Based on a Stephen King short story and directed by Osgood Perkins, who gave us last year’s overrated Longlegs, The Monkey is an awkward mash-up of grossout horror and quirky comedy that isn’t especially scary or funny. The eponymous monkey is a slightly creepy looking toy critter that two young twins, obnoxious bully Bill and his main victim, nervous younger
Read moreLast year’s standout Aussie film, Talk To Me seems to have broken ground for Aussie horror films internationally. Appearing to benefit from this is supernatural horror/comedy Late Night With the Devil which has apparently been a sensation in the US after generating a serious buzz at the South-By-South West Film Festival. The film takes what had become a slightly tired
Read moreAs a movie title, Five Nights at Freddy’s sounds more like a comedy-drama based in a nightclub rather than a horror film. Gamers, however, will know better as this is an adaptation of a massively popular supernatural/ slasher themed videogame. The film’s trailer suggested a Saw-style human rat trap torture porn film. There is a touch of that but possibly
Read moreWilliam Friedkin’s 1973 cinema adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist was one of the film events of the decade. Disturbingly powerful and superbly crafted, it chilled cinemagoers like no film before while surprisingly sparking huge interest in Mike Oldfields ‘Tubular bells’ which was used on the soundtrack. Even half a century later that film has lost little of
Read moreI went into the film The Boogeyman having read nothing about it and hoping it was a biopic of a 70’s pop funkster like say, Harry Wayne Casey from KC and the Sunshine Band. Anyone else thinking likewise, be warned, this is no upbeat music flick but instead The Boogeyman is a grim supernatural horror film. This reasonably effective spook-fest
Read moreBarbarian is almost a really effective horror film. It’s stylishly shot, makes inventive use of familiar horror settings and is at times genuinely unnerving but it’s also infuriatingly erratic with some bizarre plot devices and clumsy tonal shifts. The film begins as an impressively tense and mysterious cautionary tale with a young professional woman Tess (Georgina Campbell) turning up to
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