There’s a special kind of confidence required to take one of the most durable fairy tales ever told and run it through a 2011 teen drama filter, complete with glossy lighting, questionable tattoos, and emotional beats that feel like they were focus-grouped by people who think irony is a personality trait. Beastly tries to drag…
Onibaba (1964) – Review
Few horror films slither under your skin quite like Onibaba. Kaneto Shindō’s tale of wartime desperation, lust, and moral decay feels at once ancient and timeless. A fever dream of sex and survival set in a world where human cruelty makes ghosts redundant. Stark, sensual, and shot in eerie black-and-white splendour, it’s a film that…
Matango (1963) – Review
Sometimes Japanese horror goes for ghostly chills, sometimes for kaiju-sized spectacle. 1963’s Matango, however, takes the road less travelled: stranding a group of bourgeois day-trippers on a rotting island and feeding them psychedelic mushrooms until they lose their humanity and their dignity. Directed by Ishirō Honda, best known for Godzilla, this damp, mouldy little nightmare…
Beauty and the Beast (2009) – Review
Somewhere along the line, someone looked at Beauty and the Beast, a story that has survived centuries of retellings, and decided it needed to be dragged through a bargain-bin fantasy filter. The 2009 adaptation arrived with the cinematic grace of a dropped cinder block, armed with bad acting, worse effects, and a script that felt…
Tales of Terror (1962) – Review
Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror is the cinematic equivalent of a gothic wine flight: three mini-doses of Edgar Allan Poe, poured into one luridly lit glass, swirled with gallows humour, and gulped down with Vincent Price’s velvety voice as the chaser. Released in 1962 at the height of Corman’s “Poe cycle,” it’s both spooky and…