Author: Peter 'Witchfinder' Hopkins

VANILLA CAKE **** USA 2016 Dir: Crystal Pastis. 8 mins A grim, good looking short film from writer-director Crystal Pastis, whose C.V. also numbers an assistant editor gig on this year’s JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM. Overbearing, widowed all-American mom Julie Mitchell is preparing a juvenile party to mark her son’s (Coleton Ray) 16th birthday – while she slates his religion and his “obesity”. Things take a turn for the worst with the realisation that she has baked a vanilla cake rather than the chocolate cake he requested. Pastis favours rapid-cut montages and a disquietingly cheerful colour palette for this tale…

FILMS FROM A BROKEN MIND *** UK 2016 Dir: Bazz Hancher. 87 mins A wisecracking, guffawing Satan (Matt Lee) welcomes newcomers to Hell in the framing story of this engaging anthology film from Kidderminster-based indie director Bazz Hancher. The opener, “Leon’s Broken Mind” has an astonishingly repulsive performance by Richard Rowbotham as a lonely, thumbsucking mummy’s boy driven by childhood abuse (and with a little inspiration from a snuff movie in Kidderminster’s last DVD rental shop) to a murder spree. It captures the grubby visual aesthetic of a nasty shot-on-video 80’s gore flick and Rowbotham’s fearless, oddly compelling schizo recalls…

THE DARK **** Austria 2018 Dir: Justin P. Lange 95 mins In The Dark, an undead girl explores her humanity when she helps a blind boy. It definitely has been a while since I have seen a zombie film, so I am quite pleased to say The Dark is one of my favourite zombie films. It’s a tragic examination of trauma and the scars of a troubled life, Think along the lines of Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin mixed with John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let The Right One In, but with a more direct approach. Nadia Alexander’s undead Mina and Toby…

Leading independent distributor Wild Eye Releasing have released Portuguese horror film THE FOREST OF THE LOST SOULS on Amazon Prime, Blu-ray and DVD. The psychological “coming of age” horror film, written and directed by directed by José Pedro Lopes, also has new artwork to coincide with the Amazon and BD launch. Synopsis: Ricardo and Carolina are complete strangers that meet seemingly by chance in the Forest of the Lost Souls , a place where many people go to commit suicide. These two, a young woman and an old man, are no different than the others as they also came to…

REVENGE ***** France 2017 Dir: Coralie Fargeat. 108 mins The title of writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s visually stunning 21st century, #MeToo-era rape-revenge movie appears on screen in huge bold, yellow letters. The opening stretch toys with genre expectations and long-held perceptions of the horror genre as the domain of the “male gaze”, as beautiful leading lady Matilda Lutz is objectified by both the male characters and the camera. The blonde American fantasy figure, mistress of married father Kevin Janssens, arrives at his lavish villa in the middle of the desert and becomes the victim of a brutal sexual assault involving his…