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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...

Under The Skin

by Martin | April 26, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I took a half day off work to see this, and thus missed Ann Widdecombe on the Jeremy Vine show talking about 'What It Means To Be Human'. However, this offered a roughly comparable experience. An attractive alien disguised as movie star Scarlett Johanssen drives round...

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...

Frightfest Halloween 2018

by Martin | February 24, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

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...

The Substance / The Driver’s Seat (1974)

by Martin | November 10, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE SUBSTANCE Coralie Fargeat's The Substance is preposterous, which makes perfect sense. We're in the realm of showbiz, after all. Demi Moore is formidable as 'Elizabeth Sparkle', a fading star now fronting an aerobics show who is told by leering, vulgar producer...

THE UNTAMED RAW NOCTURAMA

by Martin | January 15, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE UNTAMED This London Film Festival showing represented my first visit to the Picturehouse Central. Entering, you feel like you've walked into a bar, and a busy one – and you have. Retreating in horror from all this socialising, which is not what I come to the...

Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965)

by Martin | May 29, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

At one point in this the man who I suppose we'll have to call the hero for want of any other more suitable candidate – Lt. Dave Madden ( Jan Murray) - is told that he has 'crossed a line'. Well this film has crossed a line before it's even started, as the credits roll...

The Hart Of London (1970)/Sodom (1989)

by Martin | May 23, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Experimental cinema – you either love it or you hate it. Or you don’t know what to think. The BFI’s Will Fowler assembled this double bill in January 2015 under the heading of ‘Transcendence’. And rightly so, I think. The Hart of London confounds our expectations from...

The Devil Outside / Permanent Green Light

by Martin | March 16, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE DEVIL OUTSIDE In writer-director Andrew Hulme's second film (after gangster drama Snow In Paradise, which I haven't seen but will be sure to catch up with – no doubt on London Live - one day) our adolescent hero Robert (Noah Carson) finds the disconnect between...

A Brexit Trilogy

by Martin | March 24, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

GOD'S OWN COUNTRY (2017) Brexit – is it humanity asserting its freedom to be perverse in the face of global capitalism, or is it just a backward-leaning movement composed of people whose preciousness about their 'British identity' makes you wonder who the real...