By Cleaver Patterson. In these days of run-of-the-mill schlockfests it appears Southern Europe is fast becoming the place to go for cutting edge horror. Hollywood seems stuck in the belief that the teenage slasher genre is still alive and well, whilst Britain thinks that featuring television comics such as Ross […]
Gangster Squad, Tearing Through Tradition
By Matthew Sorrento. Gangster Squad begins with Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), the King of Los Angeles, showing a different kind of power, as he boxes while another character describes him in voice over. Even casual viewers of recent crime films recognize the voice to be Josh Brolin’s, playing an L.A. […]
North Sea Texas (2011)
By Mark James. Throughout the 90s, Belgian filmmaker Bavo Defurne showcased his highly stylized sensibility in a series of queer-infused shorts that reflected overt influences from Derek Jarman, Pierre et Gilles and Jean Genet. He explored timeless queer topics: teenage love, compartmentalizing complex emotions, and fetishizing the unattainable. With his […]
Lazy and Exploitative: The Impossible (2012)
By Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible opens with a title card reminding us of the tsunami of December 2004 and of its 230,000 victims, followed by the announcement that the film is based on true events. Then the text fades away until all that’s left are the words […]
The Philosophy of the Double Bill (Or, How To Stop Worrying and Love Technology)
By Sarah Myles. The perfect double bill is an elusive, mythical thing. A single entertainment event comprised of two unique artistic expressions. A tradition steeped in social history and Hollywood controversy, the evolution of which has shaped our cinema trips for decades and shapes our home-cinema experiences today. First becoming […]
Texas Chainsaw 3D adds no new dimension to Leatherface saga
By Cleaver Patterson. There was a time when the inclusion of 3D in a film title suggested a degree of novel originality. Unfortunately those days are long past with the process now used in horror films to produce little more than substandard cliché shocks, beggaring the question why Texas Chainsaw […]
Fifties Hysteria Returns: Doomsday Prepping in a Culture of Fear, Death, and Automatic Weapons
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Consider Your Man Card Reissued” (Print ad for Bushmaster Firearms) I write this as I watch in sadness, surrounded by a bank of televisions at the gym, all conveying images of the “theatre” of war that is now America at Christmas in 2012. The slaying of […]
Surrealism and Sudden Death in the Films of Lucio Fulci
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Dedicated to the memory of Rick Lopez. The films of Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror filmmaker, are usually lumped in with those of other ‘gore’ specialists, but it seems to me that this is just one component of Fulci’s work. Running through all his films is […]
2012: The Apocalypse That Never Happened
By Anna Carius. It seems that the Mayans got it wrong. The end of the human civilization, portrayed with such gusto by Roland Emmerich in 2012 (2009), did not happen after all. So if you looked forward to “finding out the truth” and experience that “the end is just the […]
9 Day Hobbit: An Exploration of Cinematic Time
By Diarmuid Corkery. Well before Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit was released, it had already caused controversy among tentative fans due to two disclosed revelations. The first is a decision taken by the director to divide J.R.R. Tolkien’s book into three back-to-back epics. Considering the text itself is […]