in an arched cellar, where Johann Strauss Sr’s Radetzky March pours its incongruously upbeat notes from two speakers. This bricked bunker has been…
Written and directed by the Duke Mitchell Club’s own Evrim Ersoy, abdullah offers a day in the life of its titular antihero (played by Gabriel Horn), apparently too unassuming and inconspicuous even to merit an upper-case letter for his first name. A short, overlooked Turkish cabbie in London, he drifts in loneliness and silence along…
Review first published by EyeforFilm A big old house at night, shown in a montage of mood-setting images. An empty kitchen, and an equally empty bedroom with a desk. An old framed monochrome photo of a man and child, and another besides them of a woman. Then a gaunt, suited fellow (Guy Henry) with a…
Review first published by EyeforFilm Compassion, a short film by writer/director Roberto Oliveri, opens with a wide shot of an empty living room. Even when its owner, an unnamed ‘old woman’ (Diana Quick), drifts into view, that emptiness persists, now translated into a palpable loneliness. Searching for her glasses, she pauses over a pocket watch…