Zombie Nosh [Flesheater: Revenge Of The Living Dead]

This Halloween I watched an amateur drama school rendition of Night Of The Living Dead, but at least it actually took place on Halloween night.

Barbarian

Deftly flips expectation at every opportunity, superb.

Visa To Hell [Sha ru di yu]

A crazed mixture of John Woo and The Shaw Brothers. King.

The Feast [Gwledd]

A fantastic slow burn of discomfort that builds gently to outrageous grotesquerie.

Cast A Deadly Spell

A hard boiled detective tale draped in Lovecraft references and wobbly rubber monster FX that’s a bit too hardcore on occasion for kids and a bit too throwaway fluff for adults the rest of the time.

Watcher

Presents a mystery but the twist is there is no mystery.

Orphan: First Kill

A prequel that absolutely nobody asked for with a twist in the middle that entirely justifies its existence.

Mr. Vampire [Geung see sin sang]

Some seriously outdated attempts at humour, some seriously unnecessary animal cruelty and a whole load of seriously awesome kung fu fights with hopping vampires.

The McPherson Tape [U.F.O. Abduction]

The true birth of the Found Footage movie with zero concession to any actual film making and instead everything focussed on making an accidental recording seem utterly real. This does make for an hour of everybody screaming over each other though, which does test the old patience a tad.

Black Adam

Feels like it starts in the middle of three different movies then spends twenty minutes dropping raw exposition before embarking on an hour long action sequence and finally ending. Then there’s another half hour long action sequence. And all of it is bafflingly ridiculous all of the time.

The Banshees Of Inisherin

A gently understated prod at life’s larger complexities. A lovely little film.

The Black Phone

Fun on a Scooby Doo level but not much else.

Kwaidan

Four traditional Japanese ghost stories that are gorgeously shot and beautifully paced, except the third one where the singing outstays its welcome.

The Empty Man

Ironically this is overfull and jam packed with conflicting ideas and stories that render the entire thing a useless muddle.

Dead Heat

Essentially a remake of D.O.A. but given a considerable burst of fun by replacing poisoning with zombification followed by sudden decay. I was surprised at how much young Treat Williams put me in mind of Jason Bateman and even more surprised at how much I want to see Bateman in a remake of this opposite whatever our modern equivalent of the vaguely charismatic, monosyllabic, slab of meat Joe Piscopo would be. Probably Dave Bautista or something.

Shivers [The Parasite Murders/ They Came From Within]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you can clearly see the wires but it still shits you up, then it is a master at work.

V/H/S/99

Less found footage, more amateur film making by characters within the stories, but if that story can be told without the characters filming it then it just doesn’t need to be found footage. The stories themselves? The first is shit, the second requires you to buy the concept of supernatural entities purchasing cameras and setting them up, the third is brilliant and could have been improved infinitely if it was shot properly, the fourth is deeply average and the fifth is the only one that really works in the format.

House Of Wax [3D]

A thoroughly enjoyable Vincent Price yarn overshadowed by a bit where a man bashed a ball on a bit of elastic in and out of the screen. I wanted more of that.

Don’t Go Near The Park [Nightstalker/ Curse Of The Living Dead]

Extremely trashy nonsense about 12,000 year old cannibals who must eat children to stay young. Looks like it was made for a tenner by people with a very dodgy moral compass.

The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive [L'arma, l'ora, il movente]

A satisfyingly convoluted mystery that’s disappointingly low on savage death but pleasingly high on sleaze. Includes lashings of topless nuns, repeated spooky haunted house moments for no real reason and an ending that delightfully updates Poe even if it does take a more saccharine route out.

Hellraiser

A disappointment. I was hoping this would go back to the source novella for some true Barker glories, but no it’s just yet another poorly formulated sequel that does nothing the other nine sequels haven’t already attempted, only backed by substantially more money.

Amsterdam

It definitely takes huge film making talent to be able to take a cast as strong as this has, embed them in a true story as grand as this has, and come out of it all with something so frothy and slight.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Not only a laughably poor attempt at a sequel but also a laughably poor attempt at a film.

Videoman [Videomannen]

Was expecting a giallo obsessed descent into paranoia, madness and messy stabby death, but got a story about alcoholics falling in love instead. Kinda lost interest anyway when the protagonist claimed Fulci was a better director than Argento and described Suspiria as a giallo but with a witch as the killer. Tsk.

Tilbury

Supremely weird Icelandic yarn about a strange imp working as an officer in the British army, who vomits green butter and gains sustenance by suckling on a distended nipple growing on the inside of his girlfriend’s thigh. I shit you not.

Lake Of The Dead [De dødes tjern]

Talky and dull.

Devil’s Express [Death Express]

Utterly shit. 

Is that gold velvet dungaree outfit on the poster worn in the film? 

Yes. 

Does that save it? 

No, that’s how utterly shit this movie is.

Werewolf By Night

Not really a movie, but i’m mildly baffled as to why it isn’t. Stick fifteen minutes on the start to flesh out a couple more characters, show more of the hunting and you’d have a pretty good movie.

God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines

For those who are in to Techno, this isn’t going to tell them anything new but they’ll love it regardless. For those who aren’t in to Techno, it is imperative that they are made aware that this hugely popular genre of music stems entirely from a group of black fellas hanging out in Detroit during the eighties and has nothing to do with cunts like David Guetta, and this puts that message out there with aplomb.

Deadstream

During the first twenty minutes I really began to regret putting this on, then it hit a stride that’s best described as ‘Jackass meets Found Footage hauntings’ and leaned hard into the silliness and I regretted nothing. 

Host

Takes place entirely as a Zoom call and uses this very effectively to provide some original scares, my favourite being somebody repeatedly emerging from, and then disappearing back into their fake Zoom background as their face is repeatedly smashed into their keyboard. As fun as all of this undoubtedly is though, there’s no story to be had because no Zoom call ever is a story worth telling.

Death Weekend [The House By The Lake]

A rape/revenge movie that’s thankfully low on sordid detail, providing fully clothed sexual assault and a gang who are more irritating than leery, and that is also pleasingly high on heroine resourcefulness as she calmly fucks everyone up.

Nope

This is a great movie, but if a good 50 minutes were to be shorn from it then it would be an amazing movie. And those 50 minutes could easily then be fleshed out into another totally separate amazing movie. Jordan Peele clearly knows what he’s doing but still has lessons to be learned.

In The Mouth Of Madness

The final masterpiece from a master who has since lost his way.

Prince Of Darkness

Carpenter’s second in his trilogy of love letters to Lovecraft suffers from a considerably lower FX budget than the other two which means to truly enjoy how excellent this film is you have to be really on board with ideas like ancient entities of pure evil being represented by the occasional spray of dirty water.