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.
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...
Kothanodi (BFI London Film Festival 2015)
by Martin | November 1, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Indian horror films are hard to come by – and this isn't one either, or not exactly. Nevertheless, Kothanodi (it means 'river of fables'), a compendium of four interlinked folk tales from Assam, is almost grim enough to qualify. In the most optimistic of these tales...
The Body Stealers (1969)
by Martin | June 11, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
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...
Mirror Mirror (1990) / Happy Deathday (2017) / Thelma (2017)
by Martin | September 9, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
MIRROR MIRROR 'Long may it continue', I said earlier in the year about the BFI's 'Cult' strand. Well now it has ended (though replaced by something very similar called Terror Vision) but at least its last showing, curated by feminist film collective the Final Girls,...
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...
Screen Time
by Martin | April 10, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
MYSTERIES OF LISBON (2010) Lockdown was a good time to finally sit down, maybe even lie down, and watch those films whose running time demanded an entire day devoted to them, and their extras. The Chilean director Raúl Ruiz, in the extras on the New Wave Films DVD of...
Everlasting Love (Amor Eterno)
by Martin | April 26, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Showing at BFI Flare, Marçal Forés’ Everlasting Love presents a more plausible woodland cruising ground than did Alain Guiraudie’s overpraised Stranger By The Lake, even if this one does feature teenage cannibals. Forés’ last (and first) film was Animals, which...
White Devils: Get Out, The Transfiguration and Whity (1971)
by Martin | May 21, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
GET OUT In Get Out a black American guy Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) goes with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) to visit her (rich) family, only to find them a little overbearing in their acceptance of him. Sure, they're liberal, but as he wearily agrees with...
Apples / In The Earth
by Martin | July 17, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
APPLES Who on earth, returning to the cinema after – well OK, during – a global pandemic would go and see a film that is about the pandemic, even if obliquely? About six people (including me) is the answer, if this afternoon showing is anything to go by. Apples seems...
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quay De Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
by Martin | April 14, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
CAUTION: Pre-lockdown content. May include allusions to leaving the house. Are there awards for audiences? Sometimes I feel that I deserve recognition for the efforts I make to catch one-off showings of alienating arthouse films – or at least, that they should pay me...