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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.

The Entity (1982) / Night Watch (1973)

THE ENTITY It has always struck me that the general tone of life in America is one of hysteria. When I said this once to my cousin, who lives in Texas, she maintained that, rather than hysterics, Americans are 'survivors'. If someone claims to be a survivor merely on...

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...

The Devil Outside / Permanent Green Light

THE DEVIL OUTSIDE In writer-director Andrew Hulme's second film (after gangster drama Snow In Paradise, which I haven't seen but will be sure to catch up with – no doubt on London Live - one day) our adolescent hero Robert (Noah Carson) finds the disconnect between...

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...

Killer’s Moon (1978)

I've always been put off by Redemption DVDs because they seem to be marketed at sadomasochistic lesbian vampire Goths and (moreover) their male admirers - and I am neither. Look beyond the packaging, however, and you will often find a decent transfer of a hard-to-find...

Kothanodi (BFI London Film Festival 2015)

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...

Frightfest 2014: Cheerleaders, Show Pieces, and the Babadook

ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE As is well-known, the only way in which girls can achieve any kind of power in that hellish jock-dominated microcosm of American society known as high school is either by means of their bodies or through witchcraft. And witchcraft doesn't work. Or...

Amulet /Master

AMULET Can horror be 'progressive'? Actor and now director Romola Garai talks about 'changing the narrative' of horror with her first film but I'm not sure that she's managed it (what is this 'narrative' anyway?) though she might have thrown a few spokes in its...

The Manster (1959)

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....

London Film Festival 2019: Vivarium / Scales (and End Of The Century)

VIVARIUM Director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garrett Shanley's second film sadly doesn't manage to fulfil the promise of their previous feature, 2016’s Without Name. The LFF brochure compares it to The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror but while it could pass for one of...