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Damnation Alley (1977)

by Martin | August 9, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Given Roger Zelazny's reputation as an SF writer I can only assume that this is a bowlderized version of his 1969 novel. The very fact that it's showing at 8:00 of a Saturday morning on the Horror Channel suggests that it may not be very challenging. Still, I've set...

Emmanuelle 5 (1987)

by Martin | January 25, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

My interest in Polish director Walerian Borowczyck came about by accident. Back in the early 80's I saw his 1971 film Blanche described in the Daily Mail's TV listings as one of the most frightening ghost stories ever filmed - at any rate, this is what I remember. As...

45 Years

by Martin | October 24, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

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....

BFI London Film Festival 2017: Good Manners

by Martin | January 13, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

The first film by Brazilian directorial duo Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra was 2011's Hard Labour in which a woman's attempt to get her small business (a grocery store) off the ground is undermined by the corpse of a werewolf lurking behind one of the walls – and also...

The Colossus Of New York (1958) / The Alligator People (1959)

by Martin | May 27, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

In American monster movies of the early 50's the monstrous generally had a scientific explanation – of course the science didn't always stand up to close examination, but then it rarely got any. It was only required to generate panic - for the length of the film, at...

The Brand New Testament (BFI London Film Festival 2015)

by Martin | November 14, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Jaco Van Dormael's film might end up being remembered as the one where Catherine Deneuve sleeps with a gorilla, but that's the least of it. Benoît Poolvoorde is God, a middle-aged slob who never leaves his apartment and spends most of his time on his computer,...

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

by Martin | March 20, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

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...

LFF 2019: Jallikattu/Saint Maud

by Martin | November 14, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Ah yes, the London Film Festival. I remember that. Well it did happen this year, it was just 'different' – they even tried to suggest that the festival we had (mostly online) represented some kind of exciting innovation rather than an attempt to pretend that a film...

Mothra (1961)

by Martin | July 12, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

After a self-imposed double-bill of Camille Claudel 1915 and Miss Violence at the Curzon Soho, what better way to cool off than with a showing of Mothra, at the Prince Charles off Leicester Square? So I reasoned. And it only cost a pound, if you were a member. I was....

The Manster (1959)

by Martin | June 12, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

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....