Manhattan Baby (1982)

After watching Italian horror director and gore-meister Lucio Fulci’s ‘Gates Of Hell’ trilogy last year for spooky movie Halloween season, the collapse of logic was definitely understood as an auteur trademark across all those movies. Manhattan Baby (1982) is Fulci’s Exorcist rip-off, which follows an archaeologist digging around a haunted tomb in Egypt whose family […]

The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971)

When it comes to the genre of folk-horror, there are three titles often referred to as key canonical texts: Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man (original) and The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971). The latter was also used as the main promotional imagery for the recent documentary about folk horror, Woodlands Dark And Bewitched directed by […]

Pig (2021)

I appreciate people who avoid trailers or reading reviews (and can easily skip reading this); the idea of taking a movie in without preconceptions, expectations or spoilers is like the pure film viewing experience. But I can’t help myself – I like watching trailers, I like reading advance reviews, probably to my detriment. So it […]

Best Of The Best 2 (1993)

Best Of The Best 2 (1993): definitely a title I saw in a video store magazine as a kid and was like, “There was a Best Of The Best 1?” Thanks to a VHS rip on YouTube, I know all about the first movie now, which I did enjoy, a late-1980s martial arts melodrama with […]

Another Year (2010)

Revisiting Mike Leigh’s film, Another Year (2010), there are images of the middle-aged couple Tom (Jim Broadbent), a geologist, and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a counsellor, that are so appealing and heart-warming to me. Gerri cuddling Tom while he prepares dinner or both of them sitting underneath a tarp with a cup of tea while it […]