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BFI London Film Festival 2017: The Wound, Most Beautiful Island

by Martin | January 28, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE WOUND Up for the Sutherland First Feature Award was this South African tale whose hero Xolani (Nakhane Touré) returns every year to the countryside to become a 'caregiver' to initiates in a tribal ritual wherein boys become men by dint of such activities as...

Kinoteka 2019. Monument

by Martin | May 4, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

'It won't be easy', warned writer-director Jagoda Szelc before her second film began, which was possibly an example of what she later referred to as her as her 'dry humour' – does anyone go to the Polish Film Festival expecting uncomplicated fun and games? Not that...

Burke And Hare (1971)

by Martin | January 26, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

This is director Vernon Sewell’s last film and there’s something fitting about that: after two ventures into the more fantastical side of horror (The Blood Beast Terror and The Curse Of The Crimson Altar from 1966 and 1968 respectively) neither of which went out of...

Sins Of The Fleshapoids (1965)/Orphans Of The Cosmos (2008)

by Martin | January 18, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I settled down for this Kuchar Brothers double-bill at the BFI with three cushions (Christmas presents for Mum) in carrier bags, a burden bulky enough to suggest that I should have splashed out on another ticket. With an amused gay man on my left and Brian Sewell...

The Mad Ghoul (1943)

by Martin | January 2, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Director James Hogan's film begins with an unusually delicate situation for a mad scientist flick – the heroine Isabel (Evelyn Ankers) has fallen out of love with the hero Ted (David Bruce). Isabel confides this melancholy fact to Dr. Alfred Morris, Ted’s chemistry...

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...

Frightfest 2017: Outliers

by Martin | November 5, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

DHOGS I'm a genre lightweight really, a dilettante. Of all the films I saw at Frightfest this year, only one – The Glass Coffin - could really be called a horror film, and that was probably the least of them. Why, I wasn't even wearing a black T-shirt. Dhogs isn't...

Frightfest 2022

by Martin | December 18, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

'Keep On Rollin', says a T-shirt on a little girl outside the Prince Charles Cinema, which I at first imagined was a reference to Jean Rollin, French director of sex vampire films and subject of the documentary Orchestrator of Storms, showing at Frightfest. The image...

LFF 2018: Tumbbad / The Nightshifter

by Martin | January 13, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

TUMBBAD Indian horror films are something of a rarity, but Kothanodi was one of my highlights of 2015's London Film Festival, and that was a horror film – sort of. This one, my first film of this year's festival, definitely is - or wants to be. It begins with an...

Longlegs / Only The River Flows

by Martin | October 16, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

LONGLEGS Longlegs has been subject to a lot of hype claiming that it is the scariest film of the year or decade or maybe even century, and it certainly maintains a tense and creepy atmosphere throughout, but the scariest moment comes before the credits, where the...