Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Dashed dreams and grubby hands reveal themselves to be the stuff of Edgar Wright’s nightmares in the stylish throwback Last Night in Soho. A ghostly haunter with one foot in the modern zeitgeist and one squarely in raging 1960’s London, Wright’s first foray into the horror grapples between serious social horrors and pure genre thrills, delivering a thoroughly entertaining slice of Giallo exploitation that warns of the temptation of nostalgia. Read More
Subtlety has never been the aim of James DeMonaco, the writer-director of the first trilogy of Purge flicks as well as screenwriter for the remaining sequels and all-around franchise figurehead, and that’s never been more clear than in The Forever Purge. Claiming to be the final film in the franchise that spawned four sequels and two seasons of a now-cancelled USA Network series, The Forever Purge puts our turbulent American politics front and center, creating a not-too-distant vision where MAGA-inspired insurrectionists continue the “legalized violence” at the film’s center beyond the allowed 12-hour window of the purge. A new dawn brings the continuation of violence as America enters a “forever purge”, a state of bullet-ridden eternal mayhem; a nightmarish ever after of racially-motivated violence. Read More
The Conjuring extended universe is one of the – if not the most – preeminent examples of a modern horror franchise done correctly. Expansive, with spin-offs shooting off into this direction or that, and an absolute box office powerhouse (with almost two billion dollars in worldwide gross), The Conjuring’s terrifying rein is vast. And yet with three separate offshoots, including a full-fledged Annabelle trilogy, and more on the way, the haunting force of the series that began in 2013 comes sputtering to a decidedly indifferent halt with The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Read More
John Krasinski’s Lee Abbott may have bit the dust in the actor-turned-filmmaker’s directorial debut but that doesn’t stop him from returning in the opening moments of A Quiet Place Part II. The scene is set as Marco Beltrami’s foreboding soundtrack creeps into our senses as a ‘Day 1’ title card slips into frame. The end is nigh but no one knows anything about the devastation barreling their way. In fact, it’s just another beautiful summer day in Small Town America. The Abbot family and their tight-knit community gather in blissful ignorance at a little league game. Marcus (Noah Jupe) is up to bat when the sky erupts in flaming streaks. Something is coming. Families break off into nuclear clusters, rushing to their vehicles, heading home to regroup. Before anyone has any sense of what’s happening, monsters reign down, killing anything that makes a sound. A quiet place is born, in flame and in blood. Read More
Little more than a collection of audio-visual horror movie clichès stitched atop a daddy’s-gone-for-the-night campfire tale, David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s The Djinn feels like a short film puffed out to feature length without the content sufficient to support said feature status. The film follows Dylan (Ezra Dewey), mute son to a late-night DJ and single father (Rob Brownstein) who decides to mess around with a haunted book and ends up summoning a djinn, which for the purposes of this film is basically an evil genie. Read More
In Devereux Milburn’s Honeydew, the window-dressings of dustbowl farmland hospitality flakes off to reveal a disturbing underbelly; one crusted with human sacrifice, religious devotion, and, more likely than not, a good-sized serving of man-meat. The flame has been long extinguished between Sam (Steven Spielberg’s son Sawyer Spielberg ) and Rylie (Malin Barr), a waiter/aspiring actor and botanist graduate student respectively, but the two head to rural Massachusetts with plans to camp out and do some research for Rylie’s thesis on a medieval wheat-based neurodegenerative disease. When they’re forced off the property of a grumpy old timer named Eulis in the middle of the night only to discover that their car will not start, they seek assistance at a nearby farmstead. You can probably guess where this goes next. Read More
There is a scene early on in the absolutely bonkers horror camp-fest Sound of Violence where murderess-musician-mistress Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown) kidnaps a homeless man and rigs him up like an electric drum set. Part-hardware, part-flesh, done up as if Kevin Mcalester and Jigsaw were there to help perfect the evil mastermind mechanics. A meat tenderizer dangles above his skull, a mallet aimed at his kneecaps, scalpels bisecting his wrists like cello bows. Alexis nervously puts on her earphones and gets to work. Read More
America never got past its Salem period in Elle Calahan’s allegorical social horror movie Witch Hunt. The only difference is, in Calahan’s world, witches actually do exist. The United States is a perilous place for those magical few; the practice of witchcraft has been banned and is punishable by death; families of convicted witches are forced into deep-cover and permanent hiding; their only hopes being smuggled south to the Mexican border where freedom from institutionalized prejudice looms. Read More
Eco-horror is having a resurgence of late, as are psilocybin mushrooms as a visual language in film. Jaco Bouwer’s formidable woodland creeper Gaia fits snugly into a recent wave of psychedelic folk horror, a subgenre that binds Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (a recent Sundance release that would make a pitch perfect double feature with Bouwer’s entry) and even Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Sparked by an increasing awareness of humanity’s abusive relationship with nature, eco-horror pits the survival of man and earth against one another and in the light of a global pandemic, those themes have never been as prescient. Read More
A few nights into a mysterious university sleep study, Sarah finds herself perusing a bookshop, pulled towards the Phillip K. Dick entries on the shelf. Jeremy, her primary researcher and maybe-stalker, suggests she give Dick a read, referring to his work as “hauntingly sad”. This description – hauntingly sad – accurately captures the weirdly affecting (and low-key terrifying) tonality of Come True, a descent into sleep paralysis and ancestral nightmares coming to life. Vividly tragic, but always in a darkly unspeakable way, Come True captures that in-between realm separating sleep and dreams and twists it into a malevolent manifesto about the collective terror that lingers in the mysterious netherworld of slumber. Read More