The Last Video Store had its UK première on Saturday 28th Oct at the Halloween FrightFest A bearded man sits on a sofa before a table piled with beer cans and VHS rentals with titles like Warpgate and Beaverlake Massacre 4. He picks up the remote, and we see, emerging from his old television’s static…
The Unheard begins with noise, and then silence. The noise is both auditory and visual in nature, as an old family video plays with its staticky images jumping and skipping and the audio track loudly distorting. A mother and child can be seen, both inside and outdoors, and a voice can be heard calling ‘Mommy’…
Be Kind Rewind first published by EyeforFilm From his music videos for Björk and the White Stripes to his feature films like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004) and The Science Of Sleep (2006), Michel Gondry has established a reputation as the quirky king of high-concept cinema delivered in a lo-fi package. His latest film, Be Kind Rewind,…
It’s 25 December, 1987 in Jack Henry Robbins’ VHYes, and 12-year-old Ralph (Mason McNulty), on the cusp of adolescence, receives a camcorder for Christmas. Over the next six days leading to the New Year, Ralph obsessively documents not just his adventures – with his family and his best friend Josh (Rahm Braslaw) – but also…
Videoman (Videomannen) first published by SciFiNow “I feel like King Kong in New York,” says Ennio Midena (Stefan Sauk) to Simone Karlsson (Lena Nilsson) in Kristian A. Söderström’s Videoman (Videomannen), “I should have been extinct a long time ago.” Ennio is a fish out of water in more ways than one. A ‘flat broke’ migrant who…
In the prologue to SiREN, the mysterious Mr Nyx (Justin Welborn) is called by the police to a church, where he finds the aftermath of a demonic conjuring gone horribly wrong, and a naked girl, her mouth covered in blood, who is evidently not of this world. Rather more knowledgeable about these sorts of phenomena…
Video Nasties: Draconian Days first published by Film Divider “How little historical memory we have! The next time there’s a panic, we won’t remember how stupid the last one was, and how people got away with things. Critical voices have to care about history.” The speaker is Martin Barker, an academic who, in the midst of…
The Straight-To-Video Horror Masterpieces of the 1980s first published by Grolsch Filmworks The whole concept of direct-to-video did not really exist until the 1980s. Before then, if you wanted to watch a movie, you either paid to see it in a cinema, or waited an eon for it to show on TV. Then suddenly everybody,…