A Horror Film Blog

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

Having watching Jane Schoenbrun's  We're All Going to the World's Fair it is almost impossible to say quite what I have watched. My initial comments on Shudder were condescending, faintly praising the director doing something other than a slasher clone.  There's an implied criticism in that, suggesting (not too far below the surface) that what ever they did they did not do it terribly well.  And I imagine a lot of people watching We're All Going to the World's Fair would have left it at that.  At best, a sporadically interesting attempt at micro-budget film-making.  At worst, a near unwatchable pretentious mess. But thinking about the film again as I tried to write this review, I found myself feeling much more positive and intrigued, about the film itself.  Its refusal to give a conventional narrative or establish a diegetic reality with observable rules prompted an intellectual response and forced me to either reject the project altogether (as I suspect many w

1988, Idiana.  Three girls attend a heavy metal concert, pick up some guys and take them to one of the girls' parents nice pad to drink, take drugs, play Never Have I Ever, get jiggy ... and carnage ensues. I will admit I watched wanting next to nothing in terms of mental stimulation, and was really in search of things lurid and sleazy.  But We Summon the Darkness was ... much better than I expected.  So much so that I didn't feel disappointed when it failed to deliver the lur and sleaze. Instead of a flatlining exploitation flick channeling Last House on the Left, what I got was surprisingly fun comedy.  The cast are good, the direction shows flair (and on one occasion, flare). "This is not what I meant when I said I wanted things to get hot!" While no-one will mistake the screenplay for Tolstoy (thank God) it is witty and clever, addressing the (resurgent, if it ever actually went away) conservative Satanic panic nonsense associated with rock music, drinking, drugs

This is a hilarious black comedy.  It has everything virtually apart from zombies - a creepy babysitter, a demonic child, a lunatic mother and a selfish, perverse father, child abuse, LSD, necromania, multiple murders, dead rabbits ... So much the script writers are clearly struggling to keep all the different plot elements moving in sync, but they just about pull it off. We meet Millicent attending at job interview as a baby sitter for a very high needs child.  Millie presents as 21-year-old, and says she is studying medicine.  She quickly forms a rapport with the boy, Johnny. Parents, Jacob and Rebecca, hire her. Turns out Millie isn't quite what she seems - addiction to LSD being just one 'problematic' aspect.  She casually disregards Becca's rules about child care - which are many - and seems not unresponsive as Jacob starts making advances on her.  And there is more, so much more, about her. Okay, so she's a psycho.  That isn't any big reveal.  It's si

This is authentically terrible.  Written and directed by hardcore musical legend (allegedly) Glen Danzig and drawing on stories and visual stylings of the verotik magazine established by hardcore publishing legend (very allegedly) Glen Danzig, this reeks of being a vanity project with a lot more vanity than project.  It just sucks, on any level. Now, if I say there all the stories are seedy, gory and rank with nudity, this will give entirely the wrong idea of what we are dealing with here.  It does not suck because it is morally repugnant.  It sucks because it sucks. It's just not good film making.  It isn't even good bad film making, or good nasty film making.    Perhaps calling it bad film making is being too generous.  It's just bad. The film comes in three part, each a brief half hour that is made to feel endless by the plodding inanity.  In the first part - a prostitute with eyes for nipples (why?) gets upset when a client is less than thrilled by her baby blue peeking