Tag: Review
Making up for lost time, here I am again with another edition of Recent Reads. For this round, it’s absolutely unintentional but I ended up reading some horror with cool LGBTQ+ representation. I just wish I’d posted this sooner so it could’ve come out on time for Pride Month! Oh, well. Perhaps these reads may
There’s an inherent restlessness in the face of the unknown, perpetually stoking curiosity. Intentionally or otherwise, this very restlessness is what renders Dreadful Chapters a compelling viewing experience. Hailing from the Malayalam film landscape, this indie production brims with potential, laying the groundwork for the burgeoning career of Indian-born director Nirmal Baby Varghese. As his
Candy Land (2022) is a religious-horror-themed slasher film that upends established genre conventions in unexpected and gripping ways. Writer-director John Swab (Let Me Make You a Martyr) tells the gritty story of a group of prostitutes that live and work in a rural and isolated truck stop. Tension mounts as a killer stalk them and
A Wounded Fawn opens with a quote from Surrealist painter and author Leonora Carrington: “I suddenly became aware that I was both mortal and touchable and that I could be destroyed“. Centering the film around a serial-killer protagonist who slowly comes to the same realization, director Travis Stevens (Girl on the Third Floor, Jakob’s Wife)
Have you at any point while watching a particularly messy death scene in cinema thought to yourself “I’d hate to be the one to clean up that mess”? Or would you be willing to roll up your sleeves and dive in elbow deep through the gooey entrails that may once have a person, scrubbing until
Jishu eiga, abbreviated from jishu seisaku eiga and translating roughly to “autonomously produced”, is an elusive, self-sufficient form of filmmaking popularised during the decline of mainstream Japanese cinema around the 1970’s. Mostly filmed on 8mm film and chiefly witnessed at a handful of specialist film festivals, this independent form of filmmaking helped launch the directorial
In the summer of 2009, a Korean blogger claimed to have seen a strange creature near Jangsan, a mountain in Busan. The following year, the creature was spotted again. As of March 2013, there had been 14 recorded sightings, six of which put the creature at Jangsan. Described as having a sloth-like shape and long
Beneath its table of contents, Revenant’s Hymn offers a comprehensive list of content warnings. From violence and suicide to eye trauma and Nazism, Elliott Dunstan’s third collection of short stories runs the gamut of traumatic themes and disturbing content. Dunstan exploits every weakness a reader might possess, inching split and bloodied fingernails into the nooks
“Capitalism is nothing before the forces of love and passion!” So declares an impossibly pregnant woman’s stalker in The Embodiment, the second story in this intricate puzzle box of a collection from Korean author Bora Chung. Cursed Bunny offers 10 stories of capitalist corruption, misogyny, and patriarchy: ghost stories, speculative fiction, and darkly comic fairy
To say that Shinji Sômai is one of the greats of cinema is an understatement. He is quoted as describing his directing philosophy as “humanity observing humanity,” his approach was vastly different from that seen in Japan at the time. As such, his films all have an unyielding realism to their story and characters, strongly