Film Reviews

The advantage small scale British films have over big studio productions is their artistic freedom. Matthias Hoene’s new horror comedy, Cockneys Vs Zombies (2012) takes full advantage of that. Starring British icons Richard Briers and Honor Blackman, this is a ...

Conor McMahon’s Stitches (2012) is British comedian Ross Noble’s film debut. Though similar in ways to the anarchic Funny Man (1994)—where the puerile humor is likely to repulse—Stitches’ grossness will have you doubled up with laughter. Stiches (Noble) is a ...

Dark Castle Entertainment’s new supernatural film, The Apparition, boasts stars from Twilight, Gossip Girl, and the Harry Potter series. It also represents itself with an awful poster design depicting a young woman covered in creepy hands. Dark Castle has a ...

Reality is often more frightening than make-believe. A fact which gives the new British horror When The Lights Went Out an added frisson of excitement. According to a claim when the film opens, director/writer Pat Holden’s atmospheric chiller is based ...

World War I left England many ghosts. A generation of men—that Gertrude Stein later called The Lost Generation—was sent to the trenches. And of those who fought in the Great War, some came back, physically and spiritually fractured beyond repair, ...

UK filmmaker Alex Chandon (Cradle of Fear) has probably forgotten more redneck-stalker-in-the-woods films than you’ve heard about. If his latest film is any indication, Chandon has a fondness for rural horror that goes beyond a fanboy’s posturing. He has a ...

The Witches has become the default title of Peter Curtis’s 1960 occult novel, due to the 1966 Hammer adaptation. It was originally The Devil’s Own, however, and later became The Little Wax Doll, published under the author’s real name of Norah Lofts. This latest ...

Bradley Parker’s Chernobyl Diaries is like an old amusement park ride. You’ve been on that ride before, and you know what to expect, but it’s a thrill while it lasts. And so goes Diaries, with that familiar formula of taking a small group ...

It seems appropriate that Fatal Pictures have done such justice to the body-horror genre, a sphere of filmmaking so closely associated with their fellow Canadian and Torontonian David Cronenberg. Familiar begins as an American Beauty-style satire of middle-class North American life, ...

Hammer was always a mixed bag. You had the true classics like Dracula (1958) and The Devil Rides Out (1968). At the bottom were duds like The Terror of the Tongs (1961), Maniac (1963) and The Scars of Dracula (1970). Somewhere in the middle were the competent but perhaps-unremarkable films, such as The ...