A Horror Film Blog

I am going to be controversial and say this revered film is only so-so. Yeah, I know, a real hot take on a film released 17 years ago. This is Pan.  He has a labyrinth. In a nutshell, for the three people who don't know nothin' about this film.  It is set in Spain during the Civil War.  A young girl, Ofelia, and her mother travel to a large house commandeered by fascist troops.  One of them their fascists - the commanding officer - is Ofelia's step-father and the father-to-be of the child Ofelia's mother is carrying. Ofelia soon discovers there is a whole whacky world of fantastic beasts living in the ancient labyrinth behind the house (rumours Jack Nicholson can be seen in a photograph on the wall can not be confirmed at this time.) One of these kooky characters is a faun who tells her to do a lot of stuff because she's actually a princess and if she does them she'll get her magic kingdom back.  So she does.  Meanwhile some plucky partisans are scrapping with t

A family shelter in an isolated cabin.  A hostile group of relentless marauders lay siege to them.  This is the stuff of many films, and it is also the stuff of 2017 Jackals .  A film about which the best thing you can say is it does what it sets out to do pretty well, and the worst thing you can say about it is it could have been a much better film. "Daddy, we will have a lot of things to talk through once this is over." The idea underpinning the narrative - a family attempts to 'deprogram' their son, the brainwashed member of a cult - was interesting and could have been developed a lot more. There was scope for an intriguing cat-and-mouse battle between the family and their ex-army deprogrammer, and the swivel eyed son; and the belief system of the cult could have been explored.  Instead, the intervention aspect is really just a MacGuffin, used to set up the plot of the film, because it requires these people to be in an isolated area so they can be assailed by the c

A young couple decide to have a weekend away at his daddy's beach house in a town perched on the edge of the ocean.  Damned if they don't choose the weekend of some terrifying ecological catastrophe for it. Emily and Randall smooch.  We don't get many essentially nice people smooching in horror films, so let's celebrate them. I enjoyed the first two acts of this of this film a lot. And they are distinct acts - the initial establishment and location of character, then confusion and mounting horror, followed by an action-orientated climax. I particularly appreciated the director's willingness to take things slowly and let unease and uncertainty build up. For the first half hour everything seems normal and mundane.  Our characters - Emily and Randall - arrive at the beach house.  They meet an older couple who are also planning on staying there.  Delightfully, and so unusually for films, no-one is unpleasant or acts like a total dick. Misunderstandings smoothed over and

Stop me if you've heard this one before ... Two women arrange to meet up with  male friends in an isolated cabin.  Once they get there, they find their friends are missing and are marauded by some distinctly unfriendly locals. "That's a warning sign, isn't it?  We should heed that.  We shoul go back ... Oh, wait, don't leave me alone ..." That is about as basic a horror film scenario as you can get, without involving babysitters and a masked killers.  The twist that makes The Retreat slightly - very slightly - different is that the cabin attendees are gay - two queer women meeting up with their queer male friends for a weekend away, unaware that the locals are distinctly unwelcoming to the rainbow community. It's not exactly a radical innovation - horror films have often focused on frowned-upon sexual activity, and you could argue the shift from villain to victim signals some advancement for the rainbow community.  But beyond this, the film is pretty obvio

I really enjoyed Neil Marshall's debut, Dog Soldiers , back in the day; and though I didn't understand what all the excitement was about, lots of people praised The Descent , because apparently feminism is two women in a cave arguing over who owns a man; and I am a sucker for people being trapped in a cave stories and even more so when there are flesh eating monsters, so I didn't not like that film. I can't think of anything amusing to say here, so I will say nothing. But The Lair is a very, very poor excuse for a monster movie - even if large parts of it are set underground and, yes, there are flesh eating monsters. It's an entirely predictable Aliens -but-in-Afghanistan nonsense. Plodding and dull, without surprises or innovation.  So, Lt Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk) is an RAF pilot deployed in Afghanistan.  We see Sinclair in a plane in the skies above Afghanistan, in the throes of getting shot down.  Then there is a brief flash back, to TWO DAYS EARLIER, as

Oh, dear. Why is it whenever a director wants to make a controversial, boundary challenging and confronting film, they cleave to precisely the same format?  Take a beautiful woman. Deposit her in an isolated location. Surround her by deviant, thirsty men. Have them rape her. Have her survive and exact bloody revenge. I call shotgun! This was the formula used back in 1978 for I Spit On Your Grave and (with slight alterations in the plot, allowing others to avenge the violation) Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972) and its original source, The Virgin Spring (1960) by Bergman; and probably further and further back. Sex and cinema have gone hand in hand since the first moving images were captured, and there is inevitably a point where the male gaze becomes the male touch. But those films were, in their way, transgressive and had purpose - at least sufficient justification to sustain a beery argument. Even I Spit On Your Grave , in spite of its flaws (and there are many