Like Werner Herzog before him and Robert Eggers today, Annaud makes great use of his locations, and the faces of those inhabiting them, creating a fourteenth century you can almost smell. It may be a cracking adventure and a fun time at the movies, but you really wouldn’t want to live there.
Justin Farrington
164 posts
An intoxicating mix of vigilante thriller and Poundland superhero movie all set against a social realist backdrop, it not only works in many seemingly contradictory genres, it does it without pitting them against each other, and that’s what makes it such an exhilarating weekend in Hell.
On record there are over a hundred guitar tracks on each track -- live, where I see them at The Troxy, there are just two hooded men, standing in front of a veritable Stonehenge of amps, all labouring and straining under the force of the sound. Which is where the true music comes from.
...it’s time to commence one of the best weekends in London for lovers of all that’s loud and heavy, as Desertfest celebrates fifteen years of taking over Camden venues and turning them into temples to The Riff
Five strangers who have all experienced various forms of extreme trauma have all come together to attend a group therapy session run by the ominously-named Dr Hedonia. This gives them all the opportunity to tell their stories in turn — which gives us the opportunity for a neat new anthology movie that also clings to a single story, straddling the divide between the two forms.
...the latest in the V/H/S series -- the eighth, in fact, which is impressive for a series devoted to the found footage format, which has long had its day. In fact, calling them VHS just seems weird at this point, as the traditional main audience for new horror movies have probably never used a VHS machine in their lives, and the letters VHS probably mean very little.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy, recently released in a handsome blu-ray slipcase set by Second Sight films, not only offer a hectic thug’s eye view of Copenhagen low-life, they also ask two very important questions. One, who is the titular pusher, and two, what does any of this have to do with a Japanese video game auteur (OK, maybe that one’s just me).
With cosmic horror having made something of a sly comeback in recent years (as the malign influence of HP Lovecraft has given way to the Thomas Ligottis and Laird Barrons of this world), there’s never been a better time to immerse yourself in the secrets of this strange, physics-and-architecture-defying house and its wonderful gallery of grotesques for a unique slice of surrealist horror.
Songs mutate and evolve, improvised elements sticking and becoming part of the canon. In fact, Swans evolve to such a degree that I reckon given a long enough tour, one of their songs is infinitely more likely to develop sentience than any fucking LLM.
When I first moved to London in 1990 at the tender age of eighteen, I was in part drawn by the lure of a city offering plenty of live music. So of course the first thing I did was go to see Fields Of The Nephilim at The Town and Country Club. And now, thirty-five years later, here they are in the same building (though now it’s called The Forum), celebrating their own fortieth anniversary.
... the reason it works, always has worked, and just keeps working is that Guitar Wolf, like Motörhead, don’t fuck with the formula. And, like Motörhead, they take rock’n’roll, strip it back to its basics, and do it faster, louder and, most importantly, COOLER than anyone else.
Other than a basic knowledge of the premise, watching the two movies isn’t necessary to enjoy these, though it is recommended. Over six episodes we see him and his alter-ego Peachfuzz get up to all sorts of murderous shenanigans in bite-sized pieces, each episode being a self-contained “tape”.
...it’s also Desertfest weekend, so I’m off to sunny Camden Town to see the world’s finest collection of Orange amps and hear some of the finest crushingly loud music available.
In taking the action away from Prague, where Meyrinck’s gothic horror takes place, Szulkin performs the neat trick of also bringing along another famous resident of that city -- Golem is as much Franz Kafka as it is Meyrinck, if not more so. Which seems a pretty obvious link to make given the subject matter, but he goes a bit deeper than that.
Second Sight WARNING — contains spoilers for Scanners, The Brood and also (oddly enough) Nightbreed. My first introduction to the work of David Cronenberg may not have been ideal, but it was probably fitting. It was through that classic promo shot of a dude with his head exploding from Scanners, in the pages of a much-thumbed copy of (I think) Starlog which got breathlessly passed round my classroom […]
The beauty of the short-form FF format is that there’s little time for exposition, something which can destroy both horror and SF when not done well. These aren’t Cixin Liu short stories, designed to make you think differently about the nature of the universe -- they’re V/H/S short stories, designed to be spooky, nasty, scary or some combination of the three.
What worked perfectly on a sketchy VHS at home suddenly seemed to fall flat on the big screen. It’s all about the suspension of disbelief -- being able to believe something you know intellectually is a fiction is real. Turns out it’s easier to do that when you’re not in a building whose very existence is predicated on showing people things that don’t exist, and when you’re not in the company of hundreds of people eating popcorn.
When it dropped in 1996, Zoon received a very mixed reception. It landed at a weird time, when the goth / industrial rock alliance had been forged but was still a somewhat uneasy one. On first hearing, I and many others were disappointed that what we were getting wasn’t more Fields Of The Nephilim, but what initially sounded like a softer, more introspective Ministry -- and really, what’s the point of a softer, more introspective Ministry?