It’s Halloween, so we’re checking out a little spooky action with the Netflix movie, Vampires vs The Bronx. This fun excursion into the supernatural won’t test your brain, but never wears out its welcome. Director Osmany “Oz” Rodriguez has an impressive CV in television, notably on A. P. Bio and Saturday Night Live. And he…
Director Egor Abramenko delivers a creepy creature-feature with Sputnik. It starts with two cosmonauts planning to return to Earth, but quickly morphs into something else entirely. It’s 1983. After a Soviet space mission returns into barren Kazakhstan, the support team find one of the intrepid travellers hasn’t make it and the other – the commander…
The Babysitter: Killer Queen is a hybrid of gory horror, coming-of-age tale and black comedy. It’s the sequel to 2017’s cult favourite The Babysitter. In that film, teen Cole (Judah Lewis) discovered his babysitter was involved in a satanic blood cult. Two years after the events of that film the angst-ridden Cole is still traumatised,…
The Devil All the Time is a sprawling and multi-layered Southern Gothic tale of good and evil. The film offers a rich tapestry of amoral and unsavoury characters and explores that potent nexus between religion, sex and violence, fate and faith. The atypical and nonlinear narrative spans a couple of decades between the end of…
“Dead bodies usually mean something bad…” It’s 1945, towards the send of WWII. The German navy are even sinking hospital ships. When the film opens, a group of survivors from a sunken hospital ship are adrift somewhere in the North Atlantic. Tensions are high as they are desperately short of food and water. This motley…
A man haunted by his past is forced to face his demons in the slow-moving horror film, The Vigil. Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis) is a shadow of a man in the aftermath of a tragedy that befell his younger brother. He was present; but he didn’t intervene and before he knew it, it was too…
Vivarium is a descent into madness. It did my head in. Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) are a happy couple. They’re considering buying a house together. One day they wander into a shop displaying cardboard models of the same perfectly manicured home. A strange real estate salesman – Martin (Jonathan Aris) – implores…
More twisted weirdness from New Zealand filmmaker Ant Timpson, best known for his work as a producer on gory horror films like the 2012 horror anthology The ABCs of Death. Timpson makes his feature directorial debut with this irreverent, nasty and darkly comic thriller about a young man who tries to reconnect with his estranged…
Produced under the auspices of Blumhouse, which specialises in horror, The Invisible Man is a taut psychological thriller that effectively combines elements of sci-fi and horror. Written and directed by Melbourne filmmaker Leigh Whannell (a co-creator of the Saw and Insidious franchises), this serves up a refreshingly different take on the mad scientist character originally…
The popular TV series Fantasy Island ran for seven seasons from 1977. It involved guests being granted fantasies, but at a price that often involved exposing the error of their ways. So there were perils and life lessons, but nothing like this big screen horror version of the show. Each of the five guests who…
