Far Out isn't Far Enough.
Dear friends, followers and anyone else who is still reading this blog after many months of inactivity - I am writing today to let you know that, after an eternity of faffing about, I have finally printed up the first issues of two new paper fanzines - the current plan being that they will replace / supersede this blog going forward. There are several reasons for making the move back to paper at…
So, I’m unsure whether or not I have any remaining readers who are London-based, but just on the off-chance… I am contributing the above event, taking place on Tues 29th April, at my local community café, as part of the New Cross & Deptford Free Film Festival . The concept is, we will be travelling the globe, exploring world cultures through the warped prism of action movies. As such, the current…
So first off - a quick note to any remaining loyal readers, to clarify that I didn’t really intend for this to just become an obits blog going forward, but a total absence of time to write, combined with blogger’s increasingly disruptive barrage of log-in requests, content blocks and cookie pop-ups, make it difficult to envisage a return to regular posting in this space. I have however been…
Of all the obituary posts I’ve felt obliged to hastily bang out for this blog over the years, this loss is perhaps the one which has proved most difficult to process, or to find words for. When looking at a figure like Lynch - who has been a giant presence within any kind of art or culture I’d deign to care about, throughout my life - it would be all too easy to begin throwing ill-judged…
If only to distract myself from the fact that the flaming jalopy which is the western world just failed to clear the chasm jump which might have kept the wheels rolling a while longer, here is a little post to celebrate the fact that, after three consecutive Octobers, I’ve finally managed to watch, and write something about, every episode of the 1980 ‘Hammer House of Horror’ series. Not exactly a…
I will frame this review by saying that, over the past year or so, I have watched a number of highly acclaimed / hyped new horror movies, and, sadly, have found that they all either failed to live up to their full potential, or else just left me feeling a bit underwhelmed. On its own modest terms however, this latest word-of-mouth hit really worked for me. This will likely be a short review,…
And so, my three year odyssey through the corridors of the Hammer House of Horror concludes with this final, 13th episode - and, on reflection, I think we should probably compliment the series’ producers on deciding to bid farewell to their viewers with the televisual equivalent of a painful kick in the cobblers. Despite boasting a name suggestive of pulpy gothic horror pleasures, ‘The Mark of…
Well, speaking of doppelgangers , look what else I watched this month… There’s an awful lot to unpack in this ambitious attempt to take the Freudian conception of the unheimlich / uncanny to its ultimate extreme, but, given that I’ve got around to it five years late, and given that it was the high profile follow up to an Oscar-winning hit, I’m sure all of its semiotic / socio-political sub-texts…
The 12th, and penultimate, episode of the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ may not necessarily be the best, or most entertaining, of the series - but it is almost certainly the most unsettling, rivalled only by The Silent Scream (also directed by dark horse Alan Gibson, who arguably offered better proof of his talents here than in the theatrical features he made for Hammer during the early ‘70s). Ranald…
Whilst watching this intermittently delightful Bollywood werewolf movie, I was under the impression that what I was witnessing here was a precursor to the definitive mode of masala horror film which the Ramsay Brothers would go on to perfect in their work through the ‘80s and early ‘90s. I’ve only subsequently realised however that, in making that assumption, my chronology was actually a bit off.…
Las Vegas-based filmmaker Charles Nizet’s berserk drive-in oddity ‘Help Me.. I’m Possessed!’ was one of the unexpected highlights of my 2022 October horror marathon, so naturally I was curious to check out Nizet’s other foray into horror territory, previously considered a lost film, but now happily rescued from oblivion (albeit in an alternate softcore sexploitation cut, with burned in Dutch and…
As the foundations of Franco’s fascist regime in Spain gradually disintegrated through the late 1970s following the dictator’s death, the restrictions governing on-screen content in the previously censorious nation correspondingly collapsed, flooding Spanish screens with an unprecedented backlog of smut, eventually culminating the early ‘80s hey-day of the hastily codified Classificada ‘S’…
In spite of a solid pedigree connecting it back to Hammer’s theatrical era (director Sasdy, plus a script by Tony Hinds under his John Elder pseudonym), this 11th episode of ‘Hammer House of Horrors’ sadly ranks as one of the series’ absolute worst. The story here concerns a mentally fragile, just released-from-the-nuthouse heiress Penny (‘Dark Shadows’ veteran Kathryn Leigh Scott), who, left at…
One strand I want to try to work into my horror marathon this October involves filling in a few gaps re: films I really should have seen by now, but for some reason have not. Given that I’m a big fan of both Hammer Films and eccentric, black & white British sci-fi movies more generally, the awkwardly titled ‘X… The Unknown’, Hammer’s immediate follow up to the success of ‘The Quatermass Xperiment’…
Released, I believe, one year prior to Franju’s definitive ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’, this early outlier in the ever-popular field of plastic surgery / facial reconstruction-themed horror differs slightly from the norm, in that Anton Diffring’s Dr Schüler [formerly Rossiter] is actually really good at restoring facially scarred women to their former beauty, requiring neither non-consenting…
Ok, several days late and several dollars short this year, but I mean… I couldn’t just let this blog fade away into the digital void with a snarky hatchet job on a Roger Corman film at the top of the page, could I..? Despite all manner of time / life related pressures, I’m still doing my damnedest to meet the now traditional “one horror movie a day” challenge this year, and have been posting notes…
If we were to chart Roger Corman’s engagement with socio-political issues in his work upon some kind of hypothetical scale, then at the opposite end of it from the uncomfortably effective The Intruder, we would find ‘Gas-s-s-s!, or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It’ [ henceforth ‘Gas’, just for the sake of our sanity] , an inexplicable, rather hare-brained movie which,…
Though not quite the overlooked masterpiece it is sometimes hailed as, this unique entry in Roger Corman’s filmography - a rare and impassioned excursion into the treacherous realm we would today call ‘non-genre’ - certainly still packs a punch, remaining as sickening, uncomfortable and difficult to shake off as a random kick to the kidneys. One thing which must be understood straight away about…
...or, as the storybook style title card has it, ‘The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent’. A big name for what is, by anyone’s estimation, a fairly minor movie, but not by any means an unenjoyable one. If nothing else, the film certainly delivers on its title in short order (a lesson Corman had clearly learned from the failure of The Beast With…
(A flyer for a series of Corman screenings which I picked up in Tokyo circa 2011.) Yes, I know that he had a great run, that he lived a long and rewarding life, and that ‘celebration’ rather than ‘sadness’ should usually be the watchword when a beloved individual passes away at the age of 98…. but damn it all, I was really hoping Roger Corman would make it to 100. I mean, that would just have…
Sea Fever (Neasa Hardiman, 2019) As far as niche sub-genres go, sea-bound eco/survival horror is generally a good bet, and this modest, primarily Irish indie production takes a pretty convincing shot at it. It’s a rather less exciting prospect to try to write about, truth be told, but I feel like telling you about it nonetheless, so buckle up, and we’ll get through this whole ‘review’ thing…
Looking back, it seems I began 2023 with a rare round-up of ‘new’ movies I’d seen recently, and… things seem to be going that way for 2024 too, so why don’t we make a Jan/Feb tradition of it? The first of two planned posts, this one will be looking at a few recent releases your friends, co-habitants and co-workers might actually have heard of, including the latest iterations of two of Japan’s (and…
With apologies for the delay… 5. Je t’aime moi non plus (Serge Gainsbourg, 1976) Venturing out to a cinema screening of this one, in honour of the late Jane Birkin, mid-way through 2023, my first reaction to the opening scenes was simply to marvel at what a confident, technically accomplished and beautifully composed movie this is, given that it was Gainsbourg’s debut as director. A world away…
Well, cards on the table - 2023 was not exactly a great year, on either a personal level, a global level, or I daresay on many of the myriad levels found somewhere in-between. But, mustn’t grumble, right? Even as my (our?) quality of life takes a (personal / collective?) battering, we’re all (mostly?) still here, still reading things and watching movies, and still (occasionally) updating blogs. In…
As anyone familiar with his work will be aware, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Evil Clergyman’ is a brief, half-formed fragment, obviously written in haste, perhaps extrapolated from a bad dream, and presumably never intended for publication in its extant form. Nonetheless, it saw print several years after Lovecraft’s death, in the April 1939 edition of ‘Weird Tales’, and - rather irksomely - it has formed…