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An Unquiet Grave is a remarkably simple but remarkably effective horror film. Two people, one camera, a handful of sets, kicking off with a scene at a graveside where grieving husband Jamie (Jacob Ware) meets Ava (Christine Nyland), the twin sister of his dead wife, Julia, and together they set off to resurrect the dead … Read more
Gaia is a South African horror film. Unusual enough. An eco-horror, a survivalist horror, a myco-horror and a Freudian horror too. And somehow, in among all that, it even manages a bit of old-fashioned girl-in-a-T-shirt horror titillation, a demonstration of its limber ability to play to and against horror expectations. The supreme example of this … Read more
With Elon Musk currently trailing his Neuralink “brain machine interface” idea as the future of inter-personal communications, how about The President’s Analyst, a 1967 movie that got there first? It’s called the Cerebrum Communicator – a brain implant that will render phone calls unnecessary – and comes at the familiar point in this spytastic spoof when … Read more
Films, like False Positive, about a pregnant woman pressured by husband, doctor and peers into taking a particular course of action, are always going to be compared to Rosemary’s Baby. There are no satanists in director/co-writer John Lee’s slice of modern gothic horror but he’s largely happy for his film to face that ordeal. Brave … Read more
Cruella, like Maleficent, gives a female baddie an origin story, and ends up in the same cul-de-sac, insisting that here is one of the female baddies for the ages, while at the same time asking us to sympathise with a poor Disney dear who’s been badly treated. 101 dogs’ breakfasts is the result. Since Emma … Read more
The Vanished stars three names who used to keep casting directors’ phones busy. Anne Heche, Thomas Jane and Jason Patric all bring a useful intensity to an incredibly wayward kidnap drama written by Peter Facinelli, whose face you’ll probably know (from the Twilight films, or Supergirl or Nurse Jackie on TV) even if you don’t … Read more
With its documentary feel and taste for the fantastical, Wendy walks in the shoes of Beasts of the Southern Wild, the Ben Zeitlin film that was one of the must-sees of 2012. Wendy isn’t going to fare so well, not least because that tune’s already been played. As the title hints, it’s a variation on … Read more
“I’m gonna go home and wank over your Instagram pictures, but not the ones with your mouth open,” Pete says to Mandy early on in Rare Beasts, Billie Piper’s patchily brilliant excursion into the ongoing joust that is male/female relations. Mandy (Piper, who also wrote and directs) has “big teeth”, big cartoon features generally, something … Read more
Keeping its cards close to its chest, almost until it’s too late, A Perfect Enemy is one of those low-budget Euro-thriller co-productions that also (eventually) makes some sense of its transborder elements, particularly its cast. There are only really two people, in a “starring” sense, in any case. The Polish actor Tomasz Kot you might … Read more
In the Earth is Ben Wheatley’s most overtly horror of horror films since he did the U is for Unearthed section of the portmanteau The ABCs of Death, though in films like Sightseers, High Rise and last year’s Rebecca horror has always lurked at the edges of his work. Made during the covid pandemic, and … Read more
The Tenth Victim is a textbook case of a cult film that’s actually no good. Released in 1965 and billed as sci-fi (it barely is), it’s a camp Italian spectacle combining the unique talents of Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastroianni, and just that cocktail – 1965, Italy, sci-fi (ish), Andress and Mastroianni – is plenty of … Read more
If you’ve never seen a screen version of Jean Cocteau’s short one-hander The Human Voice before, this one, starring Tilda Swinton and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, is a good place to start. There are plenty of others. Shelby Satterthwaite appeared in a Canadian version in 2019, Rosamund Pike in an adaptation by Patrick Kennedy in … Read more
