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Three Against Nature

by Martin | June 10, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (1976) 'An insult to any audience' concludes the review of Lewis John Carlino's film The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (hereafter referred to as Sailor) in my damaged-in-transit Waterstones-freebie edition of the...

Gentrified Horror: The Nightcomers (1971) and Us

by Martin | July 21, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

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...

BFI London Film Festival 2021: Age and Agency

by Martin | January 30, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

LA ABUELA In this Spanish film from Rec director Paco Plaza, Susana (Almudena Amor), a fashion model on the verge of success, has to take a career break when her grandmother Pilar (Vera Valdez) has a brain haemorrhage and she has to go and look after her, at least...

Strait Jacket (1964) / Lizzie

by Martin | December 1, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

STRAIT JACKET Winding up the Joan Crawford season at the BFI was this William Castle production from the trashier end of her spectrum, though compared to Trog (1970) it's a masterpiece. The audience have come over-determined to giggle at a camp classic, and to be fair...

Kothanodi (BFI London Film Festival 2015)

by Martin | November 1, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

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...

Peeping Tom (1960)

by Martin | July 17, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I used to say that Michael Powell's Peeping Tom was my favourite film. That I don't say it now has nothing to do with the quality of the film or my changing perception of it; more, it's down to a realisation that there are too many films, and that I have too many...

Crazy About Love: Fingernails, Vincent Must Die, and Tchaikovsky’s Wife

by Martin | March 3, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

FINGERNAILS Love is lighter than air, sings Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields. It floats away when you let go. Love therefore needs to be grounded: in Greek director Christos Nikou's follow-up to his debut film Apples it is grounded in having your fingernails...

Burial Ground (1981)

by Martin | August 7, 2016 | movies, reviews, Uncategorized | 0 Comments

In the prologue to this plot-free Italian zombie opus, also known as The Nights of Terror, a professor raises the dead from an Etruscan tomb just in time for the arrival of a group of privileged merry-makers down for a weekend at the adjoining country house. With one...

Arrival

by Martin | March 18, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Denis Villeneuve's Arrival brings to our attention something about contact with alien life forms that to my knowledge hasn't been thoroughly explored up until now – how boring it might be. That's not to say that the film itself is boring – although it does hover on...

Frightfest 2021

by Martin | December 14, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

NIGHT DRIVE A mysterious fugue enveloped Frightfest last year – it's like it didn't really happen. But suddenly here I am again in the Empire Leicester Square, and – after a few 'missing' years - Dave is even back, and sitting next to me. It all feels suspiciously...