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 ...

I enjoyed this.  It is obviously a low budget effort, with just three actors and a limited set (cabin / woods) but whatever money they had was spent wisely, getting capable performers and splashing out (pun intentional) on lots of gory wolf action. Has anything nice ever happened when people go to an isolated cabin in the woods? The first half is building up characters and relationships.  The second half is a fight for survival against some mean doggos.  Neither part is quite on-the-money but it is still engaging enough.   The characters and the conflicts are  a bit stock - you get the feeling we're in a mash up of the Hunger Games (Tough girl with bow in a love triangle with her rugged best friend and her soft city boyfriend) and ... uh ... something with wolves.  But the acting and setting is good.   The mis-en-scene helps you work out it is a love triangle, and it ain't the boys who are hot for each other The second half feels a bit rushed...

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 w...

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...

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, drug...

 A frustrating missed opportunity to do something awesome. There are some tropes that never get old, in my humble opinion.  One of the oldest, most over-used yet evergreen is the one about the squad of tough-as-nails  (or, less often smart-as-fuck scientists) who have to investigate a Terribly Mysterious Happening and discover Things Man Was Not Meant To Know that eats their faces before the Plucky Final Guy / Girl blows it up or flushes it into space or whatever.  Love it.  Any film like that is almost guaranteed a sympathetic viewing - and (weirdly) the closer they stick to the template the better they mostly are.  Mostly. Milena Radulović spends almost the entire film looking various sorts of bad ass. Which is what makes Superdeep disappointing.  In theory, it should be among the greatest of such films - it is essentially The Thing and Aliens and a bunch of lesser genre examples ( Leviathan , Ghost Ship , Event Horizon ) stuck into a blender and ...

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...

I have vague memories of watching this film years ago.  I remember not liking it very much.  Seeing it appear on Shudder, I thought I would revisit it, in case I had judged it unfairly. Perhaps.  It's an okay film, blessed with a good cast and budget 'all on screen' as they say; but it struggles to put its story across convincingly. Torches.  There are a lot of torches in this film.  at least these guys came prepared. The producers include Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver.  Big name producers guarantees a decent budget and access to resources but it also puts some limitations in terms of tone and story.  It can't be too dark, it's a Robert Zemeckis film.  It has to be brash and loud and in-your-face, it's a Joel Silver film. So, to the story.  A crew of rugged, tough-as-nails salvagers are commissioned by a completely unsinister stranger called Ferriman (geddit?) to locate and salvage a liner that has been drifting in the Bering Sea for 40 yea...

This Italaina film, directed by Lorenzo Bianchini, is a curious effort.  It is pretty much setting and atmosphere in search of a story.  There are some very ambitious ideas here - the film is virtually a one-man show, with our attention centered squarely on wildlife researcher Marco Contrada (played by Renzo Gariup) who wanders into an old abandoned village, redolent with menace, and finds himself somehow unable to leave. It starts brilliantly - the first half is an assured demonstration of building up unease, as Marco potters about putting cameras on foxes and so on, before exploring the obviously doom laden abandoned village. Even with essentially one character and virtually no dialogue, it is is fascinating. The use of sound is particularly good - every crunch of gravel, scrape and creak seems to intimate a mysterious danger. The cinematography is brilliant - stark and drained of colour, to the point where it seems we are watching a series of sepia photographs come to life....

This is not the other current film called Julia , which is a documentary about well known cook, writer and television personality, Julia Child. This Julia is a glossy, slickly made rape-revenge film starring Ashley Williams. So it pretty much goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway) that there are likely to be trigger warnings for rape and sexual violence. Rape-revenge films are always going to be challenging.  I am not opposed to the topic of rape being used in art.  After all, I like films in which people are terrorized, tortured and murdered.  Rape is, on an objective level, just another terrible thing that can be done by one human being to another.  it is interesting to observe, however, as a society how we seem far more comfortable with murder and evisceration than we are with rape. We'll laugh at some dumb lummox getting chopped into little pieces, and jeer as the blubber about it.  But as soon as rape is involved it becomes much more .... problema...