Month: January 2023
Maniac Driver is a 2020 Japanese horror thriller, written and directed by Kurando Mitsutake. Mitsutake has worked in many areas of film production but is most notable as director of Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf (2009) and Gun Woman (2014). Following a personal tragedy, a taxi driver randomly stalks and kills his female passengers in
Published while he was still in college, Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel Less Than Zero (1985) established themes of isolation and excess still present in his work today. The narrator, a disaffected young adult named Clay, sets himself apart from his friends and longs to leave Los Angeles. He appears again in Ellis’ second book,
Once again, readers, my insomnia had come to call, and I needed a good read for the night. However, choosing the story took some time. I wanted something different from the usual ghosts, vampires, and demons of contemporary horror. I craved a story with more complexity in its characters and antagonists. Michael McDowell’s Blackwater delivers!
“I came out early, I couldn’t take it”“I hated it”“I loved it and won’t have a word said against it!”– Quotes overheard in the foyer, after having seen Skinamarink. Written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball and shot on a micro-budget at his childhood Canadian home, Skinamarink (2022) is inspired by a childhood nightmare. Pirated,
Korean genre cinema has never shied away from violence; from the unrelenting stream of beatings in I Saw The Devil to the eye-wateringly graphic tooth extraction in Oldboy, blood and brutality have long been a staple of some of the country’s best cinematic achievements. Enter Project Wolf Hunting (2022), a movie so drenched in viscera
Despite being one of Japan’s biggest film studios throughout the late 40s and 50s during the golden age of Japanese cinema, Daiei was struggling by the mid-60s and had to slash budgets for their productions. This eventually led to a merger with Nikkatsu in 1970, followed by bankruptcy in 1971. Somewhat overlooked is Daiei’s
Although the first thing that comes to mind would be to honour the classic camp slashers or creature-feature flicks, I decided to welcome summer with Barry Levinson’s The Bay (2012) on Shudder. This found footage mockumentary portrays what we first may confuse with a viral outbreak, but is in fact a parasitic outbreak. If something
Eichi Sato, known better in the following years for his work on the live-action adaptations of Lychee Hikari Club (2016) and Miso Misou (2018), found his way to shock us from the very beginning with his debut movie. Let’s Make the Teacher Have a Miscarriage Club (2011) is a film with many flaws, but its
In the Fall of 2022, the horror movie community got a jolt when the trailer for director Gerard Johnstone’s and screenwriter Akela Cooper’s sci-fi/horror film, M3GAN, dropped. The trailer’s creepy, dancing doll, at once recognizable both as human-shaped and unhuman in its weird movements and affectless face, became a viral sensation. M3GAN is more
After File 01 went off with a bang, Koji Shiraishi’s Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 02: Shivering Ghost (2012) tries something different and turns out unexpectedly good. The first episode of the mockumentary series didn’t disappoint in serving Koji’s found footage brands and Japanese myth goodness, showing how his knack for storytelling and genre