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.
White Devils: Get Out, The Transfiguration and Whity (1971)
by Martin | May 21, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
GET OUT In Get Out a black American guy Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) goes with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) to visit her (rich) family, only to find them a little overbearing in their acceptance of him. Sure, they're liberal, but as he wearily agrees with...
Power Games: The Childhood of a Leader and The Student
by Martin | February 18, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
THE CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER This is out on DVD now, I discovered it in Sainsbury's, the cast staring balefully out at me from the cover and seeming to condemn me for my lack of professionalism in not getting round to review this back in September 2016, when I...
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
by Martin | March 1, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
An Iranian vampire Western? Is this what the world really needs? On the evidence presented here – yes. Not that this is really Iranian, since it is shot in America and is set in a fictional (Iranian) place called ‘Bad City’. Not that it’s really a Western either,...
Frightfest 2018 – The Cleaning Lady, Braid and Piercing
by Martin | September 23, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
THE CLEANING LADY Frightfest is now 'owned' by Arrow Video, which makes sense. The only difference I could see was that there were a lot of free DVD's lying around, which I certainly wasn't complaining about (I'll save that for when I watch them). The first two films...
Pride And Prejudice And Zombies
by Martin | October 23, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
In theory this could be my ideal film, uniting art and trash with no middle ground; but there's a difference between theory and practice. I remember years ago, when I used to work in Waterstones, looking at the cover of the book this is based on and wondering if there...
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...
Frightfest 2019 Part One – Home Discomforts
by Martin | September 21, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Set in my ways as I am I prefer to buy my Frightfest tickets in person, at whatever passes for a 'box office' nowadays. Over the years this has become more and more difficult and now entails leaving it to the very last moment. This time around I thought my resistance...
Frightfest 2017: The Glass Coffin
by Martin | September 23, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Some kind of religious revival seems to be going on outside Frightfest's new (old) home, the Cineworld (formerly Empire) Leicester Square. A sign saying 'Repent or Perish' has been held aloft. I wonder if this is particularly aimed at the Frightfest crowd. Maybe it's...
The Devil’s Rain (1975)
by Martin | April 26, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
I've taken to listening to Shaun Keaveny on BBC6 Music in the mornings, via my TV – specifically Freeview 707. A couple of months ago my just-awoken fingers were fumblingly pressing those figures out on the remote and hesitated too long, inadvertently accessing 70, at...
Crimes At The Dark House and elsewhere – some films with Tod Slaughter 1937-1946
by Martin | August 19, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Crimes At The Dark House (1940) is nominally a version of Wilkie Collins' novel The Woman In White in which Tod Slaughter is Sir Percival Glyde – or rather he isn't, he's an impostor first seen hammering a tent peg into the real Sir Percival's left ear. Which is to...