Cinema Rediscovered 2018: Trapped in THE MAFU CAGE. When is a cult film not a cult film?

Shown as part of this year’s Cinema Rediscovered Festival at the Bristol Watershed, The Mafu Cage had me stumbling out of the cinema wondering WTF did I just watch… so I had to tell you about it.

Hidden Gems – rediscovering American Mary

Jen and Sylvia Soska’s 2012 film American Mary is a highly original horror film that flew under the radar on it’s original release and is ripe for rediscovery (or maybe just discovery).

BBC One’s Requiem could be the best British TV horror story in years

Sorry, it’s been a slow start to the blog in 2018 as life has got in the way. But here is my first piece of the year, an introduction to the BBC’s new horror series Requiem. 

THIS GREEN UNPLEASANT LAND – THE VISIONS OF NIGEL KNEALE

With the release of an updated version of the excellent biography Into the Unknown – the fantastic life of Nigel Kneale (Andy Murray, Headpress) this seems like a good time to burrow deep into my archives and exhume an article I wrote for the now defunct digital magazine Cult TV Times. Enjoy…

Train to Busan is an express ride to hell with no stops

Released by Studio Canal, Korean zombie film Train to Busan rocks up on UK screens from the 28th of October. A box office blockbuster in its home country, is this a zombie epic worth boarding? Review follows…

Remembering Wes Craven and The People Under the Stairs

The news today (the 31st August 2015) of the death of the director Wes Craven came as something it was hard not to characterise with gallows humour as a ‘Shocker’, of all the directors classed as ‘Masters of Horror’ Craven was the one that had kept a candle burning for the horror genre. Whilst others either fizzled out after initial promise (Hooper), gradually got stuck in a genre rut (Romero), suffered a gradual decline (Carpenter), or left the genre for pastures new (Cronenberg), Craven demonstrated a remarkable resilience. 

Favourite films – Witchfinder General

Witchfinder General was the final film from the talented director Michael Reeves before his untimely death at age 25 from an alcohol and barbituate overdose (often described as a suicide, the official coroner’s report actually classed Reeves death as accidental).

Scraping the barrel – Basement

When it comes time to do the inevitable year end top ten film list that no anal retentive movie fan can resist, 2014 will be a year in which British film is riding high and holding its own against the very best of international cinema. So with that in mind, here’s a reminder of how bad we can be…

Hidden treasures – Lake Mungo

Films fail to find their audience on release for a variety of reasons. There’s bad timing – the box office failure of the wonderful Tremors in 1990 is often ascribed to the film unfortunately being released in close proximity to a serious earthquake that hit California. There’s poor marketing, Disney has had a mare with this recently with terrible campaigns for both John Carter and The Lone Ranger (it should be noted that there are many excuses trotted out for flop movies too). There’s Harvey Weinstein and his predisposition to buy movies and then shelve them.

Hidden treasures – No One Lives

No One Lives

Directed by Ryûhei Kitamura.

Written by David Cohen.

Starring Luke Evans, Adelade Clemens, Lee Tergesen, Laura Ramsey, Derek Magyar, Beau Knapp, America Olivo, Brodus Clay, Lindsey Shaw.

US, 86 mins, cert 18.

In a couple of years of film writing/blogging you see a lot of crap, and if you watch a lot of horror movies you may as well multiply the amount of crap by the power of ten (unless you are one of those horror guys with incredibly low standards).

Of course it’s easier to write snappy sarcastic reviews than praise. There are too many specialist horror outlets who seem to exist only to provide five stars and a pull quote about how, say, the remake of I Spit On Your Grave is one of the BEST REMAKES EVAH!!! Conversely the genuine pleasures of a finely crafted genre B picture often seem lost on critics writing for mainstream outlets (with some notable exceptions – Kermode, Floyd, Newman).

And so I want to present a movie you may have missed, Ryûhei Kitamura’s No One Lives, a great example of the kind of glossy hi-octane genre thrillers that studios don’t seem to produce anymore. No One Lives is an incredibly tight 86 minutes of amoral violence, gore and nihilism that hits the exploitation sweet spot so many aim for and miss.