DVD/Blu-Ray Review
Blu-Ray Review: Days of Bagnold Summer
Cinema tends to portray school holidays as epic turning points in the lives of children. The time when we experience our first love or face some important event or tragedy. A major turning point in our lives or when we make the difficult transition into adulthood. Or even a summer romance. In actuality, those weeks …
Blu-ray Review: Godmonster of Indian Flats
There’s nothing quite like a good creature feature. A film which introduces a monster into a narrative and has a whole lot of fun with it. Whether it works or not has as much to do with the time and effort invested in making it as it does budget. You don’t need to spend millions …
Blu-Ray Review: Rogue Cops and Racketeers
While Fabio Testi began his film career as a stuntman, taking on a few small roles, being cast in Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis made him a star in his native Italy. The Italian’s relationships with the likes of Ursula Andress, Jean Seberg and Charlotte Rampling ensured that he stayed in the …
Blu-ray Review – Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
As a society, we seem to be fascinated by the concept of a serial killer. There appears to be some innate need to try and understand the rationale behind their actions and a constant debate over whether the blame can be attributed to nature or nurture. This has gradually seeped into popular culture and the …
Blu-ray Review: The Scare Film Archives Volume 1: Drug Stories!
The American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) is a non-profit organisation whose mission is to preserve the legacy of genre movies through collection, conservation, and distribution. Located in Austin, Texas and founded it 2009, it benefits from having a number of high-profile advisors from within the industry. With an archive containing over six thousand film prints, …
Film Review – Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle
Wars are never straightforward. The bigger the conflict, both in terms of length and size of the arena of battle, the messier things like logistics and communications become. The Pacific theatre during World War II is a prime example. fighting took place across countless islands, big and small, scattered across the ocean. Groups easily became …
Blu-Ray Review – Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th
The late 1970s and 1980s was the era of the mega horror franchises. Innovations in filmmaking techniques and technologies, not to mention the growing turbulence within the world, made it a fertile time for genre cinema to flourish. Huge series sprung up, which weren’t just big box office hits but also gained avid (often rabid) …
Blu-Ray Review: In Cold Blood
Today, true crime is big business. Newsagents’ shelves are full of magazines, bookstores stuffed to the seams with bestsellers and streaming services providing a platform, and funding, for countless popular series. This hasn’t always been the case though. When Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was published in 1966 it was an instant success. Remaining one …
Blu-Ray Review: Coach to Vienna
Wars are not merely a simple case of good versus evil. While leaders like Hitler and Stalin might have been rotten to the core, soldiers are often there against their own will. Either conscripted into an army or forced to serve. History likes to tie events up in nice bows but anyone placed in a …
Blu-ray Review: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
One of the most enduring, influential and popular faces of horror cinema is that of Frankenstein’s monster. Since the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel back in 1818, the idea of a mad professor reanimating the dead has persisted throughout popular culture. There have been many interpretations and uses of her creation over the year, often …