Discontinued opens with Sarah (Ashley Hutchinson), filmed from behind, sitting and contemplating an idyllic lake, as a male voice calmly intones: “Return to a place where you are at peace, and reflect on the idea of impermanence. The universe keeps moving, and nothing will remain as it is, good or bad.” This is the film’s…
Demonic first published by Sight & Sound, October 2021 Synopsis: Somewhere in North America, today. Carly is drawn into an experimental attempt to make contact in a virtual space with her mass-murdering mother Angela, now in a coma. Yet there is something else inside, desperate to escape, and a team of Vatican demon hunters is…
Max Reload and the Nether Blasters first published by VODzilla.co Meet Max Jenkins (Tom Plumley) – both a young orphaned Ferris Bueller-lookalike who lives in smalltown Middletown with his war veteran grandfather (Martin Kove), and a talented coder whose inability to work with others has held him back from getting the sort of work in…
Demonic had its UK première at FrightFest 2021 “Mum?” shouts Carly (Carly Pope) as she walks through a field, and then into the large abandoned sanatorium beyond – a sanatorium being, significantly, a place of both sickness and recovery. Guided by the pleading voice of her mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt), Carly finally finds her sitting…
“What if, like, a fairy godmother came down from the sky, and she said, ‘Jeanette, with one wave of my magic wand, I’m going to give you the perfect life.’ What would you say?” This is Douglas (Tim Seyfert) speaking as he lies on the grass alongside his addressee, Jeanette Harper (Freya Berry) – through…
At the beginning of writer/director Miguel Llansó’s Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway, the title is presented as the colourful title screen for an Eighties computer game, complete with garishly coloured 8-bit graphics displaying the film’s main characters, all to the accompaniment of old-school electronic squelches on the soundtrack. It is an apt…
The Deserted first published by Little White Lies, following a VR screening at the Taiwan Film Festival, 2019 You sit in a swivel chair in a basement room, surrounded by up to 15 other people each with their own swivel chairs. There is no common big screen. Rather, individual computers feed the images direct to…
eXistenZ first published by Little White Lies, as the 57th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “I don’t like it here. I don’t know what’s going on, we’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly non-existent. Always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.” ‘PR nerd’ Ted Pikul (Jude Law) is a…