Nicolás Onetti

What the Waters Left Behind: Scars

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Sophie in her red halter top

No prizes for guessing that What the Waters Left Behind: Scars is a follow-up, to 2017’s What the Waters Left Behind. Or for guessing that it’s going to feature another gang of good-looking young people being given a maximally bad time in the same bleak, blasted evacuated city by some gnarly old guys. Torture porn they used to call this stuff back in the day. The original was directed by the double-teaming Onetti brothers, Nicolás and Luciano, but it’s just Nicolás this time out. Luciano is still on board, supplying the atmospheric score that’s a key part of the film’s success. If you like this sort of thing, which I don’t particularly. If … Read more

The 100 Candles Game

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Alicia Gerrard in the segment Blight

Compendium horror – who’s it for? That question formed in my mind as The 100 Candles Game told its seven different stories, plus another one that links them all together, Arabian Nights style. Are audiences hungry for this sort of thing? I don’t think so. Film-makers love the portmanteau horror film, though, because it gives directors a chance to hawk their wares, in affordable chunks, often supported by a producer who knows his way around the business. But on the whole they are patchy affairs, usually a mix of the OK, the pretty skanky and, rarely, a magnificent outlier. There is no true magnificence here, though the film-makers on display are a lot … Read more

Abrakadabra

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Lorenzo the troubled magician

2018’s Abrakadabra rides the giallo revival like an ace jockey, completing in one hour nine minutes what the likes of Amer, Berberian Sound Studio and Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses spent much more time over, packing it all in and then doling it all out atmospherically. For all its race-winning form, it never feels hurried. It’s a gory story about a magician, told like a magician’s trick, with plenty of misdirection – “What the eyes see and the ears hear the mind believes,” we’re warned in a written preamble, a quote from master magician Harry Houdini, apparently. And then we’re off into a story about a stage illusionist whose trick goes badly wrong, resulting in … Read more