It’s usually hyperbole to say that someone does it all, but in the case of Larry Fessenden, it just so happens to be true. An award-winning actor, producer, writer, director and editor – Fessenden is a genre filmmaker with a real skill in delivering works that entertain but also have a fair amount of nuance and sophistication.  Fessenden’s latest film is Blackout, a werewolf horror with a top-notch cast that includes Alex Hurt, Addison Timlin, Marshall Bell and Barbara Crampton amongst its number.  The film is not only a fantastic old-school horror pic, but it also features plenty of ..read more

Released in 2013, The Borderlands came and went with relatively little fanfare. Coming out in the wake of the found-footage phenomenon, the Elliott Garner-directed film got lumped in with many lesser films which permeated the horror scene at the time. With a few exceptions, the found-footage subgenre has a pretty atrocious track record and many low-budget filmmakers use the gimmick as a way of covering the tracks of poor storytelling while obscuring their lack of finesse behind the camera. It takes real skill and an understanding of storytelling to make the format work – and it can’t be contri ..read more

Regular readers will know that Movies In Focus regards S. Craig Zahler as one of the finest U.S. filmmakers to emerge in the last decade or so. Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete – are all first-rate works from a unique cinematic voice  – and it’s verging on criminal that Zahler hasn’t made a film since Dragged Across Concrete in 2018. He has a literary approach to story and character – something which is no surprise considering that he’s also a novelist. The good news is that World of Reel is reporting that Zahler is gearing up to direct The Big Stone Grid ..read more

Swapping his beloved New York for Paris, Woody Allen is again behind the camera for Coup de Chance (Stroke Of Luck) – his 50th feature film as writer-director. This time, not only is the famed auteur in a different city (although it’s not his first time in the City of Lights), but he’s also working in a different language – Coup de Chance is Allen’s first French-language film. Allen isn’t fluent in the language, he wrote the screenplay and then it was translated into French. The script seems to work and doesn’t appear to be incongruous.  Playing with Allen’s usual themes of relationships ..read more

The Matrix is 25 years old – a quarter of a century. Whoa, where does time go? One of the defining movies in cinema history, The Matrix pretty much came from nowhere back in 1999 and changed the face of how science fiction and action movies were made. The Wachowskis tapped into something that Hollywood didn’t know audiences wanted and it gave the world ‘bullet time’, ‘wire-fu’ and manga-influenced sci-fi action philosophy. Simply put, nobody had seen anything quite like The Matrix when it was released on 31 March 1999. It grossed $27 million during its first weekend, topping out at $171 millio ..read more

Nostalgia is a hot commodity. For years it helped drive a large section of the music industry and in recent years it’s taken a firm grip on Hollywood. Legacy sequels are an IP to mined and the studios have gotten out their pick axes and gone to work. Star Wars, Blade Runner, Spider-Man, Batman, Tron and Top Gun have all been updated for new audiences – but the major draw for these new incarnations has been in bringing back legacy characters – and everyone from Tom Cruise to Harrison Ford and even Michael Keaton and Jeff Bridges have dusted off the duds of an iconic character and taken them aro ..read more

After dabbling in action (Death Wish), kids’ movies (The House With A Clock In Its Walls) and documentaries (Fin), the godfather of torture porn himself, Eli Roth finally returns to the horror genre with Thanksgiving. A film that was first mooted as a fictitious trailer in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 exploitation opus, Grindhouse, it has taken 16 years for Roth to finally bring the holiday slasher pic to the screen. Was it worth the wait? Yeah, I guess it was. It doesn’t redefine the genre, but it does feature solid performances and some pretty good thrills and kills, ensurin ..read more

Famous – or should I say infamous for being one of the UK’s banned video nasties – Nightmares In A Damaged Brain (also known as Nightmare) saw its distributor, David Hamilton Grant jailed when he released the film uncut after it was censored by the British Board of Film Classification. A dark thriller from Italian director Romano Scavolini, this psychological slasher isn’t as vile or as sleazy as its reputation would have you believe. In fact – dare I say it – it’s something of a thought-provoking genre piece. After he’s released from a psychiatric institution, George Tatum (Baird St ..read more

Anyone familiar with Movies In Focus will know that I’m not a fan of ‘found footage’ horror movies. Don’t get me wrong – some can be great – but they’re often substandard and use the format as a cheap gimmick to overcome poor filmmaking. However, I do like anthology films and enjoy the opportunity to see filmmakers with various styles playing with different forms of storytelling. So ultimately, the good outweighs the bad when it comes to Shudder‘s V/H/S franchise – and V/H/S/85 – the sixth film in the series – is the best instalment yet.  Made up from short films by David Bruckner, Scott ..read more

In cinematic terms, Frank Henenlotter is like David Cronenberg’s younger, scrappier and less popular cousin. Both have worked in the realm of body horror, but while films like The Fly, Dead Ringers and Crash helped bring Cronenberg a certain air of respectability, Henenlotter has remained locked in the low-budget horror dungeon. Films like Basket Case, Brain Damage and Frankenhooker have their fans and a certain cult cache, but Frankenlotter has never broken through to the upper echelon of the genre. In fact, he hasn’t directed a narrative feature since 2008’s Bad Biology.  Now, I normall ..read more