★★★★☆ What Keeps You Alive is not just a edge-of-your-seat style thriller, but a searing portrait into relationships, and the horror of intimacy, or of not even really knowing who it is you’re sleeping next to. Cozy idyll gives way with a (literal) thud to a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game, (and Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ A joint directorial effort between François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, Summer of 84 is a somewhat disappointing entry into the hallowed halls of nostalgia, following in the footsteps of Andy Muschietti’s IT update and Netflix’s Stranger Things. Formulaic, it has all of the familiar tropes in place: Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The heyday of the Parisian Grand Guignol is a perfect setting for a film screening at a horror festival: holding up a mirror to the notion of the bloodthirsty audience and how implicit we are in the sadistic voyeurism of the horror genre, it can serve as a snapshot Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ You know the slasher-movie drill. Two high-school students are parked on a country lane at night. The windows have steamed up. Busy necking, the boy and girl suddenly hear a noise outside. The boy gets out of the car, goaded by the girl, who questions his masculinity.Soon enough, his Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Kevin Greutert’s latest thriller sees a family up against a deranged cult. Set over the course of a few hours on a dark night, Jackals is an atmospheric horror movie from the director of the best Saw series (XI) and the criminally underrated Jessabelle.Set in the 1980s and supposedly Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Dominic Brunt’s third directorial feature is a political satire intent on causing a stink. A tale of human greed and demented obsession with money, Attack of the Adult Babies has a lot to get off its chest and it’s abundantly clear which political parties it’s targeting.Somewhere in Yorkshire, a Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Kept under wraps for two years as a top-secret production, Adam Green’s Hatchet series redux Victor Crowley is a splatter movie joy. Both reboot and sequel directly connected to events in Hatchet III, Victor Crowley hits the horror movie sweet spot like an axe to the face. There’s something Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Joe Lynch’s grisly corporate satire Mayhem follows a young lawyer’s mission to confront the company CEO that screwed him over. The lawyer (Steven Yuen) and everyone in the building has been infected with a virus known as ID7, which increases rage levels to deadly effect.Mayhem is a populist tale Continue Reading
★★★★☆ It would be unfair to dismiss Imitation Girl as an Under the Skin knockoff. Both are art films featuring an alien landing on Earth and assuming the form of a young woman, the theme of identity crisis is strong and there’s black gunk. That’s where similarities end.Julianna (Lauren Ashley Carter) is Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Misogynistic exploitation cinema or a study of misogyny? Premiering at this year’s Horror Channel-sponsored FrightFest, director Trent Haaga’s 68 Kill is a violent, button-pushing caper with excellent performances from AnnaLynne McCord and Sheila Vand.68 Kill opens with the image of a fly trapped in honey. Given that the plot Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ As the adage goes “Don’t fuck with the Chuck”, and the rule still applies. The maniacal doll is up to no good (for a change) in Don Mancini’s Cult of Chucky, a series revitalised from the remains of the Child’s Play series and showing no signs of slowing down.Following Continue Reading
FrightFest is a genre fan’s Christmas – a Black Christmas, naturally. 2017 marks its 18th edition and the UK’s premier horror cinema festival has returned to what was always its best venue: The Empire Theatre in Leicester Square, now run by the Cineworld chain. Attendees will remember well the experience Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Like an episode of The Twilight Zone guest-directed by Luis Buñuel, The Similars is richly absurd in premise but also founded on a bedrock of social and political issues. One vital historical reference is the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, the same year in which the film is set, where Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Ali Abbasi’s striking debut Shelley is a Gothic horror that uses degeneration of the body to explore the exploitation of migrant workers and the individualist ideology that accompanies society’s growing obsession with ‘organic’ living. A young Romanian woman, Elena (Cosmina Stratan), arrives in the Danish countryside to work as Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ On the colour wheel, Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas is more Bob Clark’s Black Christmas than Michael Curtiz’s White Christmas. While it’s tempting to bring them together as a Yuletide triptych, a ‘Three Colours Christmas’ triple-bill (Krzysztof Kieślowski missed a trick with that one), Anderson’s comic slasher doesn’t quite earn Continue Reading