Blue Light had its world première on Saturday 28th Oct at the Halloween FrightFest Blue Light opens with the sound of a little girl singing The Wheels on the Bus. As Carrie (Bella DeLong) approaches the girl from behind and compliments her voice, the girl turns around and instead of smiling or chatting, stares menacingly…
How To Kill Monsters had its world première on Fri 25th Aug at FrightFest It begins with the end. Jamie Lancaster (Lyndsey Craine) emerges from a cabin in the woods, with her Little Red Riding Hood costume bathed in blood and a chainsaw purring in her hands. She is a classic final girl – the…
Malum opens with a diptych of horrific sequences from 2022. In the first, police-seized footage shows four abducted young women being terrorised in the barn of a pig farm by the members of a Manson-esque cult whose leader John Michael Malum (an understated Chaney Morrow) evidently causes the video to blur and distort by his…
Night of the Bastard had its international première at FrightFest 2022 Erik Boccio’s Night of the Bastard opens in 1978, as Andy (Luke B. Carlson) and his heavily pregnant partner Lily (Avery Joy Davis) drive out to the Californian desert for a baby shower with Andy’s recently moved brother Chuck, Chuck’s wife Michelle and their…
By Night’s End opens with an external wide shot of a suburban, single-storey home at night. A ‘For Sale’ sign in the yard is briefly illuminated in red and blue by a passing patrol car, and then a man approaches from the foreground and enters the house. Shortly afterwards we see him again, half-jogging half-limping…
Jackals first published by SciFiNow The Powells – father Andrew (Jonathan Schaech), his divorced wife Kathy (Deborah Kara Unger), their sons Justin (Ben Sullivan) and Campbell (Nick Roux), Justin’s former girlfriend Samantha (Chelsea Ricketts), and Justin and Samantha’s baby daughter Zoe – are having a reunion in their vacation cabin. This, however, is no ordinary…
The Bar (El Bar) first published by SciFiNow The Bar (El Bar) opens on a particulate level: an animated dance of cells multiplying, mutating and spreading, all to a wonderful jazz score. Intimations of viral infection in this credit sequence ensure that the next scene – a mobile single-take tracking shot that jumps dexterously from…
Beaufort first published by Film4 Summary: Josef Cedar’s film uses the grunts’ prespective to dramatise Israel’s difficult 2000 decision to abandon a long-held outpost in Lebanon. Review: Masada has etched itself deeply into the Israeli psyche. Under siege in this mountain fortress during the first century C.E., every last Jewish man, woman and child committed collective suicide…
Run Hide Fight first published by VODzilla.co (in a slightly truncated version) Perhaps cinema’s first school shooting depicted was in Lindsay Anderson’s if…. (1968), whose antihero (Malcolm McDowell, in his on-screen debut) opens fire on fellow pupils, teachers, parents and visiting members of the establishment in a recalcitrant assault upon society’s stuffy status quo. On April 20, 1999, the horror of…
Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula (Bando) first published by VODzilla.co A virus has leaked out of a bio-factory in South Korea, spreading so rapidly (via the rabid bites of the infected) that the government effectively loses control of the state in a single day. We already know this, because in 2016 director Yeon Sang-ho (here…
Land of the Dead first published by EyeforFilm, 30 Sept 2005 George A. Romero established himself as the first and greatest auteur of the undead with what has since become affectionately known as his ‘Holy Trinity’, a trilogy of films that laid down both the law and the lore for zombie horror. Mixing his liberal…