Select Page

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.

Under The Skin

I took a half day off work to see this, and thus missed Ann Widdecombe on the Jeremy Vine show talking about 'What It Means To Be Human'. However, this offered a roughly comparable experience. An attractive alien disguised as movie star Scarlett Johanssen drives round...

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...

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...

More Quite Good Films of 2014

L FOR LEISURE The fact that people are nostalgic for the 90's is beguilingly weird to me - I was there, and barely noticed them – but maybe this is why I enjoyed Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman's goofy, dreamy, possibly inconsequential L For Leisure so very much. It was...

Talk To Me / Asteroid City / Nope

TALK TO ME Directors Danny and Michael Phillipou come to us from YouTube, where they operate some sort of channel apparently, which may explain why this BFI showing was full of young people. They were probably taking advantage of the BFI under-25's offer (as if youth...

Empire of the Ants (1977) / Contamination (1980) / Alien 2: On Earth (1981)

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977) Bert I Gordon, director of such vintage extravaganzas as 1958's Attack Of The 50ft Woman briefly returned to cinema screens in the 1970's with a couple of films which were, nominally, adaptations of H G Wells stories, though B.I.G. (note...

Frightfest 2015 Day Three

Over Your Dead Body The vexing question of what to see and what not to see at these festivals often results in me scouring the internet for reviews from other festivals. It didn't do me a lot of good in this case since I found two reviews for OYDB, one of which...

Frightfest 2014: Bad Milo!

Frightfest has relocated from the Empire Leicester Square to the Vue Leicester Square, which seems to be a good thing. No more cramped Discovery Screens, we now have the run of numerous larger screens over several floors. And it's even nearer Burger King, where I sit...

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...

A Prince, The Animal Kingdom, Behind The Mountains and Birth/Rebirth

A PRINCE Pierre Creton's film featured in both John Waters' top ten and Sight and Sound's top 50, so it should have been made for me – but there's no accounting for taste. All I can say is that it certainly gives you the feeling that director/co-writer Creton knew...