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.
Amulet /Master
by Martin | May 2, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
AMULET Can horror be 'progressive'? Actor and now director Romola Garai talks about 'changing the narrative' of horror with her first film but I'm not sure that she's managed it (what is this 'narrative' anyway?) though she might have thrown a few spokes in its...
The Brand New Testament (BFI London Film Festival 2015)
by Martin | November 14, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Jaco Van Dormael's film might end up being remembered as the one where Catherine Deneuve sleeps with a gorilla, but that's the least of it. Benoît Poolvoorde is God, a middle-aged slob who never leaves his apartment and spends most of his time on his computer,...
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...
Final Destination: Bloodlines / Bogancloch / The Shrouds
by Martin | September 27, 2025 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES Horror franchises are noted for their unkillable villains, constantly being resurrected, but the Final Destination films cut to the chase in that the villain is death itself, and who is going to kill him? Or her. Or them. The films settle...
Weapons /Bring Her Back
by Martin | January 18, 2026 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
WEAPONS There was a lot of hype around writer-director Zach Cregger's follow-up to the promising Barbarian – I remember noticing a website ranking the characters in Weapons in order of how 'iconic' they are. No doubt it is old-fashioned of me to expect to wait a few...
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...
Damnation Alley (1977)
by Martin | August 9, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Given Roger Zelazny's reputation as an SF writer I can only assume that this is a bowlderized version of his 1969 novel. The very fact that it's showing at 8:00 of a Saturday morning on the Horror Channel suggests that it may not be very challenging. Still, I've set...
A Cure For Wellness
by Martin | March 25, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
A slice of Hollywood Eurogothic from Gore Pirates of the Caribbean Verbinski, this begins quite promisingly in a vein of deadpan camp – a mode which serves it well enough until it goes (almost literally) down the toilet. Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), a young, reptilian Wall...
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...
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...