The Empty Beach (1985)

Bogie in Bondi. The Empty Beach (1985) is a neo-noir shot in Sydney during the mid-1980s, and based on a novel by Peter Corris, one of a series of books devoted to his detective character, Cliff Hardy. A commercial failure at the Australian box office, this is a boilerplate mystery. But what was satisfying to […]

Bloody Moon (1981)

Must a film be coherent? Eurohorror has so much to teach us. The American slasher genre filtered through Spanish director Jess Franco in gun-for-hire mode. Accentuated by watching the English dub where the voiceover artists are rushing through dialogue at a speedy clip, another layer to what is already alien onscreen behaviour. A group of […]

Venus In Furs (1969)

The meeting point between exploitation demands and arthouse pretensions is ideal cinematic terrain to my mind. Base pleasures that Venus In Furs (1969) – directed by Jess Franco – offers is nudity and sex (well, what accounts for it late 1960s international cinema) with Maria Rohm nude in a fur coat with stockings and a […]

Night Of The Ghouls (1959)

The seance scene. When the camera focuses on Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) – a granite-face middle-aged guy wearing a suit and a “swami” turban – sitting at a table, and the camera moves back so that we can see three people sitting on one side, and three rinky-dink skeletons sitting on the other, I was […]

The Eternal Daughter (2022)

The Eternal Daughter (2022) is not a horror movie, but a ghost story. It’s useful to make that distinction since it’s about eeriness and suggestion, using ghosts as a way of dealing with memory, uncertainty and unresolvable emotions. Joanna Hogg (Unrelated) reunites with Tilda Swinton (after her first short film, Caprice, and The Souvenir Part […]