Edmund Lester

This film is certainly gritty. Essentially a married couple working at Heathrow airport are on the lookout for new members of their family. They find young adults no one will really miss and kidnap them. Then they start torturing and brainwashing them - making them want to be part of the family by threatening violence for any slight misdemeanor. It is violent. Very violent at times, and more unsettling because it is all carried out my a middle-aged couple - not a demon in sight - and in the confines of a typical house making it very intimate and intense. It's a film you may not have heard of. I hadn't particularly - beyond the occasional mention in some of the horror mags. But if you like a bit of gore it might be your thing.

I had hopes for this film. It looked as though it might be a decent zombie flick. I was wrong. Although it starts pretty well, introducing the inhabitants of a New York apartment block well and giving a decent enough background to the story (everyday struggle kind of thing), the main story kind of just faded into silliness. And all because of one element - the ratty bit. Played as a straight zombie film this could have been good, but it fell short. Sorry, I just didn't like it. I did want to.

I received an email this morning concerning a reviews article I'd written a little while ago. It's been accepted by The Internet Review of Science Fiction. The grin hasn't stopped yet. Theirs is a great site. It doesn't feature fiction, just articles, interviews and reviews and one of mine is to . If you want to go check them out (and I would advise you do) they can be found at http://www.irosf.com/ . My piece "Long Live the Novella" reviews four titles from UK speciality press PS Publishing Uncle River - Camp Desolation and the Eschatology of Salt Stephen Baxter - Starfall Alex Irvine - Mystery Hill Joel Lane - The Witnesses are Gone Three really good books and one decent , you'll have to read the review when it's posted to find out more about them. Or you could pop to PS Publishing and buy them yourself and make your own mind up.

Nicholas Cage films are usually a hit and miss affair - and in recent years I've found them far more miss than hit. His latest film threatened his average for quite a while by being actually quite good. It's creepy (in a non-horror way). Cage plays a college professor. His son's school opens a time capsule from the 1950s which had been filled with the pupils' ideas of what the year 2009 might be like. Most of the images are the typical 1950s futuristic ideas - flying cars and the like. Cage's son however is handed something different. His envelope contained a sheet of numbers. Cage notices that the number seem to specify dates and numbers. He traces these to the dates disastrous events in recent history and the number of people killed in them. And the last three dates on the list are still to happen. It's an interesting concept, one that put me in mind of Robert Charles Wilson's novels. It's an idea that grabs you right from the off. Okay the ending migh...

I'd heard a lot of good things about this film. So much so that I was a little wary about actually watching it. I've been disappointed too many times - and yes I will admit I'm jaded. That the lead vampire was a child scared me somewhat, kids that are a little bit weird (or a lot weird) can be disconcerting. But they can most often be very, very annoying. My wife had read and thoroughly loved the book this film is based on, so I was not alone in a little feeling of trepidation. She was more worried that there were elements of the story that they could simply not film, yet would harm the film if they were omitted. We were both greatly relieved. This was the best vampire movie I've seen in years. It's different setting - a small Swedish community in the 1980s - worked brilliantly. The serious cold of a Swedish winter was dramatic. The film being shot with a reduced pallette effect added wonderfully to a sense of foreboding. As does its pacing. American films are rarel...

I watched some of the Belgian Grand Prix this afternoon. I'm not the gratest of fans of the sport but I do watch the occasional race. The two Brits crashed out early so I didn't have any special interest in the result. However an event of the end of the race made me think. The race was won by a Finn, with an Italian second and a German third. Nothing too unusual there. But in the post race press conference all three drivers (Raikkonen, Fisichella and Vettel) spoke near perfect English. From my travels in Europe I know that a good knowledge of English is not all that uncommon. I've had conversations in English with people I've met in Italy, Austria, France, Belgium, the Netherlands etc. In Britain though you'd not find this the case. Okay there are a number of second generation immigrants in Britain who can speak the languages of their parents' homelands. But you find Brits without this linguistic advantage and more than half will have no real knowledge of a seco...

I finally managed to find time to watch Watchmen last night. I know it's taken me a while and you could say I have been wasting my time on bad horror movies. I've probably watched a dozen B-movie horrors since buying Watchmen but hey... In my defence I do tend to put the bad horror films on in the office whilst I am working (like now) and the whole family (makes it sound huge, there's four of us) wanted to watch Watchmen. So it had to wait until there was time when everyone else wasn't watching TV (I watch little TV, except for DVD sets of TV shows like Dexter, Millenium, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Trek, Stargate, X-Files etc and sport - mainly cricket). So last night we decided it was time for Watchmen. I enjoyed it. We all enjoyed it. Good and dark, moody. It didn't pull any punches. However when I got into work today and started discussing it with colleagues I found the universally didn't like it. And the reason was pacing. They all thought it was too slow and ...

When I was a teenager I used to watch a lot of really bad horror films. I'd get together with a couple of friends and we'd head to the video rental store and hire a couple of films - based purely on how bad they looked. We often used as a guide the fact that the computer system in the store could identify the least rented films in the place. If no one watched them we figured they had to be bad. These nights would include a fair smattering of Troma films, a number of straight to video movies (the best/worst of which was definitely Mutant Kid) and a decent helping of video nasties. Fantastic fun. Well of late we've started to do it again. If you've read any of the recent posts on this blog you may have noticed this. Anyway down to business. I have a new contender for plain bad horror. I picked up a film called Sickle. I suspected it might be bad when it was up for sale for a pound - a single pound. Well every single fear/hope I had for this film was met. It is just bad. T...

My recent horror film fetish is continuing. The latest film to get a viewing is this adaptation of a Clive Barker short story that stars ex-soccer player Vinnie Jones. I'd been looking forward to this for a while now. For once with a horror film everything I'd heard about it was positive. Well the portents were good, but the film? Would it live up to my hopes? The simple answer is yes. I thought this film was fantastic fun. It's a little over the top in terms of blood at times but that's just fun. The violence is extreme in places, made more hard hitting by a cold, expressionless performance by Vinnie Jones. The basic story is that Vinnie is a serial killer who finds his victims on the New York Underground, preying on victims on the trains after 2am. A photographer encounters him and becomes obsessed with trying to find proof of his murders. This is one of the best horror films I've seen in months - and I do watch rather a few. Vinnie Jones is best when in these kin...

I just wanted to prove I am not a one-dimensional monster when it comes to movies. Okay I like horror films and of late haved watched a great many, but this liking is not exclusive. And don't go thinking that I mean I watch science fiction movies to prove my rounded personality. I like a good many movies of most genres - okay I'll admit there are few rom-coms on my favourites list, the American Pie style movies get very short shrift on my watching schedule. Add tot his I can say I've not been impressed with Sacha Baron Cohen - the little I have seen of his output has not enticed me to watch a whole movie. I'm not saying I think his films are bad. Far from it, I think he is a very talented man - he's spotted a style and gone for it, producing semi-real over-the-top edgy comedy that's verging on embarassing. You kow, the cringeworthy stuff. Anyway back to my choice, or rather the family choice. I sat down with the whole family and we picked a Chinese movie called ...

I'm having a bit of a horror film session. Over the last three days I've watched another three. The first of these was Creep - a rather pleasing little tale of a German woman trapped in a London Underground station after the trains have stopped running who finds that she is sharing the tunnels with a killer mutant. There are a couple of side characters, a homeless Scottish druggie and his girlfriend, a guy from work who believes our lead woman "wants him", a security guard and a sewer worker captured by the mutant. But the focus stays with the German woman and her attempts to escape the killer. It's not all that high on the gore, its story is a little predicable, but over all it's not a bad movie. Second up was an American film called Vacancy, which sees a couple check into a motel after their car breaks down. They discover a couple of video tapes in their room. When they play them they find what seems to be a low budget amateur horror . However when they noti...