HOUSE OF USHER (DEVIL’S ADVOCATES) by Evert Jan Van Leeuwen Author Evert Jan Van Leeuwen brings a welcome personal touch to this informative celebration of the first of Roger Corman’s beloved Poe Cycle. The monograph opens with Van Leeuwen’s memories of discovering ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and the cinematic Poe films via the BBC’s Corman-Poe season of 1990, sparking a love of the Gothic and a fascination with the film’s place in the pantheon of Poe adaptations and Corman’s career. How many teenager viewers empathised with the angsty Roderick Usher at the same time as Van Leeuwen?…
Author: Steven West
TWO HEADS CREEK **** UK / Australia 2019 Dir: Jesse O’Brien. 85 mins Here’s an inventively gory, genuinely funny horror comedy built on a foundation of broadly satirised Australian archetypes and Brexit-era British social conflict, with an emphasis on the racism inherent in both. Jordan Waller (who also wrote the screenplay) is a butcher of Polish origin facing both a sausage crisis and the relentless torments of xenophobic locals. Still living at the family home above the butcher shop, he reunites with his estranged twin sister (Kathryn Wilder) – the advertising face for a popular stool softener – and, after…
THE STYLIST *** USA 2020 Dir: Jill Gevargizian. 105 mins A sleek-looking, character-driven thriller adapted from co-writer / director Jill Gevargizian’s short 2016 film of the same name, this unfolds like a distaff riff on the “God’s Lonely Man” post-TAXI DRIVER sequence of modern American horror films. Though superbly acted and shot (by Robert Patrick Stern), its echoes of both versions of MANIAC (1980/2012), amongst others, give it a second hand feel despite the gender switch of the protagonist. Najarra Townsend, the best thing about the CONTRACTED films, is excellent in a reprisal of her role from the original short.…
CREEPSHOW (DEVIL’S ADVOCATES) by Simon Brown CREEPSHOW, the lightest, most purely fun of all Romero movies, doesn’t necessarily warrant a full academic analysis in the way that his lauded contributions to zombie cinema invite or, indeed, his fabulous revisionist Gothic MARTIN. Simon Brown, author of this entry in the Devil’s Advocates series of horror film monographs, does a fine job of placing the historic Romero-King collaboration in a wider context and acknowledges the film’s more throwaway nature by highlighting the “extra textual pleasures afforded by Ed Harris boogieing on down”. Ultimately the only direct cinematic union of the two horror…
HOSTS **** UK 2020 Dir: Adam Leader, Richard Oakes. 89 mins A distinctively British spin on INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS that makes a major virtue out of its low budget. The opening is deceptively light and funny, with an appealing young couple preparing for Christmas Eve dinner with the neighbours. Jack (Neal Ward) has just had a bad dye job and sports a naff Christmas jumper. Lucy (Samantha Loxley) has started a new job as a primary school teacher. While the TV reports traditional Christmases are on the wane and talks ominously about unidentified electrical currents, the couple spot Something…