Shallow Grave concerns the misguided actions of a group of university students upon discovering their new flatmate is (a) dead and (b) in possession of a suitcase filled with cash. It was the breakthrough film for Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor, and it’s easy to see why on both counts. Boyle’s filmmaking is flashy, energising…
Videodrome is a mad, grotesque nightmare, all writhing flesh and flicking hallucinatory visions. We switch from one scene to the next without a narrative umbilical cord to follow, like a torpid couch potato flicking between channels. The movie is dank and forbidding, dripping with amniotic fluid, an aborted mutation. Max Renn (James Woods) is the…
Noirs are at their best when they reveal the darkness hiding beneath a thin veneer of civilisation, with ever-present shadows stretching across the screen. Killer Joe is a grimy neo-noir, but its characters wear their darkness on their sleeves without the façade of civility. Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) discusses the murder of his mother with…
I was expecting, thanks to its marketing, The Loved Ones to be a tongue-in-cheek horror movie, with a broad, comedic take on the prom night slasher film. I certainly hadn’t anticipated the gutpunch of an early scene where a girl drives alongside a dog, who, recently stabbed, pants futilely for air. It gets darker from…
The Deep Blue Sea begins with a suicide attempt scored with over-dramatic classical music, overlaid with histrionic strings. The music bothered me, though it’s very appropriate to the film on the whole, a classically-produced melodrama where characters alternate between either politely saying things like “See, I rather foolishly thought that my indifference would hurt your…
Dubstep has been the whipping boy of popular culture for some time now. It’s not undeserved; there are plenty of genuinely terrible songs in the genre (Nero – Crush On You and Benny Benassi – Cinema (Skrillex Remix) are good examples of the lazy, paint-by-numbers songwriting that warrants the hate), but a lot of the…
The fifth film in the Wrong Turn series changes setting again, moving from a mental hospital in the Bloody Beginnings to a small town in the middle of a music festival. Bloodlines introduces a genuine antagonist –named Maynard – with substantially more intelligence than the gibbering inbred psychopaths rampaging through the earlier films (though they’re…
The best live shows are born of either professionalism (which tends to go hand-in-hand with competent musicianship) or, more often, enthusiasm, a group or artist obviously enjoying themselves on stage. Last night’s performance by Hot Chip had both professionalism and enthusiasm in spades. It also featured the lost art of careful setlist structuring (ie. not…
Bloody Beginnings does its best to bloody up its beginning as quickly as possible; after a scenery-chewing psychiatrist speeds through the necessary exposition – we’re at a West Virginia psychiatric hospital filled with incest-mutated psychopaths who can’t feel pain and, of course, “There’s a button to open all their cells in case of fire,” duh…
This entry in the Wrong Turn series is the weakest so far. It follows a group of escaped prison inmates (plus supporting ‘victims’ – prison guards, police and a civilian). Like Wrong Turn 2, it features really clumsy introductory dialogue establishing these characters’ personalities; unlike Wrong Turn 2, you don’t get the sense that anyone…
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