Film review: ‘THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER’, by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’

William 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

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Film review: ‘BARBARIAN’ by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’

Barbarian 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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Film review: ‘YOU WON’T BE ALONE’ by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’

Macedonian-Australian writer/ director Goran Stolevski’s creepy, impressionistic and at times very unsettling, You Won’t Be Alone, mixes a grittily realistic depiction of early 19th Century European provincial life with supernatural horror. The film plays a little like a sinister fairy-tale with elements of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, the ‘wild girl from the forest’ sub-genre, Candide/Bad Boy Bubby-like tales of an

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