by Ben Bussey Not content with taking over London’s Empire Leicester Square every August Bank Holiday long weekend, Film4 FrightFest also take a bite out of the annual Glasgow Film Festival in February, and they’ve just announced the films to be shown at the event this year at the Glasgow Film Theatre. FrightFest’s co-director Alan [...]

Review by Keri O’Shea I’m going to start this review with a confession: I’m not a huge fan of the giallo genre. Gialli are stylish to look at, but once I get over the visual good stuff I find their plots are often contrived to the point of predictability, even when the eventual outcomes are [...]

Review by Keri O’Shea Robin Hardy is obviously a man who likes to take his time. It’s been the best part of forty years since The Wicker Man first graced screens and yet, this year, he has – finally – completed and released The Wicker Tree, based on his novel Cowboys for Christ. I saw [...]

Interview conducted by Keri O’Shea You want to know about enthusiasm? When director Fouad Benhammou found out, last-minute, that his movie The Village of Shadows (reviewed here) was being screened at The Abertoir Horror Festival, he was so pleased that he flew himself and one of the film’s stars to Wales for the occasion AND [...]

Review by Keri O’Shea It’s probably fair to say that, for those who form part of a prospective audience, not many of us know too much about the country of Serbia. So, when trying to estimate the efficacy of a movie which purports to be ‘an allegory about Serbia’, we’re already in dangerous territory. If [...]

Review by Keri O’Shea It’s odd – sometimes when a film itself makes a claim about how ‘original’ it is or how it is somehow ‘redefining genre’, you wonder why you’re hearing it from them, not the fans. Sometimes it even comes across like a kid establishing their version of events first, before you discover [...]

Review by Kayley Viteo First things first: A Lonely Place to Die isn’t a horror film. It can best be described as an action thriller, and in terms of action it certainly delivers. However, A Lonely Place to Die isn’t very thrilling so much as it is kind of boring. A group of rock climbers, [...]

Review by Keri O’Shea  If, like me, repeatedly seeing people GETTING FUCKING TIED TO CHAIRS in horror movies makes you weep soundlessly into your hands at such a singular lack of imagination, then Village of Shadows might well have something to offer. Atmospheric supernatural horror often gets overlooked (or botched) by low-budget filmmakers, but first-time [...]

Review by Kayley Viteo Of all the films to play Toronto After Dark, one of my most anticipated was the independent supernatural horror Absentia. Prior to the screening, the hype was tremendous. Touted as Toronto After Dark’s scariest film of the festival, Absentia delivers – though compared to the rest of the field, it is [...]

Keri O’Shea on Abertoir Horror Film Festival 2011, Aberystwyth, Wales UK Well, that’s it for another year: Abertoir has been and gone, there’s nothing left on my horror calendar and I’ve once more been spat out, kicking and screaming, into Real Life. Still, perhaps it’s all for the best. At the time of writing, I [...]

Review by Kayley Viteo I can’t count the amount of times Midnight Son was billed as the anti-Twilight at Toronto After Dark. First, are we really at the point where everything with a gothic romance is compared (positively or negatively) to something chiefly aimed at thirteen year olds? I think we’re all grown-ups, and can [...]

Review by Kayley Viteo The Theater Bizarre is the result of an interesting experiment where six genre filmmakers are given an identical budget and full creative license in order to make a short film in Grand Guignol tradition. Basically, this is an anthology for “mutant side projects” that showcase the most disturbing, grisly things an [...]

Review by Kayley Viteo It’s 2039 and astronaut Lee Miller (Gunner Wright) is alone aboard the International Space Station. Cut off from the Earth after some sort of apocalyptical event destroys communications, Miller is faced with the sort of isolation humans are not meant to experience. Once he finds a journal that dates back to [...]

Review by Kayley Viteo War of the Dead is an ideal film festival movie if for no other reason than Nazi zombies are warmly welcomed by a crowd ready to have fun. In recent years it seems like the zombie subgenre has spawned its own subgenre with Nazi zombies, something I must confess to being [...]

Review by Kayley Viteo Kevin Corrigan (Pineapple Express) plays Ken Boyd, a recently released mental patient who suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder from severely traumatic bullying in high school. As a new romance, an unsympathetic mother, and a surprise appearance by his 11-year-old daughter all combine to ratchet his stress levels higher, Ken’s [...]

Reviews by Kayley Viteo Good Morning Beautiful – Although I missed the beginning of this one due to Toronto traffic, I walked in at the right moment. Creepy, but with a sly undercurrent, there’s something both slow-moving and frenetic about this short by Todd Cobery. Protoparticulas – A sci-fi black and white piece that manages [...]

Review by Kayley Viteo Mike (Michael McKiddy) wakes up in a laboratory with amnesia, somehow less dead than the other zombies running around the countryside. He quickly teams up with Brent (Ross Kidder), an even more talkative zombie, and finds himself on a quest to win back the heart of his girlfriend Ellie (Natalie Victoria). [...]