Remember the 1980’s? They were well skill weren’t they? With your high-top trainers and body warmer you were probably pretty cool as you skateboarded down to the awesome new multi-screen cinema that opened in your town, hoping you could scope out some well wicked flicks and maybe score with some bodacious babes along the way.
So, you pay your £1.50 entrance fee and find that Tim Burton’s Batman is playing on 7 screens, and Back to the Future 2 is on the remaining 6 – woah; totally heinous dude! How’s a hard-core gorehound like you going to get his grue-filled kicks when every decent horror movie has been banned by Maggie Thatcher: Milk Snatcher?!
Well if you were resourceful, you popped down to your local video store/ice cream van, slipped them a tenner and got a dodgy third-hand VHS copy of Evil Dead, and possibly some crap German porn as a bonus. Or you could take the more circuitous route followed by director Ti West; Wait 25 years, then score some ancient filming equipment and film your very own hoary 80’s scarefest – with seriously scary results!
Major studios currently have one rule when it comes to horror – remake, remake, and remake again. Slasher flicks are the norm, usually with a tired, post-Scream makeover for the ironic/not-ironic-but-don’t-actually-know-any-better audience. With this in mind, it may come as a surprise to find STS championing a remake, especially one that doesn’t even have the benefit of decent source material. Be under no illusions, She-Creature contains all the ingredients for a crap-fest of epic proportions.
Taking a bloody awful 1956 Samual Arkoff movie as source, She-Creature thankfully plays fast and loose with it, originally billing itself as ‘the mermaid chronicles part 1’ it seems they couldn’t be bothered to make any follow-ups. Either that or they had so much fun with this that they knew it couldn’t be topped.
Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s version of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, Let The Right One In, finally limps on to British and American screens…just in time for the DVD release. That said, this is definitely a film that deserves a big screen, and a night-walk home through the park afterwards.
This is stunning, catching the ethereal beauty of a Scandinavian winter and juxtaposing it with the modern, concrete grimness of the cold war. Despite being firmly rooted in the 80s, the film spends a lot of time building an atmosphere that is both timeless and ageless.
Despite rumours that this is his final acting gig, Clint manages to stay nicely understated in Gran Torino and it’s to his credit that despite Academy disdain, Gran Torino has gone on to become his most succesful film. Just as Unforgiven put The Man With No Name neatly to bed, this plays out like a resolution to the Dirty Harry films – and a far better one than The Dead Pool at that. Read More »
Going by title alone, you’d be forgiven for expecting a set-piece-filled video game spin off. In fact this is a slow burning and underplayed version of real life events, as Norwegian resistance member Max takes on dastardly invading Nazis, in a WWII film that’s a wobbly mix of two-fisted action and true-life consequence.
