Border (2018)

Winner of Un Certain Regard at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the Swedish film Border (2018; Gräns) might also take the crown for weirdest sex scene in a movie. Directed by Ali Abbasi and based on a story written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, the author of Let The Right One In, which gives an indication […]

Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

For me, Dolemite Is My Name (2019) was a good time. I was predisposed to like it because of the writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. They wrote one of my favourite movies, Ed Wood, and the easy comparison was that this was a Blaxploitation version of that biopic. There’s a similar structure with supporting […]

Color Out Of Space (2019)

The final film I saw at this year’s MonsterFest was Color Out Of Space (2019), which I was very keen to see as a new adaptation of the HP Lovecraft story by cult director Richard Stanley (Hardware), his first film in many years after being booted off the 1996 flop, Island Of Dr Moreau. More […]

Bliss (2019)

Joe Begos had two films as a director in this year’s MonsterFest and Bliss (2019) was made before VFW on a low budget, shot on 16mm, and exorcising the director’s own creative funk through the horror genre. Focusing on a painter (Dora Madison Burge, from Friday Night Lights) in a career slump who decides to […]

VFW (2019)

One Friday night, I went to a 9:15pm screening of VFW (2019) as part of MonsterFest, but it felt more like a midnight movie. Completely in the spirit of John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 right from the opening credits, particularly with the ominous synth of Steve Moore’s excellent score, it’s a splatter siege movie […]