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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...

Censor / Surge

by Martin | October 10, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

CENSOR Prano Bailey-Bond's Censor makes a link between censorship and (emotional, psychological) repression that's pretty obvious, but the film has a knack of making the obvious work – which has the additional virtue of being thematically appropriate. After all, the...

Terror Firmer (1999) / Screamplay (1985) / Suture (1993)

by Martin | July 10, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

TERROR FIRMER Based on a memoir by Lloyd Kaufman, co-founder of Troma Entertainment, and director of many of its 'hits', such as The Toxic Avenger (also on this Czech DVD under the title Toxicky Mstitel), this film is essentially Kaufman's 8½. He plays a blind...

The Woods Have Legs – Three Films

by Martin | December 3, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Blair Witch The woods! A simple enough phrase but so ominously evocative – I was quite intrigued on discovering that director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett's film The Woods was due to premiere at Frightfest this year. I found much to enjoy in Barrett/Wingard's...

Our Time / Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

by Martin | September 7, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

OUR TIME There was quite a high turnout for this three-hour epic of directorial self-laceration from Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, although admittedly this was at the Minema screen at the Curzon Bloomsbury, which seats about 20 people. I had a guy ahead of me...

Enys Men / Skinamarink

by Martin | February 25, 2023 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

ENYS MEN Mark Jenkin's follow-up to the attention-grabbing and fiercely Cornish Bait is being sold as 'folk-horror' but it's a bit more experimental than that might suggest. I don't know if anyone has complained. Certainly I won't, since I enjoy an experimental film,...

The Angry Red Planet (1960)

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

There's often a sense in SF films, especially those of the 50's, that the real subjects of interest are not giant mantises or bug-eyed aliens but women. This is made explicit in director Robert Gordon's 1955 film It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955) where Faith...

Frightfest 2014: Cheerleaders, Show Pieces, and the Babadook

by Martin | September 14, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE As is well-known, the only way in which girls can achieve any kind of power in that hellish jock-dominated microcosm of American society known as high school is either by means of their bodies or through witchcraft. And witchcraft doesn't work. Or...

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...

Frightfest 2014: R100

by Martin | August 31, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

What's that you say? Are Japanese films still as bonkers as they used to be? Why yes, and here is the proof. In Hitoshi Matsumoto's beguiling oddity a furniture salesman (Nao Ômori) attempts to escape the drudgery of his existence (wife in coma, young son to raise) by...