The Poughkeepsie Tapes, Why Found Footage is Good, and the Most Disturbing Film I’ve seen.

In 1999 The Blair Witch Project was released (Myrick, Sanchez) a groundbreaking piece of cinema that frightened an entire generation of cinema enthusiasts. The main thing it had going for it was its in depth marketing campaign, arguably making use of the internet for the first time in the history of film, it sported a […]

TV of the Festive Variety. Part One

Christmas comes but once a year, and we all have favourite films that we like to watch. They give us a feeling of comfort when we are at this point of the year, half-way out of the dark and the cold. For me I find that when I think back to the films that I […]

Three Movies to watch as the World Ends

We seem to be living in a world from a movie script at the moment and as a result we all have far much too time on our hands. So as a result I propose we use this time to go back and reflect on some of those wacky worlds created for the big screen, […]

The Eligible Bachelor: Spiritualism and Sherlock Holmes.

On re-watching of the Granada television series Sherlock Holmes (1984-94) one episode stands out, controversially as a cinematic mess that I feel is some of the best in the canon put to celluloid. The story is first striking in the central performance by Jeremy Brett who was incredibly ill at the time of the films […]

The Toxic Avenger: Troma, freedom and the politics of cinema.

We live in troubled times, the world on a knife edge, politically divided, with the environment in an irascible state, earth boiling with the masses crying out for change. Mass protests and a call for revolution. But never mind about that I’m going to talk about Troma. Troma entertainment is the worlds oldest independent film […]

Zardoz; Why the Gun is Good. Why the Penis is Evil…

“The Gun is Good, the Penis is Evil” Such is some of the opening words from Zardoz, the 1974 cult classic made by John Boorman who after the success of Deliverance was given carte blanche by the studio to make whatever he wanted. The result was Zardoz, a big budget sci fi epic focusing on […]

Hardware: The best Christmas film since Die Hard.

I have always been tangentially aware of the works of Richard Stanley, an eccentric but clearly intelligent individual hailing from South Africa, who lived the majority of his younger life in London. From listening to him in interviews and reading about his creative ideas he has always struck me as an outsider, compromised by […]

Freaks; Empathy and Dwarves

Freaks was developed by Tod Browning as early as 1927, but came into production in 1931, with the legendary director (famous for his work as a horror auteur for his work with Lon Chaney in The Unknown (1927) and Bella Lugosi in arguably the most famous early version of Dracula (1931) Browning pursued his passion […]

Entourage: A lesson in disappointment.

I am personally an incredibly big fan of the television series Entourage (2004-2011) as a person who is interested in the way the Hollywood system works and how films are made Entourage as a series intrigued me as it is said by many starlets that it is a fair representation of how movies are made […]

Punk Shakespeare: Derek Jarman and The Tempest

Personally I am very fond of very strange movies and I feel that is why Derek Jarman is one of my favourite film makers, his work is inherently odd and wholly original. In the world of cinema I tend to favour imagination and Jarman always delivered this in spades. His second film Jubilee (1977) is […]