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.
Rabid (1977) / Black Magic 2 (1976)
by Martin | June 10, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
RABID (1977) I watched this (on Arrow Video Blu-Ray) quite early on in lockdown, before the later symptoms of COVID-19 like frothing at the mouth with blue foam and biting people in the neck appeared. Oh no wait, that hasn't happened yet has it? Nevertheless this is...
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...
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...
FrightFest 2024 – Mental Health Issues
by Martin | March 1, 2025 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
The big screen at the relocated FrightFest (Odeon Leicester Square) is almost scarily big now: I couldn't face it. For single ticket buyers like me the seating options weren't promising anyway. So I stuck with the Discovery Screens and found myself in another cinema...
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...
45 Years
by Martin | October 24, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling play Geoff and Kate, a couple in their 70's who seem to think they are happily married until his ex-girlfriend Katya turns up, entombed in ice in a Swiss glacier and apparently unchanged since she fell into a fissure back in 1962....
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...
In Pictures 2: Rope (1948) /Possessor (2020)
by Martin | August 30, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
ROPE On the extras on my DVD of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope screenwriter Arthur Laurents nails several of the reasons why this adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's play (based on the Leopold/Loeb case in which a couple of students felt entitled to kill a 14 year old boy...
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...
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...