Philhelm Scream

Source As with Quantum of Solace (2008) and The Great Gatsby (2013), Prometheus (2012) is one of those films where I often try to convince myself that I was wrong, and that actually, surely it can’t be as bad as I remember.  Maybe it’s actually pretty good?   Yeah, I’m sure it was actually great – I’ll put it on now.   I might even get as far as lying to myself during the movie, wanting it to be good… right until a biologist thinks it’s a good idea to start toying with a scary space snake, and a geologist suddenly turns in to a zombie after having his face melted off.  Despite it’s entertaining scares and great visuals, it’s around that point where I begin to accept that this was in fact a let-down of a movie.  Aliens (1986) is a superb thrill ride of a war film, but Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is one of my favourite films of all time .  I love how much of a slow burner it is, cranking up the horror and dread very gradually.    One of Prometh...

Source How great is that poster?! Much has been made of Split as M. Night Shyamalan's return to form. It's certainly been a long time coming. Sixth Sense (1999) made cultural waves at the time of release to an extent that the endless spoofs and jokes about it's twist have overshadowed the film itself. It's an excellent horror film, and gets under my skin every time I watch it. I enjoyed, but didn't love Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002), and by the time The Village (2004) was released I feel like Shyamalan and his twist endings had begun to become joke in itself. From then on his films seem to have got progressively worse to the extent you wonder whether that early work was a fluke. In 2015 it looked like he had stripped back the high concept ideas evident in duds like Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), and 2013's After Earth (I went to the cinema by myself to see that... urgh) with his tense horror, The Visit,...

Source Directed by Fede Alvarez, Home Alone 6 Don’t Breathe stars Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto as three young burglars that pick the wrong house. Stephen Lang plays their apparent easy target: a blind man with a ridiculous Tom Hardy-esc voice, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash hidden in his house. Their new host manages to turn the tables though, and if you have seen the trailer you will know what I mean when I say that this is one of the most original concepts for a horror film I’ve seen in a long time. Source This was the third time my friend Eve and I had tried to go to see something together at the cinema. Hail, Caesar! (2016) didn’t happen when phone batteries and ridiculous traffic conspired against us, and The Usual Suspects (1995) didn’t happen when Odeon forgot to get the rights to show it! So when we found ourselves running nearly 30 minutes late in awful traffic again, we were close to giving up and banning each other from going a...

Source When the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s big screen adaptation of one of our favourite ever children stories was released, I promised I would take my sister, Suzie, to watch it. It became a dangling carrot for her as she worked through her A Level exams and last weekend we finally got round to watching it. We’ve always loved Roald Dahl’s books, and we would watch the novel’s 1989 adaptation (with David Jason voicing the BFG) every time we went over to stay at our grandparent’s at summer.  If you weren't aware, it tells the story of an orphan called Sophie who becomes friends with The BFG, or 'Big Friendly Giant,' who takes her to Giant Country. Source The best way of describing this latest adaptation of The BFG is that it felt like a big warm hug. It somehow managed to be both familiar and original. Care’s been taken to respect what made the book and its character’s great, and the casting could not have been more perfect. The film’s been in product...

Source Anthony Jaswinski’s screenplay for The Shallows was featured on 2014’s Blacklist, a list of the most well received, but unmade scripts of the year. Blake Lively plays the main role in Jaume Collet-Serra’s survival horror about Nancy Adams, a surfer left injured and stranded 200 yards from the shore. To make things worse, there is a large, hungry shark circling the small group of rocks she’s managed to scramble to. Source The premise (‘127 Hours’, but with a shark) is really simple, but it’s not just that which puts a new twist on the shark movie genre (is that a genre?... lets just go with it). This isn’t a monster that’s got the taste for human flesh for no reason (it’s drawn to the area by a dead whale body). Even the finale, as well as being really satisfying, is definitely original. Blake Lively is really likeable, brings humour when needed. Her character has a backstory that doesn’t feel tacked on, and actually adds weight to those scenes where she is fight...