A Horror Film Blog

Very simple, plot wise - a couple buy a house in rural Scotland and almost immediately are targeted by a group of hostile locals who break into the house with evil intent. The couple try to escape. That's the whole story - there is no subplot, no interactions with the locals to suggest motive, no small 'precursor' building up of hostile actions - just straight into the home invasion. Clearly, these guys (meaning either hostiles or the film makers) don't have time to muck around.  It's actually refreshing to find a film where the antagonists are this direct and don't go through an preamble of putting dead birds in mail boxes or kidnapping family pets. This allows the film - even at a lean 80 minutes - to focus on a protracted cat-and-mouse sequence as Sarah and Ed try to survive their night of Hell.  A quaint house warming ritual I liked how the characters were not designed to be likeable or sympathetic - quite the opposite, they are a couple of big city English ...

Downrange , directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, is okay, in a sort of super reductive way.  Instead of standard stalk'n'slash fare, which usually being stalked across various locations and slashed one by one, or even trapped in one fairly large location with lots of hidey-holes, this film is limited to one, very small location - the lee side of a car, with a sniper taking potshots at any part of the luckless road trippers huddling on the far side of their crippled vehicle.  It's impressively minimalist, and that bare-basics attitude is applied to the script as well as the narrative.   We get virtually nil character development beyond some basic young slash fodder stereotypes.    This isn't Wolf Creek , which took its time and developed pleasant, rounded characters before making bad things happen to them in the second half.   The sniper is never given any motivation or development - though we are allowed to see him - something denied his victims until the...

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...

An effective but uneven folk horror from the Netherlands, a place not generally associated with unspeakable ancient evil steeped into the soil ... but is the real monster the atrocious dubbing? Sorry to bother you.  We're here to talk about the terrible ancient curse afflicting your bloodline.  Can we com in? Moloch is a mixed bag.  First of all, the dubbing is terrible.  Characters speak without moving their lips and then their lips flap for several seconds after the finish their lines - which are rendered in unemphatic fashion by voice actors who sound bored rather than terrified or annoyed or aroused.  Why, couldn't they have stuck subtitles on?  The set of people who are willing to soldier on in spite of the dire dubbing is identical to the set of people who will read subtitles.  Why degrade their experience by this travesty? But that said ... Beneath this superficial issue is a good film, made in a very small way and with a tight, claustroph...

Finally, after a long line of grotesque, sadistic and exploitative trash masquerading as horror I stumbled upon  Offseason  , directed by Mickey Keating, a near brilliant film. It will be appreciated by those who like atmosphere, suspense and the horror arising from being trapped; but disappoint those who like gore, jump scares, nudity and on camera eviscerations. "Just try and blend in, everything will be fine." Keating seems to have gleaned a lot of information about Things I Like and put them all together in one place: films that centre on strong female characters; abandoned places; a pervading sense of doom or punishment for crimes known or unknown; and that mysterious hinterland where the land becomes the sea.  It's also a very Lovecraftian films without actually invoking Lovecraft. So it has a nodding acquaintance with films like Carpenter;s The Fog (there  is s lot of fog billowing about the empty streets in Off Season); the magnificent Messiah of Evil directe...

It took me a while to catch up with this loose Lovecraft adaptation.  In fact, it has taken me over two decades.  Even great Cthulhu, locked in aeon long slumber in sunken R'lyeh, thinks I'm taking things a bit slowly. The reason for my dalliance is fear.  Not of being scared of the film - I'm familiar with the concept of fiction and I'm pretty sure that's what Lovecraft was writing - but being scared of disappointment.  When it comes to Lovecraft adaptations there are very few good ones.  Reanimator ?  Give me a break.  It's a lurid, trashy comedy with an unpleasant streak of 80s misogyny running through it. So I viewed Dagon with trepidation, especially when I learned the man behind the camera was none other than the director of Reanimator and self appointed master of Lovecraft adaptations, Stuart Gordon.  The man is certainly a trier, still seeking to convince the world of Scary Movie that it should really be interested in the profoundly unfu...

This Australian film is on Shudder, but it isn't exactly a horror film - look elsewhere if you want gore or shocks. It is, however, a very well made film and Quentin Tarantino's championing has helped get it some much deserved attention.   The plot does revolve around the search for a serial killer - kind of - and there are some well crafted suspense sequences, so if you need justification for its inclusion here, there's that. It's a semi-comic thriller built on three great performances - Stacey Keach as the trucker Quid; a hound credited as 'Killer' as his 'dingo' companion; and his truck as ... his truck. All roads lead to Rome, but what road diverted Jamie Lee Curtis to Australia in 1981? It's worth taking a moment to consider how Stacey Keach manages to be brilliant in many remarkable films (this one; Fat City; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) but inexplicably hasn't enjoyed the success of lesser actors. More intensity, Stacey! While we are on t...

 This film answers the all important question that I know has been keeping many of us awake at night: what would have happened if Jean Luc Godard had decided to make horror films? That might sound frivolous but I can't think of any other way to characterize this remarkable film.  It might be the greatest  Nouvelle Vague  film made outside of France.  It feels like some strange piece of Euro art-horror, only it (thankfully) eschews the 'artistic' nudity and 'daring' sexual transgressions that that pretty much goes hand-in-hand with the territory. A woman arrives in a small town and immediately hooks up with some dissolute bohemian types.  It turns out the locals are all vampires, or zombies, or something like that.  There is a lot of nothing happening for ages, and then scenes where things happen but don't really seem to make sense.  It feels like key moments or important dialogue has been carelessly left on the cutting room floor ... And if that s...

The Marshes , directed by Roger Scott, is an Australian film about a team of ecologists who get lost in an endless Australian swamp, while some malevolent force menaces them. Boffins Priya, Ben and student Will are conducting environmental research in a vast isolated wetland.  At first the evil seems human: Priya encounters a gnarly local at a gas station and inevitably they encounter him again in the swamp.  Ultimately, however, he is the least of their problems. We gonna be just fine in this here swamp. The Marshes feels like it is trying to be a mix of Wolf Creek and The Blair Witch Project , and this doesn't work too well. The first half - the Wolf Creek part - is promising, playing on the perennial Australian fear of the Bad Man in the Outback.  Nothing too original happens but it shows promise - which makes the failure to realize that potential more disappointing. We're introduced to our main characters and the initial premise with economy.  The conflict with...