Cat Person sinks its claws deep into the horrors of dating An archly-feminist Rashomon-inspired take on the “not all men” trope, CAT PERSON opens with arguably 2023’s most terrifying scene as, for a split second, we see Emelia Jones’ Margot standing blank-eyed beside an Icee machine and you think you’re watching another indescribably cringe-inducing Cineworld ..
Renfield is a horror comedy you can sink your teeth into. After the portentous self-importance of the DARK UNIVERSE announcement and the subsequent Cruise-led catastrophic misfire of THE MUMMY, how was Universal to take advantage of its storied back catalogue of horror icons? I doubt anyone could have guessed that the answer would have been ..
The power of Russell Crowe compels you to watch The Pope’s Exorcist When the Vasquez family arrive to take up residence in an old Spanish Abbey – a bequest from the recently deceased father – its not long before their son, Henry, starts acting strangely. As his condition worsens and his behaviour grows more extreme ..
The Black Phone is one horror call you’re going to want to pick up One of the more remarkable things about THE BLACK PHONE is its aesthetic. It looks and feels authentically late-1970s, so much so that you could believe it was genuinely made back then and only recently rediscovered. The most remarkable thing, however, ..
The Boogeyman is bogus, man I had high hopes for THE BOOGEYMAN. After all, when it comes to horror, it’s hard to resist a pedigree which boasts “From The Mind Of Stephen King” even if that doesn’t quite carry the same hallmark of quality cinematically that it carries in publishing, but the trailer was rock ..
Despite high concept marketing, an overreliance on jump scares leaves me stony-faced during Smile Adapted from his own 2020 short film LAURA HASN’T SLEPT, writer/ director Parker Finn takes the welcome approach of making SMILE a continuation rather than a rehash of the original, with Caitlin Stacey reprising her role of Laura and providing the ..
It’s tacky and it’s spooky, and also kind of kooky but still I take a looky at Friday The 13th Created intentionally to cash in on the audience response to John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN released two years previously, FRIDAY THE 13TH ended up becoming every bit as iconic as the movie whose coattails it was trying ..
As Insidious: The Red Door closes, let’s hope another one doesn’t open. INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR brings Patrick Wilson’s other horror franchise back to its main narrative thread after the previous two films in the series offered unnecessary and underwhelming forays into prequelisation, coming back to the Lambert family nearly a decade on from the ..
Unheralded at the time, The Unholy deserves a rekindling of faith. There’s not much that’s particularly cinematically original in THE UNHOLY, the directorial debut of veteran screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos (directing from his own screenplay adaptation from James Herbert’s novel THE SHRINE), but what I find remarkable about it is how closely it captures the ambiance ..
Evil Dead Rise sets out to Make Horror Grate Again! After the perennially troubled franchise failed to get a direct sequel to either ARMY OF DARKNESS, or THE EVIL DEAD (2013) or even a fourth season of ASH VS THE EVIL DEAD off the ground, the Deadites finally managed to return to cinemas in Lee ..
Knock At The Cabin delivers M Night Shyamalan’s most unexpected twist yet. Knock knock! Who’s there? Dave… Dave who? Dave Bautista in his most beefily earnest role yet as M Night Shyamalan stages a remarkable return to form with KNOCK AT THE CABIN. After the disappointment of OLD, he suddenly feels new again. When four ..
Horror’s answer to Where’s Wally is back in The Nun II Although I’ve had something of a love/ hate relationship with the horror genre over the years, one thing that’s always remained consistent is that horror based on Catholic iconography and catechism is like catnip to me, so it’s little wonder that THE NUN quickly ..
What better way to kick off 2023’s Month Of Spooks than with Halloween Ends? While it’s not unjust to suggest that David Gordon Green’s rebooted HALLOWEEN trilogy rivals the STAR WARS sequel trilogy for poor planning and even worse execution but the saving grace here is that where THE RISE OF SKYWALKER marked a nadir ..
The most humane thing would be to put this movie out of our misery It’s a rare movie indeed that can make me fundamentally question my love for cinema, but like Martin Scorcese finding himself at ComiCon, STRAYS made me do that. It even made me like dogs a little less. Crass but rarely clever, ..
Family matters as Blue Beetle narrowly avoids being a barrio bust Is it the end of the old or the beginning of the new? It doesn’t really matter as BLUE BEETLE is so studiously agnostic that James Gunn, Peter Safran and David Zaslav can take their sweet time making that decision while they plot the ..
She’s back! Sweetie G returns from beyond the veil to talk to us about Talk To Me Hey folks, Sweetie G here, long time no read!! Yep, it’s been a while since I was last inspired to put fingers to keyboard, but here I am, ready to talk to you about TALK TO ME, the ..
Bravura stunt work fails to mitigate the shortcomings in plot and dialogue that cause MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE to self-destruct. With Daniel Craig’s Bond having abdicated the long-held action crown in a Quixotic quest for prestige picture legitimacy, Tom Cruise has deftly manoeuvred and manipulated his one enduring franchise onto the vacant ..
Smoking Causes Coughing, Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist satire of superhero sci-fi, packs an unexpected punch. Systematically silly, SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING introduces us to “Tobacco Force”, France’s premier superhero team; wearers of spandex, defeaters of rubber monsters and moralisers on, ironically, the evils of smoking, there’s nothing they can’t do – except maintain team morale. Ordered by ..
This time it’s the years, not the mileage which weigh heavily on Henry Jones Jr For a film whose main – perhaps even sole – selling point is nostalgia, it’s an odd choice that it chooses not to dissolve from the still-present Paramount Logo into a diegetic mountain, instead substituting a Lucasfilm to locking mechanism ..
The Flash has plenty of heart but loses its soul to cynical CGI On paper, THE FLASH was not a movie that had a lot going for it. A lead actor mired in controversy and criminal legal difficulties, a lame duck cinematic universe marking time until it’s rebooted, and a broken and fragmented fanbase which, ..
Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts sinks to some pretty familiar lows It doesn’t seem that long ago that Travis Knight restored the long-lost spark to the Transformers franchise with BUMBLEBEE, erasing the excremental excesses of the Michael Bay era and starting the story afresh by paring it back to a very human-centred story featuring shapeshifting ..
Fast X is very much Dominic Toretto’s Infinity War For a franchise which features more heel/ face switcheroos than WWE (and, to be fair, more than its fair share of WWE alumni too), it’s fun to see it push its villains so far that even the seemingly endless Fast & Furious family willingness to embrace ..
Dammit, Janet! Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania fuses silly and sinister family secrets The 31st release of the MCU, ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA picks up the baton of a $29 billion-dollar-and-counting relay after the reprehensibly risible THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER and the maudlin earnestness of BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER and had me leaving the ..
Blumhouse replatforms screentime pearl-clutching with uncanny valley girl M3GAN It’s been a while since the concept of the singularity troubled the box office but with the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI-powered well, everything, permeating mainstream consciousness, it doesn’t take much intelligence – artificial or otherwise – to predict that Blumhouse, the McDonalds of horror, would ..
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, lost in grief, volunteers as tribute. Setting a new standard for “in media res”, Marvel’s BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER opens with a scene which echoes the ongoing Phase’s preoccupation with the multiverse only this time it’s a metatextual incursion as real-world events – the tragic death of Chadwick Boseman – bleed ..
Brett Morgen offers a fever dream of free-associating wanderings through Bowie’s thoughts, feelings and philosophies Much like its subject, MOONAGE DAYDREAM defies categorization and, at times, description. Brett Morgen’s indulgently realised collage of sound and vision simultaneously rejects convention and structure yet immerses you in Bowie’s life to the point where you feel at times ..
For a film that prides itself on a promise that you’ll never grow old, The Lost Boys has betrayed us all and turns 35 this year Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire. Thirty-five? How the fuck did this happen?? I did not approve this! ..
Michael Flatley’s so vain, he probably thinks this Blackbird (2022) review is about him. Full disclosure: I saw Michael Flatley’s BLACKBIRD at a private screening at my local Showcase Cinema. Not, you understand, a private screening by invitation or choice but more by audience judgement. I was the only person who’d bought a ticket. Perhaps ..
Jackass Forever is everything “I’m A Celebrity” wishes it could be, including likeable. If you’d told me, all those months ago, that the movie that finally get me back behind the keyboard would be JACKASS FOREVER, I would have thought you’d taken one too many blows to the head yourself. I’d always maintained a presumptive ..
Not even Christian Bale’s best performance to date can stop Thor: Love And Thunder from shattering a longstanding MCU consensus Of all the things I expected from THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER, being an unironic homage to STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER was not one of them and yet Taika Waititi’s fourquel opens with a ..