Orphan: First Kill first published by VODzilla.co Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan (2009) told the story of a bourgeois family adopting a nine-year-old in an attempt to fill the chasm of grief left by a stillbirth, only to discover that they have let into their already fraught household a psychopathic murderess (played by Isabelle Fuhrman) who is…
Sorry About The Demon first published by VODzilla.co When writer/director Emily Hagins presented the world première of My Sucky Teen Romance (2011) at FrightFest, she was barely old enough to attend the festival – but extraordinarily it was not her first or even second feature. In fact she debuted with Pathogen (2006) when she was…
The Ghosts of Monday first published by VODzilla.co “Look, over three seasons, we never found any evidence of paranormal activity,” TV presenter Bruce (Julian Sands) tells his director Eric (Mark Huberman) in Francesco Cinquemani’s The Ghosts of Monday. “It’s time to find something different.” Eric and Bruce are with a small crew, including Eric’s estranged…
Control first published by VODzilla.co Control opens on a beach. “Life is but a dream,” sings little Eve (Evie Loiselle), playing in the sand – and the bright light and narrow, slightly woozy focus seem to validate her words. As Eileen (Sara Mitich) watches her daughter in this hyperreal space, the idyll is repeatedly shattered…
She Came From The Woods first published by VODzilla.co “This isn’t The Burning,” Ashley (Sienna Hubert-Ross) tells her friend and fellow camp counsellor Ben (Dan Leahy) as he hears things and gets the jitters on their nocturnal walk through the woods. Sure enough She Came From The Woods is not Camp Blackfoot from Tony Maylam’s…
Hounded first published by VODzilla.co ‘Tradition’ is a word that gets bandied about a lot in Tommy Boulding’s feature debut Hounded, written by Ray Bogdanovich and Dean Lines. There are the traditions, passed down patriarchally from father to son, of England’s landed gentry going back centuries if not millennia, and ensuring that everybody stays in…
Who Invited Them first published by VODzilla.co A little boy’s feet walk through a pink-lit corridor at night, dragging a toy monkey with him, and upstairs to an orange-lit door. “Mum? Dad?”, the boys says, knocking. “Hello? I can hear you. Come on, open up.” As he knocks again, he sees blood pouring from under…
Reel Britannia first published by VODzilla.co The word ‘cinema’ comes from the Ancient Greek for ‘movement’. This is because cinema is the domain of the moving image – but in his latest documentary on cinema, writer/director Jon Spira (Elstree 1976, 2015; Hollywood Bulldogs: The Rise and Fall of the Great British Stuntman, 2021) is also…
The Burning Sea (aka North Sea, aka Nordsjøen) first publsihed by VODzilla.co The Burning Sea opens like a documentary, with a montage of archival footage accompanied by what appears to be a genuine interview with a retired North Sea oil rig worker reminiscing about his past employment. He speaks of how the men on the…
Candyman (2021) first published by VODzilla.co It is in the nature of myths to change. When writer/director Bernard Rose adapted Clive Barker‘s short story The Forbidden (1985) into the film Candyman (1992), he translocated events from Barker’s native Liverpool in Thatcher-era England to the Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago, and so introduced a long history of…
Choose or Die first published by VODzilla.co While Laura (Kate Fleetwood) and her teenage son Gabe (Pete MacHale) argue aggressively in their large, luxuriously modernist home, Laura’s husband Hal (Eddie Marsan) retreats into his den – and into childhood. For he has loaded up and is about to play a computer game from the Eighties…