‘Geothermal activity as a sign of Satan’s realm breaking through’ is quite the conceit; shame this trumped-up haunted-mansion yarn can’t cash that cheque. Another disappointment from the vaguely recalled scary video rental shelves of my youth, so… Hell of a place they picked to set up a drug rehab centre, though. See what I did there? More…
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The aesthetic epitomises the ’80s — from the fashions to the OTT effects work — but the theme is evergreen… depressingly so. More…
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I mean, you’d be fucked up too if you were locked in a cellar for 40 years. More…
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It’s the ‘Cigarette Burns’ episode of Masters of Horror except this time we get to see the movie! And it’s… OK. The film grain and wardrobe set the right tone for a supposedly unearthed filmic relic from the late ’70s. But the masks slips as it progresses, with the postmodern ‘subliminal’ edits, the lazy ‘vaguely Eastern Europeans are sinister’ trope and a bleak finale that echoes Lynch or Cronenberg or Von Trier more than Fulci and that ilk. If it wasn’t trying so hard to impress and disorient aesthetically, the strength of its more subtle themes — like the inscrutability of childhood grief — might be easier to discern. More…
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The Babysitter didn’t need a sequel, especially not one as… extra as this. More…
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What an odd assemblage of people; it’s almost like horror improv or something. More…
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The rare retro horror documentary that’s nothing of the sort: it’s instead an affecting character study of a man whose burgeoning career in the movies was cut short by gay panic. It’s unflinching about the grind of the convention circuit, and the struggle for acceptance even this far into the 21st century. But it’s also inspiring and life-affirming: despite being thrown under the bus by the ignorant, and coming close to death with Aids, Mark Patton is still here — and hopefully more alive than ever. More…
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Not quite weird or offbeat enough to work as the knowing homage it’s intended to be. But it’s got some memorably strange moments, and it serves as a distant cousin to the same year’s Dead & Buried in their shared sense of a small town gone awry under the influence of sinister forces. More…
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The shame of living. That’s the prevailing thought I’m left with from Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest. It’s a slow, slow, neorealist meditation on grief, centred on a young woman working in a nursing home (and who we shortly learn has lost a child) and an elderly widower with signs of dementia and jumbled-up memories of his late wife. The two make an unlikely connection before a spur-of-the-moment road trip becomes a trek through the woods as the man struggles to find something he’s lost, literally and figuratively. For all its glacial pacing in its first third, the film blooms when the duo disappear among the trees, with allusions to the joys and pains of motherhood, the meaning of what it is to be alive — and the hurt we bear when we outlive those who claim our hearts. More…
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So, I found a new purpose for my intermittent weaknotes. More…
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Look who I found on Apple Maps last night. #image
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I knew going in this would be different from the first Skyline, but no one told me they Evil Dead II’ed it, and jazzed it up with yer ones from The Raid for good measure. More…
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Maniac Cop 2 isn’t streaming anywhere but this one is, so… Insert ‘Maniac Cop is a tautology’ gag here. Anyway, the relatively few kills are fairly inventive, given the limitations of its hospital setting. And it’s got a satirical bent that prefigures the moral degradation of Nightcrawler by decades. Ted Raimi replacing his more illustrious brother for the TV reporter cameo was a bad omen, I have to say, but nothing prepared me for the nutzoid finale. This one goes out with a bang, indeed. More…
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