Film news and reviews: fantasy, horror, sci-fi and thrillers
In the mid-60s I was a kid obsessed with horror flicks. When the TV guide in the Sunday paper arrived, I painstakingly scanned the movie listings for anything of interest, …
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Trolls are beings whose roots are embedded in Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore and are typified as much by where they are found as their appearance and behaviour. Said to …
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The bizarre practice of shrinking a human head has an extremely dark history. While numerous cultures have participated in the practice of headhunting, the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Peruvian Amazon Jivaro …
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It’s not a shock that my 2003 film Rise of the Scarecrows has made it onto so many of the “Worst Movies Ever” lists or the “Best/Worst Movies Ever” lists. In …
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“Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.” This quote is attributed to Pauline Kael, …
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I suppose it’s best to start out explaining to readers how I came to be writing this piece for MOVIES & MANIA. In case you don’t know, I’m a former …
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“A terrible thought crept like a snake into my mind – hunting was beginning to bore me.” Like calamitous oceanic buses, two shipwrecks have left Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrae) and …
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Horror films and westerns are two of cinema’s great mainstays, having established their distinct identities and sets of conventions in the earliest days of the medium. So distinct from each …
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Satan (Hebrew: שָּׂטָן satan, meaning “adversary”; Arabic: شيطان shaitan, meaning “astray” or “distant”, sometimes “devil”) is a figure appearing in the ancient texts of the Abrahamic religions who brings evil …
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In the lacklustre Milton Subotsky production The Uncanny, Peter Cushing plays a man desperate to expose a sinister cat conspiracy against the human race: ‘They prowl by night… lusting for …
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Cthulhu is a fictional deity created by writer H. P. Lovecraft and first introduced in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. …
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Some animals are guaranteed to inspire feelings of disgust and fear in cinema audiences, and none more so than the humble rat. While a few people keep rats as pets, …
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Given Hollywood’s obsession with ‘true crime’, it’s perhaps fitting that some of the most notorious murders in history took place smack in the centre of movie land, and involved a …
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