I was always a movie guy. We had consoles (a Sega Master System, followed by a Mega Drive) in the house and I did play them, and some PC games, when I was a kid, but gaming was my brother’s thing. Despite that, and despite the fact we never had...
In 1993, Sylvester Stallone was going through, shall we say, a challenging period. He’d had a few box office disappointments. The Rocky series seemed to have played itself out with 1990’s poorly received fifth entry, and Stallone had attempted to shift into comedy, making disastrous choices in Oscar and Stop...
Coercive Control - a form of abuse in a relationship that works not through physical violence but threats and other means of controlling a partner’s behaviour - only became a crime in the UK in late 2015. I don’t think it’s a commonly used description, or a crime, in much...
As opening statements in a film career go, the pre-credits sequence of Menace II Society is a powerful one. Two young black men, Caine (Tyrin Turner) and O-Dog (Larenz Tate) are carefully watched by the Korean husband and wife owners as they buy themselves beers in a convenience store. They’re...
About 25 minutes into Revenge, a close up of an ant heralds one of my favourite sequences in a 2018 film to date. For a second it’s just there, large and still in the middle of the screen. Then, in slow motion, with a sound effect like a crashing wave,...
Time is strange. To me, 1993 doesn’t feel like it was that long ago. The films I’m watching for this series are often clearly from an era that has passed, but they don’t feel old to me. Until today. In many ways, Dave is the quaintest film I’ve seen for...
What do you come to horror cinema for? For me it’s generally to be scared, to be unnerved, to be thrilled. For that to happen there have to be certain ingredients in place. Most importantly I have to care. The ability to be truly concerned about what happens to a...
Horror, as a genre, is steeped in metaphor. Horror can be about politics, sex, disease, but it’s usually - when you get down to the bottom of it - about fears more real and more universal than vampires or zombies. The Dark Half isn’t exactly like that, in fact it...
Mental illness has, over the past few years, become more understood and easier to admit to. I’ve suffered with it myself (anxiety and depression) and know many other people who have or had their own struggles with various forms of mental illness. How movies deal with mental illness still often...