Protein had its world première in the First Blood strand at FrightFest 2024, 24 August “You’re not like most blokes, are you?”, says single mother Katrina Jones (Kezia Burrows) to the newest member of the gym that she manages, some way into Tony Burke’s feature debut Protein, co-written with Mike Oughton. They say that not…
Derelict was reviewed from an exclusive preview screener prior to its 2024 festival run The opening sequence of Derelict resonates with its title. For it shows empty spaces at dawn: a forlorn field, and by it an old, graffiti-covered building, perhaps once used for stables, but now long abandoned. Its sole occupant is merely a…
“We may all be sliding towards the edge, but it’s up to you how comfortable you are doing it,” says Clayton Minor (an electrifying Stephen Dorff), near the beginning of Nicholas Maggio’s feature debut Mob Land. Clayton has just coolly pistol-whipped a gun shop employee near to death to impress upon the owner the need…
The opening titles of Ash and Bone are impressionistically intercut with images of a young, terrified woman (Denise Emilia Sandulescu) with a splash of blood on her white top, as she limps through dark woods, and flags down a car only to realise – too late – that her pursuers are inside. She is summarily…
Hot Blooded (Ddeu-geo-un pi), script of my on-stage introduction to its screening at the London Korean Film Festival, 2022 Cheon Myeong-kwan is a novelist and screenwriter. In the Nineties, he co-scripted Chang Gil-soo’s I Wish What is Forbidden To Me (1994) and Kim Eui-suk’s Gun and Gun (1995) and A Great Chinese Restaurant (1999). Then…
A Cloud So High had its world première at the Glasgow FrightFest 2022 A Cloud So High opens with a classic establishing shot: a road sign for Schooner, California that situates the viewer in a highly particularised place. It then shows local ex-cop and realtor Gene ‘Sackler’ Sarling (John Savage, The Deer Hunter) listening to…
Calm With Horses first published by VODzilla.co “That’s not you.” These words are stated – twice by different characters – to Douglas (Cosmo Jarvis), the protagonist of Calm With Horses (aka The Shadow of Violence). Douglas indeed comes with a brutal inner conflict. In a voiceover that opens the film, he states: “I’m told I…
“This had better be fucking good,” says police officer Catrin (Annes Elwy) at the beginning of Ryan Andrew Hooper’s feature debut The Toll, as she steps into the portable cabin where the Toll Booth Man (Michael Smiley) conducts his business. The latter – a dry, taciturn anonym – has been leading an equally anonymous life,…
Sweet Virginia first published by RealCrime Magazine The twin China Brothers had their debut, the Coen-esque Australia-set thriller Crawl, in 2011, with Paul on writing/directing duties and Benjamin producing. In 2012 their follow-up spec script Sweet Virginia, with its superficially similar scenario of a hired killer creating chaos in a small town, was near the top…