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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.

Frightfest 2014: The Green Inferno

Movies such as Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox and Ruggero Deodato's powerful Cannibal Holocaust really do seem to belong to a certain time and place – 70 and early 80's Italy – so it was intriguing to see how Eli Roth of Cabin Fever and Hostel fame would fare in...

Salvo

Mafia hitman Salvo (Saleh Bakri) kills a guy but instead of despatching his sister Rita (Sara Serraiocco) - a witness to the crime - he chooses to hide her in an abandoned factory and keep her fed and watered. Why? Love? Pity? Or is he caught on the horns of a...

Frightfest 2014: Open Windows, Nekromantik and Der Samurai

OPEN WINDOWS In an age when you can watch films on your phone, here's another novelty – going to the cinema to see a film whose action takes place entirely on someone's laptop screen. I think it did, anyway – I was frankly a little befuddled by the end. Bear in mind...

mother!

The release of Darren Aronofky's latest film was preceded by a director interview by Trevor Johnston in Sight & Sound urging viewers not to read it until they'd seen the film, since (even more than is usually the case) the more you knew about this film in advance...

Theatre Of Blood (1973)

Mark Kermode once stated that anyone who said they'd guessed the ending of The Usual Suspects was lying. I have never quite forgiven him for this - I guessed it, but what proof do I have? Essentially he was out there calling me a liar and I had no redress. However, I...

Horrors Of The London Film Festival 2019

DEERSKIN Horror films have fielded some unlikely 'monsters' over the years and director Quentin Dupieux has already supplied a notable one with 2010's Rubber, whose 'villain' was a spare tyre. His new film explores the malign potential of a jacket. Filling it out, and...

45 Years

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling play Geoff and Kate, a couple in their 70's who seem to think they are happily married until his ex-girlfriend Katya turns up, entombed in ice in a Swiss glacier and apparently unchanged since she fell into a fissure back in 1962....

Pacifiction/Infinity Pool/The Outwaters/Beau Is Afraid

PACIFICTION Back in 2013 I almost killed myself hurrying from a London Film Festival showing of Denis Coté's Vic And Flo Saw A Bear on the South Bank, to Albert Serra's Story of My Death in Leicester Square. Given the title of Serra's film, it would have been an...

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,...

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...