Festivals

★★★☆☆ Anthologies are typically a mixed bag, and so it goes with this Australian collection of horror yarns directed and mostly starring indigenous filmmakers and actors. Dark Place’s mix of post-colonialist commentary and genre storytelling lends a fascinating perspective to a people outcast in their own land.  Commissioned to promote First Australian talent, Dark Place is an anthology…

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★★☆☆☆ Slashers have used all manner of holiday celebrations and location gimmicks in their bid to deliver greater chills and spills. Aquaslash, which unfortunately isn’t Canadian slang for peeing in the pool, unfolds in a water park with a suitably tragic heritage.  This French-Canadian production is so committed to being retrograde, so much an unreconstructed…

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★★★★☆ In Adam Stovall’s necromantic horror film, a lonely blue-collar worker at the end of his tether meets and falls in love with a ghost haunting a property he’s overseeing for renovation. A Ghost Waits is an unexpectedly heartfelt gem of micro-budgeted filmmaking.   No matter how many tenants the landlord gets, they don’t last long.…

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★★★★☆ Francesco Giannini’s chiller pits a mum and her young child in a fight for their lives after an airborne virus turns their hotel into a gauntlet of diseased, violent fellow occupants. The resulting saga delivers more on its generic-sounding scenario than meets the eye.  With Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow and Rob Savage’s Host tapping into coronavirus…

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★★★☆☆ Justin McConnell’s The Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business is an eye-opening and informative documentary all about the rough road countless artists travel on to get films made and seen by audiences. For making a movie is just half the battle.  We’ve long known movie making is a brutal, cynical, exploitative business run by those…

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★★☆☆☆ An inventive setup unfortunately cannot save Skull: The Mask from its poor attributions. Confusing editing, disjointed storytelling, too many subplots which appear to be from completely different films, only the delightfully gruesome special effects and vivid cityscape location shooting leave a positive impression.   Horror is all about execution. Aesthetics and craft as much as victims for…

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★★★★☆ In Brea Grant’s ghoulish US healthcare farce, 12 Hour Shift, a junkie nurse and her accomplices run a body parts scam for the local mob, only for their secretive operation to come crashing down, when an unreliable courier enters the fray.   Mandy (Angela Bettis) works long hours at the local hospital, somewhere in Arkansas. She’s…

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★★★★☆ In Ivo van Aart’s timely psycho-thriller, The Columnist, a female cultural commentator subjected to an endless stream of misogynistic vitriol by online trolls decides to get her own back, showing these vile men their hateful words have consequences.   Femke Boot (Katja Herbers) has earned the wrath of right-wingers who live to ‘own the libs’, all…

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★★☆☆☆ Brought together at random by a car crash in the middle of the night, twentysomething Ariel (Emma Holzer) is thrown headfirst into a nightmare as she helps a mysterious man named Joshua (Josh Plasse) escape the attentions of a malevolent supernatural being.  Logan Thomas’ There’s No Such Thing as Vampires is a movie arguably too…

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With Covid-19 still a global threat, festival organisers have been pushed to making crucial decisions: Cancel or opt for an online edition? While a few hardy festivals, such as Venice, have announced the show must go on, at least in some form, others have decided the online option is more viable and infinitely safer. FrightFest,…

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