Martin P. Lumbridge (not his real name) persists in writing about film even though he has no professional qualifications or compelling reason to be believed. Expect spoilers.
The Manster (1959)
by Martin | June 12, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
I got this in a DVD box set called Brains That Wouldn't Die ('6 Midnight Movies on 2 DVDs!'). On the plus side, there are some hard-to-see films here – on the downside, such is the picture quality that they often remain hard to see, even while you're watching them....
Foxcatcher/Whiplash
by Martin | March 1, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
I may boast of my aversion to the mainstream but do I ever really escape it, or is it like Christopher Marlowe said: ‘Where we are is the mainstream and the mainstream is where we ever are’? (OK, he was talking about Hell but it’s the same idea.) I have been slightly...
Cold-Blooded Beast / Bloodsucking Freaks
by Martin | April 8, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
COLD-BLOODED BEAST (1971) 88 Films' Italian Collection yields this giallo in which a masked murderer stalks an all-female (the patients not the staff) mental institution but the occupants are all too busy playing with themselves and each other to notice, at least...
Blind
by Martin | May 30, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
The old Renoir cinema has resurfaced as the Curzon Bloomsbury. It hasn’t got any bigger on top but underneath it’s a rabbit warren, leading me down dark tunnels in search of the ‘Minema’ screen. This sounds small, and so it proves to be – so very intimate that the...
Post-Horror: Men / Bergman Island
by Martin | July 30, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
MEN I see that the Barbican are putting on a summer season of 'post-horror' films. Is that a film you see after a horror film, for light relief perhaps? Well no, apparently – it's just another iteration of our old friend 'elevated horror'. So the films in question...
Barbarous Mexico
by Martin | January 9, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Raindance! It’s the London film festival I always forget about, tucked as it is into the gap between Frightfest and the BFI London Film Festival but in 2015 I made it to one lunchtime screening at the Vue Piccadilly. It was busy, chaotic even, in the waiting area...
Frightfest 2015 Day One
by Martin | September 12, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
The Rotten Link Raulo and Roberta (Luis Ziembrowski and Paula Brasca) are two unlikely siblings: a simple-minded hulk, he looks old enough to be her father while she is a pretty young thing barely out of her teens. But they fit into their isolated Argentinian...
Peeping Tom (1960)
by Martin | July 17, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
I used to say that Michael Powell's Peeping Tom was my favourite film. That I don't say it now has nothing to do with the quality of the film or my changing perception of it; more, it's down to a realisation that there are too many films, and that I have too many...
The Voices
by Martin | May 4, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
A toy factory worker in a small American town, Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) is your standard eager-to-please psychotic passing for normal, at least until he starts ticking the box marked ‘serial killer’ by stabbing his indifferent love-object (Gemma Arterton) to death and...
Exhibition
by Martin | May 11, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Director Joanna Hogg's first two films – Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010) – are about upper-middle class English families on holiday in Tuscany and the Scilly Isles respectively. They were more interested in absorbing you in a landscape and situation than in...