Believe the stories of disturbed audience members leaving various screenings – there were a few hurried departures when we saw this film at this year’s London Film Festival. Debut feature writer-director Justin Kurzel has co-penned a gripping, ‘car-crash’ account based on a true Australian crime story from the 1990s. However, it’s not necessarily the crime that [...]

Writer-director Nick Murphy’s first feature film, The Awakening, is a bold step into the well-trodden genre of horror. Thankfully, Murphy has mixed supernatural intrigue with historical fact to bolster his story’s significance, adopting an old-fashioned ghost-hunting theme to its investigative concept, without relying on modern-day effects for big scares. Set in 1921 England, there is [...]

“Establishment is flawed. Down with the establishment!” appears to be Kevin Smith‘s defining and sinister mantra in his Tarantino-esque Red State, done with brutal and twisted irony in a hail of righteous bullets. Its cynicism both cultivates and dissipates the bouts of humour in one of Smith’s most radical yet frank pieces of film-making yet [...]

Lucky McKee’s new horror The Woman is 2011’s very own I Spit on Your Grave for fuelling post-viewing debate and controversy. It is a love-hate piece of film-making designed to revolt, but also to allow us to reflect. To describe it as a “look into the darkness of human nature” gives it a purpose and [...]

Debut feature director Eli Craig’s take on the comedy-horror genre is a glorious homage to all the townie-meets-country shlock horrors over the years, like an hilarious study of all the gory clichés turned on their heads. It still racks up the body count for genre fans and demonises the local White trash population, but cleverly [...]

The Gilbeys are no stranger to a bit of in-your-face grit after their 2007 gangster flick, Rise Of The Footsoldier, based on a true story. All they’ve done with their last offering, A Lonely Place To Die, starring horror Aussie darling Melissa George, is injected the horror into what is effectively a cat-and-mouse crime thriller [...]

Craig Gillespie’s last and probably only memorable film to date was the touchingly quirky Lars and the Real Girl in 2007, starring Ryan Gosling as a delusional guy who has a relationship with a life-like doll. This showed the makings of a great director of twisted unconventionality in the heart of suburbia – kind of [...]

The thought of another dance with Death – and in 3D – fills anyone tiring of the accident-obsessed franchise with dread. But Steven Quale’s addition to the grizzly iconic series, Final Destination 5 (3D), should not be dismissed so easily, and begins with a glass-smashing, gore-dripping, pole-flying 3D title extravaganza that makes you sit up [...]

As everyone knows from nature programmes alone, ‘Hell hath no fury like a Mummy scorned’. After creeping out audiences back in 1992 in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, then-maternal Rebecca De Mornay proves she’s still got the superior chill factor to scare the living daylights out of you in Saw director Darren Lynn Bousman’s [...]