Film, Horror and Miles Fielder

The Innkeepers

A genuinely involving and disconcerting chiller that thankfully eschews any trendy post-modernism

11 May 2012

Having established his credentials as a serious genre fan with a spot-on homage to 80s horror movies in The House of the Devil, writer-director Ti West reaches even further back into the past with this slow-burning thriller. Like all good haunted house…

Julia's Eyes

A very well made chiller in the stalk ‘n’ slash tradition

1 Jul 2011

(15) 112min In addition to directing visionary adult horror-fantasies (The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth) and outstanding Hollywood blockbusters (Hellboy and its sequel), Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is also carving a second career for…

Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde

29 Mar 2010

(15) 94min (Optimum) By the turn of the sexploitastic 1970s Hammer Films were upping the erotic content of their already titillating takes on horror classics with this transgender spin on Stevenson’s evil alter-ego tale of terror. Released in 1971…

Tower of London

17 Feb 2010

(15) 92min (Optimum) This long unavailable (on DVD), deliciously nasty historical horror made in 1939 is all dungeons, manacles, torture and beheadings. But it’s also fairly classy stuff, boasting a fine cast headed by Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff…

Chaw

17 Feb 2010

(15) 117min (Optimum) This blackly comic South Korean horror film arrives on the back of the success of the Asian monster movie The Host. Like that film, Chaw (pronounced ‘chow’, meaning animal trap, but probably intended to invoke Jaws) is at once…

Mad Monster Party

15 Jan 2010

(U) 94min (Optimum) You can see how this 1967 stop-motion animated feature (allegedly being remade) has had an enduring influence on Tim Burton, from his most recent foray into old-school-style animation The Corpse Bride, all the way back to his…

Colin

No-budget Welsh zombie horror

22 Oct 2009

(18) 97min Young Welsh horror movie fan Marc Price apparently made this zombie flick for just £45 – the cost of keeping his crewmates in tea and biscuits for the 18 months of weekend filming plus a few buckets of red food dye. If true, that makes…

I Sell the Dead

The horror comedy comes to DVD

2 Oct 2009

First-time writer-director Glenn McQuaid does a pretty good job of invoking the spirit of the camp old Hammer chillers films with this low-budget comedy horror about a pair luckless bodysnatchers. Set in a mist-shrouded backwater of 19th century feckin…

Pontypool

Bruce MacDonald speaks about his new zombie flick

1 Oct 2009

Just when you thought cinema had done zombies to death a film with a radical new approach comes along to reanimate the living dead. In the Canadian chiller Pontypool a mysterious infection turns the inhabitants of a small town into incoherently babbling…

White Lightnin' or just white trash?

The creators of the controversial revenge tale explain all

17 Sep 2009

Watching White Lightnin’ you wonder where its makers came up with the idea for their gloriously demented film. At once a biopic about a hillbilly dancer and a tale of revenge that plays like a seventies American horror movie, it’s the story of Jesco…

Martyrs

28 May 2009

(18) 95min This French splatter fest announces its deeply unpleasant intentions with a pre-title sequence in which a ten-year-old girl named Lucie is found hideously abused outside of a disused factory several months after being abducted by unknown…

The Antichrist

19 Mar 2009

HORROR The Italians wasted no time ripping off the enormous success of The Exorcist, knocking out this dreadful demonic possession horror less than a year after Linda Blair blew green chunks all over Max von Sydow back in 1974. The Antichrist (aka…

Mum & Dad

11 Dec 2008

(18) 85min If you appreciate black humour and have a strong stomach there’s much to be admired in Steven Sheil’s low budget British horror. Exploiting the ongoing trend for torture porn, it transports the sadomasochistic splatter-fest of the Hostel…

The Children

27 Nov 2008

HORROR The current fad for evil kiddie chillers – see Ils (Them) from France, Eden Lake from the UK and While She Was Out from the US – continues with another British horror flick in which children do diabolical things to disbelieving adults. As the…

While She Was Out

13 Nov 2008

(18) 82min This urban chiller executive produced by Mexican fantasist Guillermo del Toro and starring the enduringly gorgeous Kim Basinger and evergreen teen-alike Lukas Haas starts off promisingly but all too swiftly proves as lame as its pedestrian…

Charles Burns - Fear(s) of the Dark

16 Oct 2008

The wildly imaginative and scary animated French portmanteau horror movie Fear(s) of the Dark was made by six European and American cartoonists working with professional animators. The most notable of those cartoonists is Charles Burns, who is a legend…

Fear(s) of the Dark

16 Oct 2008

ANIMATION/MYSTERY The Gallic term ‘outre’, meaning beyond or excessive, perfectly describes this imaginatively conceived and immaculately executed French language portmanteau horror. Much of its impact is derived from its unique nature: the…

Funny Games US

27 Mar 2008

HORROR/THRILLER (18) 111min The conventional thinking about shot-for-shot remakes is why bother? We only need cast our minds back to the furore surrounding what many thought to be the sacrilegious and pointless remake of Psycho by Gus Van Sant.

Diary of the Dead

28 Feb 2008

HORROR (18) 94min Having expanded his ‘living dead’ trilogy to a tetra-logy with the relatively high budget, studio-produced Land of the Dead, modern horror movie master George A Romero goes back-to-basics – and his own beginnings – with his fifth…

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane

14 Feb 2008

HORROR (18) 90min Here’s a welcome example of that all too rare thing in American horror movies: a teen slasher that’s actually very good. The simple answer to that conundrum is that appearances can be deceptive: Mandy Lane isn’t simply a teen slasher…

Black Water

14 Feb 2008

THRILLER/HORROR (15) 90min This low budget Australian creature feature is probably inspired by the true story of a saltwater crocodile attack in the Northern Territory. Written and directed by newcomers David Nerlich and Andrew Traucki, Black Water…

KM31

14 Feb 2008

HORROR (15) 102min (Yume DVD retail/rental) Some critics were quick to liken this assured Spanish language chiller to Japanese horror films such as Ju-on: The Grudge. Young Mexican writer-director Rigoberto Castaneda’s debut does share the creepy…

Black Sheep

4 Oct 2007

It was only a matter of time before an enterprising New Zealand filmmaker made a horror movie about sheep. It’s surprising it’s taken this long for one to reach the big screen, and more surprising still, given the inherent low horror factor of lamb…

Hatchet

20 Sep 2007

Although the tagline – ‘it’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel and it’s not based on a Japanese one’ – suggests Hatchet is an original horror movie, it’s far from that. It is, as a second tagline more accurately describes this low-budget offering, ‘old…

DVD - Ghost Ship

2 Jul 2007

HORROR In this genial, seaworthy but fright-lite low budget British horror film from 1952, a couple purchase an old steam boat with the intention of turning it into a luxury love nest only to find the crate has a history akin to that of the Marie…