Love Is the Devil – Blu-Ray
As with any film about art, the personality of the artist informs both art and film, John Maybury’s Love is the Devil: Study for a portrait of Francis Bacon, is a perfect example of this. The paintings of Bacon tell much about his cold, excessive, and cynical outlook, and the film must too. Maybury wants […]
Hellboy (2019)
Neil Marshall’s Hellboy flopped hard at the box office back in April. And it really didn’t deserve to. Off the back of a $50,000,000 budget, the film only took an estimated $48,000,000 worldwide, essentially ensuring the franchise won’t see the light of day for an awful long time. When Marshall’s adaptation was announced, it was […]
The Dead Don’t Die – EIFF 2019
Flaunting one of the most delicious ensemble casts to grace a zombie film, Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die promised to be an off-beat remedy to an oversaturated sub-genre. Applying his signature oddball style and dreamy Americana to genre cinema, Jarmusch’s first horror comedy is an eclectic but faulted feature. In the sleepy town of […]
Aniara – EIFF 2019
Earth is fucked. We all know that, and Sci-fi is increasingly interested in how to deal with how fucked we are. Aniara, from directors Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja, is an epic human-centric look at post-Earth life. Aniara starts off in a well-worn futuristic world where humanity is slowly being evacuated to communes on Mars […]
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum
Who would have thought back in 2014, that John Wick would survive to fulfil not one, not two, but three exhilarating action epics? Who would have thought that 5 years later we’d all be glued to our seats watching a 54 year-old Keanu Reeves stab, shoot, and bash his way through a world of deadly […]
Luz – DbD 2019
Entrancing and elusive, Tilman Singer’s debut feature film Luz was the stand-out film of Edinburgh’s Dead by Dawn festival 2019. Playing out like an Avant Garde possession story, Luz follows a young cab driver’s (Luana Velis) desperate attempts to flee a demonic entity hell-bent on reuniting with its true love. At first Luz feels like […]
All the Gods in the Sky – DbD 2019
Tous les Dieux du Ciel (All the Gods in the Sky), from French director Quarxxx, is an incredibly bold piece of genre filmmaking and a spellbinding debut to boot. Nodding carefully to the surrealist likes of David Lynch, the body horror of David Cronenberg, the unfathomable terror of Lovecraft, and the stark realism of the […]
Incredible Violence – DbD 2019
Made on behalf of troubled independent filmmakers the world over, G Patrick Condon’s debut feature Incredible Violence is a bizarre story about how far you might have to go to finish your film, murder included. For those who enjoyed the savvy genre awareness of Scream, Cabin in the Woods, or Behind the Mask: The Rise […]
Await Further Instructions
It’s almost impossible for British Horror to deal with class and racism now and not feel coloured by Brexit. Johnny Kevorkian’s second feature film, Await Further Instructions, doesn’t namecheck the political shambles, but
Halloween (2018)
The buzz around David Gordon Green’s Halloween has been insane. Fresh blood behind the lens, the blessings of franchise instigator/genre icon John Carpenter, and the return of Jamie Lee Curtis to a role that launched her career back in 1978. If you ignore Rob Zombie’s remake and it’s sequel,
First Reformed
Paul Schrader has had a reputation for weighty mainstream releases since penning the script for Taxi Driver in 1970.