On the big screen since February 2nd, Universal Pictures and M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Village) invites you to witness the apocalypse. Knock at the Cabin demands an hour and forty minutes of your time, perhaps as the credits roll you may wish it really was the end of the world. Based on Paul Tremblay’s 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World, the film takes a few liberties, becoming some...
Risking comparison to murderous doll flicks of yesteryear, M3gan swings gracefully on screen in January 2023 with mechanical grace and manic sass. Based on the promo material alone, one can be forgiven for passing the film off as a gender bent Chucky riff. This is a disservice. On viewing it is clear, director Gerard Johnstone, screenwriter Akela Cooper, producers James Wan and Jason Blum have cra...
Definitely do not have meat for dinner if you’re going to see the new coming of age thriller Bones and All, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Set in the 1980s Midwest, it is an adaptation of a novel with the same name by Camille DeAngelis. It follows two beautiful and oddly relatable young cannibals as they seek out the secrets of their pasts that lay hidden across a myriad backroads of the Midwest, a...
Is Halloween Ends a return to form or does the film continue the downward spiral that began with Kills? It is both. There, I said it. Once again, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride subvert the tropes this iconic series founded, attempting to pull the franchise in a different direction. But much like Halloween Kills, Ends feels like a (not a Halloween) movie, within a Halloween movie. In the eyes...
THE RETALIATORS is a completely gratuitous blood-fest of gore and violence. And I absolutely adored it. THE RETALIATORS tells the story of a handsome young Preacher and 100% Good Dad, whose eldest daughter is horribly murdered. The Preacher falls apart, and seems destined to destroy himself. Until the cop investigating the murder offers him the chance to take revenge on his daughter’s killer. Hone...
I’m not really too sure what I went in expecting from Bodies Bodies Bodies, the much anticipated new film from director Halina Reijn and A24 Films, but it wasn’t quite this. Billed as a horror-comedy, reviews ran that this painfully Gen-z slasher was going to herald a new wave of woke, self-reflective, gore filled romps; and while it is all of things, it leaves a lot to be desired. Beginning in a...
Below is a somewhat spoiler-y (though not as spoiler-y as its three minute trailer) review of Nope. I’m still not entirely sure where I land on the film, so please take the following appraisal as a first impression left on the stove for a few days and only just remembered. Nope stands for Not Of Planet Earth and may describe the state of Jordan Peele’s mind as he dreamed up his third feature ̵...
Based on a short story by Joe Hill, Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone is a well paced thriller that successfully crosses genre boundaries. Subverting expectations along the way is nice, but unfortunately the story telegraphs its main punches a mile off. This review contains spoilers, so if you wish to view The Black Phone impartially scroll straight to the last two paragraphs. Denver, 1978; A mas...
Alex Garland brings two of the most talented actors of modern cinema and theatre together, stacks the odds against one of them and gaslights an entire viewership in the process in Men, a gorgeously absurd new film that ponders the question: if a strange bloke turns up naked at your house but doesn’t actually get inside, has any harm been done? Garland takes a different approach at highlighting the...
Hatching is a festival award-winning Finnish horror film directed by a woman (Hanna Bergholm) who’d never made a full-length feature before. Appropriately titled Egō in the festival’s host country and Pahanhautoja (which the ever trustworthy Google Translate claims to mean ‘evil graves’) in its native tongue, the film contains an outer membrane of gooey unpleasantness and a delicious yolk full o...
There’s two things you need to know going into the Spanish horror film LA CASA DEL CARACOL (THE HOUSE OF SNAILS). There is a severe lack of snails The dog doesn’t die The dog shows up early on, standing on the side of the road like a pointy eared hitchhiker. Author and main character Antonio (Javier Rey) picks him up on his way to the isolated town in the mountains. Suffering writer’s block, Anton...
I’m not entirely sure what goes on at those culty gatherings hosted on MarsIsland (perhaps an Elizabeth Báthory approach to skincare) but it seems to work for probable real-life vampire Jared Leto, whose inability to age is, at this point, slightly concerning. It’s a shame, then, that his dedication to acting is not given the same priority as his quest for eternal youth. Known for going way too ha...
