By Tristan Bishop Think of Peter Cushing and you think of Hammer – and vice-versa, as the studio and the actor are intrinsically linked. He appeared, alongside fellow Hammer stalwart Christopher Lee, in the breakthrough hits from the studio, The Curse Of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), and their early successes paved the way for [...]

By Keri O’Shea What is it that defines the term ‘gentleman’? Without a doubt, it is a term which remains nebulous, and one which has changed throughout its history; you could also make the case that the term itself has lost much of its meaning in the modern day, but perhaps we can still say [...]

By Ben Bussey If I were to ask who the most iconic screen Dracula was, I imagine the answers would be wide-ranging. Presumably most would be torn between Lugosi and Lee, with maybe a few shout-outs for Oldman, and one or two bending the matter slightly by arguing for Schreck. However, if I were to [...]

By Annie Riordan, Keri O’Shea and Ben Bussey As you may have ascertained from Oliver’s retrospective on the Hammer Frankenstein series yesterday, this Sunday – May 26th - marks one hundred years since the birth of Peter Cushing, hence we have devoted this week at Brutal As Hell to celebrating the late, great man, and the indelible mark [...]

By Oliver Longden 26th May 2013 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Peter Cushing. Perhaps best known to modern audiences as the skeletally thin Grand Moff Tarkin from the first Star Wars film, Cushing was a versatile and immensely dedicated actor. He achieved worldwide recognition for his many roles in Hammer horror [...]

By Ben Bussey Warning: spoilers, sideboob and man-ass ahead… ‘Sex sells.’ The old maxim has always rung true, and no doubt always will. However, back in the 1990s that time-honoured notion was taken to an altogether different level. The major movie studios had not yet developed that obsession with making everything PG-13/12A rated, so a [...]

By Oliver Longden It is fair to say that time has not been kind to The Leopard Man. 70 years after its release it looks hokey, unevenly acted and has a twist ending that looms like a Titanic-sinking iceberg over the second half of the movie. Yet despite its flaws, or perhaps because the distance [...]

By Annie Riordan Necrotizing Fasciitis. Cool name for a death metal song. Terrible way to die. As of this writing, it’s not been confirmed that the death of Jeff Hanneman, lead guitarist of Slayer, is 100% absolutely attributable to the bite of a brown recluse spider. No one is even 100% sure that a spider [...]

By Ben Bussey So the latest word (from Deadline) is that Luke Evans - the Welsh up-and-comer soon to be seen in No One Lives, and recently cast as Dracula – will be the new Crow, taking the lead role in the reboot that has spent the last few years failing to get off the ground. [...]

By Oliver Longden April 2013 marks 70 years of Jack Tourneur’s psychological horror film I Walked With a Zombie. Underneath the layers of 1940s reserve and casual racism, there’s quite a charming little movie that probably deserves to be better remembered. Back in 1943, zombies weren’t the horde of shambling undead cannibals we know today: [...]

By Annie Riordan, Keri O’Shea & Ben Bussey When Annie, Keri and myself got together last week to debate the relative merits of the Evil Dead remake – or, in other words, to rip the piss out of it – it seems that some readers were quite pleased with the results. If you weren’t one [...]

By Annie Riordan So I went to a concert in Boston last night. Big deal, you say. Well, for me it IS a big deal. I don’t leave the house much. I am loathe to immerse myself in the stinking sea that is the general public. I have a terrible fear of large crowds and [...]

By Comix If you’re like me, then when you hear the words “zombie,” you just want to rip your eyeballs out with a Walking Dead themed ice-cream scoop. If you see one more zombie movie or have to swallow one more zombie-themed show, you’d go straight nuts. But what if I told you, not only [...]

By Ben Bussey The future looks kaiju-shaped. With Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim hitting in just a few months (for which a sequel is apparently in the planning stages already), Gareth Edwards’ currently-shooting Godzilla reboot stomping onto screens next year, and a fourth Jurassic Park also underway, we can expect giant monster action in great [...]

By Annie Riordan, Keri O’Shea and Ben Bussey So here’s how it is: the Evil Dead remake opened in the UK this weekend, having opened in the US earlier in the month. Chances are, you may have seen it by now. If so, it’s entirely possible you may concur with our own Dustin, who called [...]

By Kit Rathenar John Carpenters Vampires (hereafter just “Vampires”, for simplicity’s sake) is a film I feel a little odd writing about. It’s a film that I absolutely love, but I’ve got the strangest feeling that if it could speak to me it would ask me “What the fuck are you doing here?” I don’t [...]

By Kit Rathenar It’s amazing what ten years can do. Everyone knows Rob Zombie the movie director by now. While his cinematic career hasn’t been hugely prolific by some standards, he’s got several notable titles under his belt – including the remake of Halloween – and whatever critical opinion may say of his movies, nobody [...]