Category: Film
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After the blood and blasphemy of The Curse of Frankenstein, you might expect Hammer’s next foray into horror to keep that arterial flow going — another plunge into the lurid, the violent, the gothic. But instead, they went cold. The Abominable Snowman (1957), directed by Terence Fisher and written by Nigel Kneale, is the quiet,…
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When I watched the UK premiere of Yuriyan Retriever’s Mag Mag on Saturday, the director’s name was relatively new to me, although well known in Japan and more recently in the USA. I had read it was going to be a “weird and wild satire of J-Horror”, which I’ve been fond of since discovering Urotsukidōji, Ring and…
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If you were thinking that Saint Patrick’s Day is a unique backdrop for an alien invasion horror movie, you’d be right. Historically, the few horror movies that do center around the holiday usually have a “killer leprechaun” plot, which makes the body-swapping alien concept of Hulu’s “Crawlers” so unique. Set in the town of Emerald…
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We’ve already ventured into the coffin of Hammer’s Dracula — that blood-soaked fever dream that redefined Gothic horror and drenched British cinema in technicolour blasphemy. But before the Count ever bared his fangs, before Cushing and Lee carved their names into horror’s stone altar, there was another experiment — quieter perhaps, but no less revolutionary.…
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When we think of old Hollywood the silent film era of Charlie Chaplin and the birth of American cinema, we picture a glamorous world preserved in black and white celluloid. But beneath the surface of that glittering industry lay a seedy underbelly of greed, addiction, and violence. The 1922 murder of William Desmond Taylor stands…
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It was difficult to know what to expect from Game: the opening film of the festival (I’ve seen a couple of very strong openers, and a couple less so); and audiences had been told there are “local connections” to Nottingham, which might have meant the city’s genre film festival was promoting well known talent, rather…
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There’s something about the red velvet and candlelight of Hammer’s Dracula that feels almost sinful. Not just because it redefined horror, but because it seduced it. Before 1958, cinematic vampires were ghostly aristocrats, whispering through cobwebbed castles in black-and-white shadows. But Hammer Films — in their usual, gloriously excessive way — didn’t just want to…
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Intelligent satire, humour, a demon and a cult actor or two: count me in. Portal to Hell was surprisingly deep and actually raised lots of questions, too, so I hardly knew which one to start with when I sat down at my laptop to talk to Woody Bess, its writer and director. The film’s tone…
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The day’s feature film, Baby Fever (dir Nupur Chitalia, Pascale Potvin) encompass all the themes of the day, at least tangentially. After moving to a new community with her husband, James, and finding herself pregnant, Lila interviews with the local mothers’ group, a prestigious club led by mommy influencer Trish (in a tooth-for-tooth performance by…
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Strong themes (from grief to motherhood, self-doubt to self-preservation) wrapped in elegant storytelling ruled the day at the tenth Sick Chicks Film Festival. Grief is such a ubiquitous topic in so many films that it seems impossible that there can be anything else to say, but there is. In Aunque no esté contigo (Even If…