bertrand bonello

Zombi Child

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The girls have a midnight feast

There were zombie movies before George Romero came along and shook the genre up in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead and at first Zombi Child looks like it’s harking back to an older tradition of zombie movie, like 1932’s White Zombie or 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie. We’re in Haiti in 1962, where an opening shot shows us someone assembling something nasty-looking from various bits of pufferfish innards and other voodoo bits and bobs. The resulting powder is then put into a man’s shoes. The man “dies”, is buried, disinterred and in short order – this all taking about five minutes of screen time – is working on a sugar … Read more

House of Tolerance

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Alice Barnole, Céline Sallette and Jasmine Trinca in House of Tolerance

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 February Cynthia Payne acquitted of running a brothel, 1987 On this day in 1987, 54-year-old Londoner Cynthia Payne was acquitted of being a madam and living off the immoral earnings of others. She’d been arrested before, in 1978, when her suburban sex parties for pensioners had attracted the attention of the newspapers, not least because she accepted Luncheon Vouchers as payment for activities including being spanked by young ladies. On the first occasion she’d been sentenced to 18 months in prison, reduced to six months on appeal, of which she served four. Payne’s notoriety stemmed in large part from her … Read more