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Under The Radar: Bloody Cuts In Conversation
Posted on Friday May 17, 2013, 10:33 by Owen Williams in Under The Radar
Debuting in June 2011, Bloody Cuts is an anthology series of horror shorts (as well as the name of the production company) aiming for thirteen instalments, of which eight have surfaced so far. Available to watch free on the Bloody Cuts website, the films have attracted hundreds of thousands of views online, successfully hit the festival circuit, and picked up glowing notices from far and wide. With their most ambitious project to date, the award-winning Don't Move, recently added to the online roster, Empire spoke to the collective's Jonny Franklin, who gave us a taste of Bloody Cuts' history and a glimpse of the future... Continue reading...Comment Now
Back To TopUnder The Radar: European Film Awards 2012
Posted on Sunday December 2, 2012, 00:05 by Owen Williams in Under The Radar
 A bit of context before the ceremony: this year’s European Film Awards are taking place in the beautiful surroundings of Valletta, Malta, following a couple of weeks of quiet (and not so quiet) ructions within Malta’s own modest film establishment. Despite a record year for domestic applications to the Malta Film Fund, it transpires that no visiting productions at all are currently scheduled to shoot in Malta next year. Cue bitter recriminations and accusations of incompetence and financial mismanagement from Film Service Providers Malta – a collection of production service companies responsible for managing most foreign productions filmed in Malta over the last ten years – towards controversial Malta Film Commissioner Peter Busuttil. Finance Minister Tonio Fenech dismissed the spat as a “personality clash,” but it’s a claim angrily denied by FSPM. Continue reading...Comment Now
Back To TopUnder The Radar: Night Visions 2012: Silje Reinamo and Thale
Posted on Sunday November 4, 2012, 14:39 by Owen Williams in Under The Radar
 Home-grown Scandinavian films are in relatively short supply at this year’s Night Visions in Helsinki: the Audience Award went to Dredd (although it was a close call between that and Bobcat Goldthwait's excellent God Bless America). One of the very best films of the festival however, is the beautifully enigmatic and eerie Norwegian entry Thale [ tah-lay], directed by Aleksander Nordaas and starring Silje Reinåmo. It’s the story of a forest sprite who’s been kept separated from her kind for some years, until the death of her human guardian and the arrival at her cabin-in-the-woods of Erlend Nervold and Jon Sigve Skard: a dryly hum... Continue reading... Comment Now
Back To TopUnder The Radar: Night Visions 2012: Juan Martinez Moreno and Attack of the Werewolves
Posted on Saturday November 3, 2012, 14:26 by Owen Williams in Under The Radar
 
A couple of weeks ago, you may have noticed a DVD called Attack of the Werewolves sneak, unheralded, onto the lower shelves of your local supermarket. If you immediately dismissed it, given that unprepossessing straight-to-video debut and its underwhelming cover, nobody could blame you. But you’re missing out, because Attack of the Werewolves – re-titled in the UK from Lobos De Arga (Wolves of Arga), and playing gangbusters to super-enthusiastic Night Visions audiences under its American moniker A Game of Werewolves - is in fact a great little Spanish-language horror comedy that’s well worth ninety minutes of your time.
There’s a section in Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie where a man leaves his village and makes his successful way in the world. He returns home years later, and they kill him... Continue reading... Comment Now
Back To TopUnder The Radar: Night Visions 2012: The Paperboy & The ABCs of Death
Posted on Friday November 2, 2012, 11:38 by Owen Williams in Under The Radar
In context, the biggest mystery in the slow burning, slightly mental literary crime tale The Paperboy is why it's playing at this festival. Lee Daniel's directorial follow-up to Precious, starring Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman and John Cusack, isn't an obvious fit for its horror surroundings, but by the end, in all its deep-south, swamp-gothic murder melodrama, it just about starts to make sense.
Regardless of where it's playing, it's a more-or-less worthwhile, atmospheric film. It feels self-consciously 'quality', but it's not as hammer-blow heavy-handed as Precious, its sultry southern atmosphere is effectively oppressive, and the performances are all-round pretty good, although it's hard to quite take Kidman as white-trash intent on marrying her prison-inmate penpal. Efron takes his shirt off a lot (and, at one point, gets bi... Continue reading... Comment Now
Back To TopUnder The Radar: Night Visions 2012: The Bay
Posted on Thursday November 1, 2012, 09:24 by Owen Williams in Under The Radar
 Helsinki, it seems, doesn't go much for Hallowe'en. They see it as a kind of affected American import like we do in the UK - in fact they're even less convinced by it, since the shops don't appear to be full of tat like ours. I've yet to see a " sexy Edward Scissorhands" costume. Nevertheless, the long established horror and fantasy festival Night Visions kicks off on an appropriate October 31. There's already been some preamble, with guests John Waters and Paul Verhoeven taking to the stage of the Maxim theatre. Empire arrives in time to bump into Joel Murray - brother of Bill - here representing Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America. He tells me that Goldthwait once had a collection of thousands of wind-up toys, lining his guest bedroom, which would autonomously move at any given time during the night. He then apparently replac... Continue reading... Comment Now
Back To TopUnder The Radar: FrightFest 2012: After, Chained, The Possession, Tower Block
Posted on Tuesday August 28, 2012, 00:10 by Owen Williams in Under The Radar
 FrightFest ends as it began, with another world premiere of another British film with Paul Hyett’s name in the credits (though further down than in his own The Seasoning House from Friday). Before Tower Block though, the rest of the day in Screen 1 at the Empire Leicester Square is a mixed bag. Ryan Smith’s After is a modest supernatural mystery, about Anna and Freddy, who meet on an otherwise empty bus and strike up an awkward conversation, just before an apparent crash that blacks them out. When they wake up, both in their respective homes, some weeks appear to have passed, the world has emptied of any other people, parts of their small town seem to be reverting to the past, and there’s a dense black cloud covering all the town’s exits and gradually encroaching towards the centre. Steven Strait and Karolina Wydra are likeable as the two leads, and the film as a whole has a pleasantly unassuming ind... Continue reading... Comment Now
Back To TopUnder The Radar: FrightFest 2012: Seasoning House, Nightbreed, Hidden in the Woods, V/H/S, [REC]3
Posted on Saturday August 25, 2012, 00:10 by Owen Williams in Under The Radar
![FrightFest 2012: Seasoning House, Nightbreed, Hidden in the Woods, V/H/S, [REC]3](/images/image_index/580x250/63405.jpg) The biggest Film4 FrightFest yet kicks off on Thursday night with The Seasoning House, although not before Ross Noble (whose film Stitches is playing here this weekend) has taken the stage and suggested killing an orphan for the bloodthirsty throng. There are, he discerns, apparently no limits to what we’ll tolerate. Which is reasonably good news for this year’s festival-opening world premiere. The Seasoning House is the directorial debut of FX guru Paul Hyett, but it’s a stranger and more low-key work than you might expect if you know the barnstorming stuff he’s previously done for the likes of Neil Marshall (who gets a little cameo in this). Set in a vaguely undefined part of the Balkans during a vaguely undefined 1990s conflict, it’s about a deaf-mute slave girl, nicknamed Angel, working in a “brothel” (in the loosest sense of the term) that trades in kidnapped and trafficked war orphans for the pl... Continue reading... Comment Now (1 comment)
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