There is perhaps no genre more worked over, commented upon, or deconstructed than the slasher; that most basic of horror staples has engendered all manner…
Jean-Claude Van Damme, it’s been a minute, buddy. Van Damme’s last starring vehicle, the not-particularly-exciting but still charming The Last Mercenary, mostly survived on JCVD’s…
The story of The Strangers (2008) is simple: a couple (or family, in the case of 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night) will be approached…
The first onscreen image in Faceless After Dark (2023), is, perhaps in deliberate tension with the film’s title, a human face. It is bloodied, or…
In light of the ongoing SAG strikes, this year’s TIFF featured a bevy of actor-directors, (generationally) ranging from Michael Keaton to Finn Wolfhard — allowing…
Unfortunately, the current cinema landscape doesn’t allow for many straightforward genre films to slip through the cracks. Most that do are bogged down by political…
It’s been an extremely productive year for director Jesse V. Johnson. Our premier DTV auteur has churned out three films in the last 13 or…
A tale of desperation and shared fates, of people hanging on to a life that is slipping away from them: two women, Elsa Gray (Sonya…
Of all the John Wick knockoffs that I’ve seen over the last decade, Lee Thongkham’s Kitty the Killer is almost certainly the first one that…
As a director, Jérémie Périn has made a splash in the realm of music videos, namely for his contribution to the song “Fantasy” by French…
Four films into any series, you either change or die, and the copaganda finally outruns the action choreography in the fourth installment in The Roundup…
Moritz Mohr’s new frenetic action-comedy Boy Kills World feels critic-proof inasmuch as anything one might single out as a negative could very well be spun…
Boutique label Severin Films’ documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched — a supplement to their massive and beautiful box set of folk horror films —…
What would Andrew Tate or the late Theodore J. Kaczynski make of Sasquatch Sunset? The litmus tests of this cinematic curio, which is more or…
Scarcity, meet self-interest: with the rising threat of ecological collapse and the persistent wherewithal to do little about it, dystopian scenarios have increasingly sought the…
One of the great “what ifs?” for filmgoers of a certain age is the now somewhat faded-from-memory Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn,…
Of all contemporary genres, horror seems the most susceptible to pastiche and the endless recycling of familiar tropes. Sequels and reboots are released at an…
A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity. The media powers of the hyper-modern world, unlike the institutions of Old Europe with Karl…
There are two films that writer-director Zarrar Kahn struggles to reconcile in his feature-length debut In Flames. The first, a domestic drama about women struggling…
As the sixth official installment in the long running The Omen theatrical franchise — this film is preceded by Richard Donner’s Oscar-winning 1976 original, three sequels,…