The Zone have just put up my twin reviews of The Crazies :
The 1973 original version directed by George A. Romero
The 2010 remake directed by Breck Eisner
It is interesting to note that both films deal, on a thematic level, with the way in which America wages its wars : Romero’s version is a tightly focused [...]
My first ever review for SF Signal has just gone up! I am taking a look at TTA Press’s Horror and Dark Fantasy short fiction zine Black Static, an issue of which I also reviewed for The SF Site last year.
After much humming and hawing I decided to subscribe to Black Static and I am [...]
Videovista have my review of Dom Rotheroe’s British family drama Exhibit A.
Exhibit A is the kind of film that, at a stroke, entirely justifies all the hours I have spent watching and reviewing straight-to-DVD releases. It is an intensely real and emotionally harrowing exploration of a family in crisis with some lovely performances and a [...]
Videovista have my review of Christian Alvart’s Science Fiction Horror film Pandorum.
This was a terrible film to watch but an interesting film to write about as its action sequences have some quite interesting technical flaws and because its overburdened narrative demonstrates one of the more depressing tendencies in Horror film-making, particularly when that Horror takes [...]
Videovista have my review of Francis Xavier DeGennaro’s Torture Me no More.
It is traditional when reviewing low budget films to be surprised at how good it looks. Torture Me No More elicits the opposite response : Making films is really difficult and most people are not likely to be any good at it.
One of my greatest bugbears in fiction is the concept of the “well-drawn character”. If we wants to talk about a film in terms of its mis-en-scene or its shot selection then we can read books and treatises about such matters. Books filled with Eisenstein’s montages and Welles’ long takes. Similarly, if we want to [...]
Videovista have my (rather long) piece on German Expressionist film entitled Apocalyptic Adolescence.
The piece gives a list of eight particularly noteworthy works of Expressionist cinema and ends with two works which, though not Expressionistic, seem like logical reactions against the trend. One of the challenges of writing this piece was the slow realisation that the [...]
The New Look Videovista have my review of Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Walled In.
Intriguingly, the film is based upon a work by one of the pillars of the Francophonic genre scene Serge Brussolo. A Horror/Thriller all about architecture. Sadly, despite having some wonderful ideas to draw on, the film itself feels limp and lifeless.
VideoVista has my review of King of The Hill (El Rey De La Montana). Not the long-running animated comedy but rather a taught and atmospheric Spanish thriller directed by Gonzalo-Lopez Gallago.
King of the Hill, along with a number of other films I have reviewed in the last year, suggest that Europe is going through something [...]
