RONDO AND BOB **** USA 2020 Dir: Joe O’Connell. 100 mins Writer-director Joe O’Connell follows up DANGER GOD (a celebration of death-defying B-movie stuntman Gary Kent) with this compassionate study of two distinct horror film personalities from different eras: actor Rondo Hatton and art director / production designer Robert A. Burns (who, as this film reminds us, also portrayed the Henry Lee Lucas-inspired title character in CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL KILLER). These two men are positioned as polar opposites: Hatton, presently immortalised as a genre award trophy, is conveyed as a nice, loving guy whose “monstrous” face was exploited by…
Author: Steven West
HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS **** UK 1983 Dir: Pete Walker. 97 mins In a bold move, Cannon Films asked Pete Walker, the filmmaker responsible for some of the most nihilistic, establishment-baiting British horror films of the 1970s, and MARK OF THE DEVIL screenwriter Michael Armstrong to adapt “The Seven Keys to Baldpate” into an all-star old-school horror picture. The once in a lifetime horror-icon ensemble (only missing the intended Elsa Lanchester, who proved unavailable) gives all of its ageing legends a decent slab of screen time after earlier (less expansive) team ups like SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN usually reduced…
WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE *** Australia 2021 Dir: Kiah Roache-Turner. 88 mins Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014) was a feature length calling card for co-writer / director Kiah Roache-Turner, in collaboration with his brother Tristan, delivering a zombie-plague movie that stood out from the crowd with a mixture of high-octane, inventive action, Mad Max riffs, surprising pathos, neat ideas (zombie emissions as fuel) and quote-worthy lines like “I can’t hold a gun and my massive cock at the same time”. This unimaginatively titled sequel has higher production values than its self-financed predecessor and amps up the kinetic camerawork, fast cutting, swooping…
BAPHOMET * USA 2021 Dir: Matthan Harris. 72 mins While there’s some pleasure to be found in watching the great Giovanni Lombardo Radice (“John Morghen” to long-term “video nasty” fans) channeling late-period Donald Pleasence in the role of a Satanic cult leader, writer-director Matthan Harris’ California-based spin on 1970s American occult horror movie themes is embarrassingly lame – despite an almost admirable commitment to sincere, straight-faced delivery. Radice sends one of his cult members (Stephen Brodie) to pressure shouty patriarch Colin Ward into selling his land for reasons unspecified. Ward’s pregnant daughter (a remarkably unsympathetic Rebecca Weaver) subsequently suffers the…
THE DARK AND THE WICKED *** USA 2020 Dir: Bryan Bertino. 95 mins Filmed on a meager budget on the farm of talented writer-director Bertino, this is a supremely creepy mood piece unfolding, as in THE SHINING, over a period of increasingly blurred days of the week appearing onscreen to ever more disorientating effect. In a further Stephen King nod, the backdrop is ‘Straker Farm’ in Thurber, Texas. As with other recent, standout horror movies like RELIC, the set-up offers an authentically miserable but convincing real-life horror: two siblings (Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr) have reunited to help their mom…