The Forgotten

Don’t Look in the Basement

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Mrs Callingham in close-up

All the way from 1973, Don’t Look in the Basement, which originally went by the title The Forgotten. The original is the better title – there isn’t much basement action going on here – and a more apt one, since this is something of a forgotten horror oddity. Being 1973 there’s something overtly and covertly pornified about it. Overtly in the casting of Playboy cover star Rosie Holotik as a new nurse at an out-of-the-way asylum run by one Dr Stephens (Michael Harvey). Covertly in the way it feels like it’s about to break into hot hardcore action at any moment. It never does. Some fairly random bare breasts to one side (in … Read more

2 May 2016-05-02

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Hayato Ichihara and Lily Frankie in Yakuza Apocalypse

Out This Week A War (StudioCanal, cert 15) The Danes do Afghanistan in a bloody, tense drama that takes a left turn about halfway through. That’s after we’ve been given a long immersive bath in war at its foggiest, leadership at its most difficult, focusing on Pilou Asbaek’s company commander Claus Pedersen as he takes his men out on patrol after a particularly bloody IED incident has left one of them with no legs below the knee, and his men having shown little enthusiasm for the “rebuilding the country” speech Pedersen has just given. After this, it’s a fairly familiar, though undeniably suspenseful journey through the dust, the evasive looks of the locals and the first-meets-third-world … Read more