Blu-ray
Countdown
Peruse some lists of fan-favourite genre flicks from 2019 and Justin Dec’s Countdown pops up regularly. Not high on the list, but consistently enough to tickle interest. Dec’s debut feature film won’t wow the sort of people who crawled apoplectic from screenings of Us and Midsommar, but it’s got enough insidious charm to please the friday night fright-lovers. In today’s app-strewn world, […]
Child’s Play (2019)
Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play remake was crazy controversial on announcement. Understandable when Don Mancini, original Child’s Play creator and producer, is still writing and directing Chucky films. The latest, Cult of Chucky, got a lot of love on release last year, whilst pre-emptive buzz around the remake was fairly negative. However, Klevberg and co have […]
Satanic Panic
Directed by Chelsea Stardust from a story by Ted Geoghegan and a script by Grady Hendrix (Mohawk), Satanic Panic is a refreshingly daft horror comedy steeped in Satanic imagery. Its occult entertainment for The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina generation. Geoghegan’s story sports the self-aware nostalgia he first flaunted back in We Are Still Here, but […]
3 from Hell
Fourteen years ago Rob Zombie unleashed The Devil’s Rejects on unsuspecting horror audiences. The film was a hit and a major departure from the Tobe Hooper brand of theatrical nostalgia he flaunted in his debut project House of 1000 Corpses. Now, 14 years later, Zombie has returned to complete the story of the nefarious Firefly […]
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 […]
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.
Suspiria 2018
Tremble, Tremble!!! The Witches are Back… Remakes can be controversial, especially in the horror genre. The fandom around genre classics can get territorial, defensive over their nostalgia, enraged at the very idea of a new “insert film here”. When Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria was announced, there was a very particular type of confused rage. Guadagnino is […]
Hereditary
Ari Aster’s debut film has crawled under the skins of audiences all over the world by now. Hereditary’s simple, family-in-a-grief-vacuum, approach to genre filmmaking is a
