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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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Burke And Hare (1971)

This is director Vernon Sewell’s last film and there’s something fitting about that: after two ventures into the more fantastical side of horror (The Blood Beast Terror and The Curse Of The Crimson Altar from 1966 and 1968 respectively) neither of which went out of...

Microwave Massacre (1983)

It's a truism that when horror goes wrong it can easily turn into comedy – but what happens when a horror comedy goes wrong? Microwave Massacre, available on Arrow Video, provides one possible answer - a vision of Hell made all the more hellish by the awareness that...

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

An Iranian vampire Western? Is this what the world really needs? On the evidence presented here – yes. Not that this is really Iranian, since it is shot in America and is set in a fictional (Iranian) place called ‘Bad City’. Not that it’s really a Western either,...

The Body Stealers (1969)

I seem to remember this showing late at night on ITV back in the 70's, but I never bothered to stay up watching it, and quite rightly as I was surely too young to appreciate how bad it is. Now it's showing on a Saturday morning on Movies4men, at a time when, back in...

Gentrified Horror: The Nightcomers (1971) and Us

THE NIGHTCOMERS In Nick Pinkerton's positive Sight and Sound review of Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (which I thought was shit by the way) I first encountered the phrase 'gentrified horror', a pejorative term for the kind of upmarket horror that plays to...

Privilege (1967) / Duck Soup (1933)

PRIVILEGE On this BFI DVD you get a couple of early short films from director Peter Watkins, one of which is 1961's The Forgotten Faces, an urgent, authentic-seeming account of the 1956 people's uprising in Hungary, filmed in Canterbury. Therein lies the moral of much...

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies

In theory this could be my ideal film, uniting art and trash with no middle ground; but there's a difference between theory and practice. I remember years ago, when I used to work in Waterstones, looking at the cover of the book this is based on and wondering if there...

In Fabric / Little Joe

IN FABRIC Peter Strickland's follow-up to the excellent Duke Of Burgundy is a bumpier ride, but you get to enjoy that after a while. Apparently it's set in 1993 – I read this on the Sight and Sound letters page – but it seems to be taking place in some kind of...

The Voices

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...

Power Games: The Childhood of a Leader and The Student

  THE CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER This is out on DVD now, I discovered it in Sainsbury's, the cast staring balefully out at me from the cover and seeming to condemn me for my lack of professionalism in not getting round to review this back in September 2016, when I...

Some more reviews.

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