Reviews
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
