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Hereditary

Hereditary

In theory it ought to be possible to respond to a film without taking into account to the critical reaction to it, but once you are aware of that reaction and have seen it pasted on the sides of buses, there's not much you can do about that: it's already in you. But...

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A Cat In The Brain (1990) and Slugs (1988)

A Cat In The Brain (1990) and Slugs (1988)

A CAT IN THE BRAIN It may seem an odd thing to say of a film called A Cat In The Brain but - inured as I am to disappointment in such matters (almost counting on it, you might say) - the last thing I expected to see in it was a cat clawing at someone's (living) brain....

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Three Against Nature

Three Against Nature

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (1976) 'An insult to any audience' concludes the review of Lewis John Carlino's film The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (hereafter referred to as Sailor) in my damaged-in-transit Waterstones-freebie edition of the...

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Koko-Di-Koko-Da / Swallow

KOKO-DI-KOKO-DA (LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2019) Johannes Nyholm's film starts with a mother, Erin (Ylva Gallon) suffering a bout of food poisoning which leaves her face swollen so that she looks, as her husband Tobias (Leif Edlund Johansson) jests, like Freddy Kruger. The...

BFI London Film Festival 2017: Casting, 9 Fingers

In the toilets next to NFT2 a man was calling out for someone called Antonio – he had been asked to do so by a woman outside. Antonio didn't pipe up, although one of the cubicles was in use I noticed. Conceivably Antonio was inside - asleep, dying, or simply unwilling...

Caged Women: Hounds of Love, Berlin Syndrome, The Beguiled

HOUNDS OF LOVE In 1987 sullen Australian teenager Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings) seethes with resentment at her mum, who has chosen to split with surgeon dad, necessitating a move to a seedier part of town – still, things could be worse, as she soon discovers when...

Frightfest 2019 Part Two

BLOOD AND FLESH: THE REEL LIFE AND GHASTLY DEATH OF AL ADAMSON The Cineworld discovery screen offered up David Gregory's documentary about Al Adamson, the 60's /70's exploitation director responsible for such films as 1965's Psycho-A-Go-Go and 1971's Blood of Ghastly...

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

This was prefaced by a talk from BFI programmer Michael Blyth around LBGT horror which pleasingly focused on less obvious titles – The Ghost Ship, Homicidal, Alucarda – even if he did seem to be stretching a point sometimes. Passing allusions to Dr. Jekyll And Mister...

Horror Of The Blood Monsters (1970) / The Sky Trembles And The Earth Is Afraid And The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers

Sometimes all you need is a title – how can either of these films turn out to be anything other than disappointments? But this is the case with so much in life, and even before sitting down to watch them – in fact long, long before - I have already adjusted to this on...

A Brexit Trilogy

GOD'S OWN COUNTRY (2017) Brexit – is it humanity asserting its freedom to be perverse in the face of global capitalism, or is it just a backward-leaning movement composed of people whose preciousness about their 'British identity' makes you wonder who the real...

BFI London Film Festival 2017: Brawl In Cell Block 99 and Let The Corpses Tan

BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 Violence. It can leave a nasty taste in the mouth, and perhaps it ought to. Brawl In Cell Block 99 certainly left a nasty taste in my mouth, but I'm almost convinced that this was intentional. Not intentional as regards just my mouth of course....

Arrival

Denis Villeneuve's Arrival brings to our attention something about contact with alien life forms that to my knowledge hasn't been thoroughly explored up until now – how boring it might be. That's not to say that the film itself is boring – although it does hover on...

FrightFest 2023

FrightFest has a new sponsor and is now the Pigeon Shrine FrightFest. It has to be said that Pigeon Shrine isn't the most inspiring name – 'the Pigeon Shrine FrightFest' sounded suspiciously like a bargain basement version of the original, and my fears seemed to be...

Some more reviews.

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