A Horror Film Blog

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 m...

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.  I...

 In his 80s, Dario Argento could be forgiven for not bothering any more, or for having absolutely nothing left to shock or surprise us with.  Glad to report, he still cares a bit, and he can still startle his audiences, though not with the trade mark gore you might expect. His last few efforts - Giallo was described as "a deeply disappointing work from a director who seems to be yellowing with age, his vision progressively jaundicing" and Marc Kermode - perhaps forgetting he was talking about a Dario Argento film - decried it as a "depressingly sleazy shocker."  Marc, sleazy and shocky are what makes a good Argento film. Sleazy, geddit?  Mark? And before that there was The Third Mother , an incoherent (again, an expected trait in any Argento film) banal (very un-Argento quality) conclusion to the sequence started with the mind blowingly lunatic Grand Guignol brilliance of Suspiria . So it comes as a pleasant surprise to encounter Dark Glasses , a likeable late ...

 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...