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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.

Ghost Theatre / Yakuza Apocalypse

GHOST THEATRE Hideo Nakata, director of the Ring movies and the excellent Dark Water returns with this theatrical tale that never comes to life – unlike the dummy being used as a prop in the play Ghost Theatre revolves around. The dummy's head, you see, comes from a...

Screen Time

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...

Theatre Of Blood (1973)

Mark Kermode once stated that anyone who said they'd guessed the ending of The Usual Suspects was lying. I have never quite forgiven him for this - I guessed it, but what proof do I have? Essentially he was out there calling me a liar and I had no redress. However, I...

The Secret of Dorian Gray (1969)

Ah, Valentine's Day – my favourite feast day, since my single status means I don't have to observe it. Nevertheless I was moved to recognise it to the extent of braving rail replacement services to get to the Barbican, where film programmer Josh Saco (aka Cigarette...

Norte: The End Of History

'You do know this film is four hours and ten minutes long?', asked the man doling out the tickets at the ICA. In fact, I knew about the four hours but not the ten minutes – but I said yes. He advised me to go to the toilet beforehand, as if I needed to be told. That...

Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1961)

Possibly for budgetary reasons, Kieron Moore plays both romantic lead and villain in this shocker from director Sidney J. Furie. In the former capacity he courts Hazel Court’s Nurse Linda Parker, who works at his father’s surgery in Cornwall, while in the latter he...

Goodnight Mommy

TV presenter Mommy (Suzanne Wuest) returns from plastic surgery with a bandaged face and a bad temper, so that her twin boys Elias and Lukas start to wonder if she's really Mommy at all, the question mark over her identity deftly conveyed in a scene where she plays a...

The Body Stealers (1969)

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...

Frightfest Halloween 2018

Yes I know, we are already well into 2019 but let me take you back, BACK to when the self-service checkouts in Poundland were still speaking in the voice of Bela Lugosi ('Have a spooooky day!') In truth I wasn't all that inspired by the films on offer at Frightfest...

LFF 2019: Jallikattu/Saint Maud

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...