The Flesh Itself (A Própria Carne) UK première at FrightFest, 29th and 31st August 2026 The text that opens Ian SBF’s The Flesh Itself (A Própria Carne) situates its events within a historical reality: the War of the Triple Alliance in which, between 1864 and 1870, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay massacred much of Paraguay’s population….
R-Point first published by EyeforFilm, 17 Sept 2005 “We’re dying – do you copy?” So asks the eerie disembodied voice, intercepted on military radio in Kong Su-chang’s R-Point (aka Arpointeu) – and the last word of that message, in all its ambiguity, points to a principle of imitation and replication that is central to the…
Come and See (Idi i smotri) screened on 1st and 4th June at the Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford. This is the text of my introduction to those screenings. Ladies and gentlemen, roll up, roll up! My name is Anton Bitel, I am a freelance film critic and I specialise in horror cinema – so…
Come and See (Idi I Smotri) first published by EyeforFilm, 25 May 2006 A transcript of my on-stage introduction to a screening of this film (1 June 2025 at the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford) can be found here “Decimation”, at least in its original sense, denotes the reduction of a population by one tenth; yet…
“Sisu”, text states at the beginning of the film with that word as its title, “is a Finnish word that cannot be translated”. This assertion is immediately undermined by following text which proceeds precisely to offer a translation: “It means a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination. Sisu manifests itself when all hope is…
One of the ways that cinema can portray the end of innocence is to take things that would normally appeal to children and to infuse them with fear, distress or disgust. David Hand’s animated Bambi (1942) for Disney might have been very much aimed at children, but also traumatised many of its young viewers with…
Boots On The Ground first published by SciFiNow In October 2014 – the eve of the British pull-out from conflict in Afghanistan – a unit of five squaddies is under fire in the Hindu Kush. Coming to a huge British-engineered fort (“Leftovers from the First Afghan War”, as one of them wryly observes), they see…
Gemini (aka Soseiji) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 115 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column By the time Shinya Tsukamoto helmed Gemini (aka Soseiji) in 1999, he had already established for himself an idiosyncratic filmmaking language all his own. His features like Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), its bigger budget 1992 sequel Tetsuo…
Skylines (Sklyin3s) first published by VODzilla.co As Critters 4 (1992), Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), Leprechaun 4: In Space (1996) and Jason X (2001) have taught us, the laws of cinema dictate that all gonzo franchises will eventually lose their grip on any kind of grounding reality and end up in space. Colin and Greg Strause’s Skyline…
Casshern first published by Movie Gazette In 1973, Tatsunoko Productions created an animated series for Japanese television called Shinzo Ningen Casshan, about a heroic superfighter named Casshan who defended the human race against wicked androids accidentally unleashed by his father’s experiments. It was pretty much your standard good-versus-evil anime, daft enough to find room even…
Like many a psychological thriller, The Ascent (aka Black Ops, aka Stairs) features a primal scene that it visits at the film’s beginning, and then revisits and revises numerous times during the course of its characters’ journey towards a reckoning. In an Eastern European war zone, a British special ops squad of six – Will…