Blu-ray

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Anton van Beek  |  Dec 05, 2014  |  0 comments

Director Robert Wiene's 1920 silent movie recounts the tale of the titular carnival hypnotist and the somnambulist he uses to kill for him. While the plot may appear fairly simple, Wiene's film infuses each frame of the story with a nightmarish quality, running from the overtly theatrical performances to his pioneering use of an Expressionist aesthetic – the latter creating a blatantly artificial landscape, full of harsh jagged angles, that serves to exaggerate the psychological terror. Utterly captivating.

Anton van Beek  |  Dec 03, 2014  |  0 comments

Ghostbusters celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, but thanks to its brilliant ensemble cast, witty script and imaginative special effects, the iconic comedy-horror about a trio of friends who set up a ghost extermination business in New York still feels just as fresh as it did back in 1984.

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 30, 2014  |  0 comments

This eight-film boxset brings together all but one of the films Steven Spielberg has made for Universal to date –  Duel (1971), The Sugarland Express (1974), Jaws (1975), 1941 (1979), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Always (1989), Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) – four of which get their first HD outing here.

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 27, 2014  |  0 comments

Hollywood's second attempt at bringing Godzilla to the bigscreen avoids the (many) pitfalls that befell Roland Emmerich's terrible 1998 effort. However, this hasn't stopped this new reboot from stumbling into a couple of its own making.

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 25, 2014  |  0 comments

From Robert Hamer's entry in the classic portmanteau chiller Dead of Night to Kim Sung-ho's South Korean shocker Into the Mirror, the notion of a haunted mirror is one that just keeps cropping up in the horror genre. Writer-director Mike Flanagan is the latest to 'reflect' on the concept, with this smart and scary feature-length expansion of his 2006 short Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man with the Plan.

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 24, 2014  |  0 comments

Arriving eight years after Zack Snyder's surprise box office hit, Noam Munro's 300: Rise of an Empire serves as not only prequel and sequel to that film, but also a 'side-quel' depicting another battle that took place while the Spartans clashed with Persian forces at Thermopylae. As such, the focus of the film shifts to Athenian warrior Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton), who leads the relatively small Grecian navy against the might of Persian warships led by the ferocious Artemisia (Eva Green).

Richard Holliss  |  Nov 16, 2014  |  0 comments

While working on the Bond movies with Cubby Broccoli, co-producer Harry Saltzman turned his attention away from the more glamorous world of Ian Fleming’s secret agent 007 to author Len Deighton’s grittier, insubordinate agent Harry Palmer. The result was movie gold with The Ipcress File in 1965 and the follow-up Funeral in Berlin in 1966.

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 14, 2014  |  0 comments

As many filmmakers have discovered, the horror-comedy is a tricky thing to pull off. Get it right and you could have a Return of the Living Dead on your hands, get it wrong and you could end up stuck with a Return of the Living Dead II-sized stinker on your hands. Which brings us to Zombeavers, a tongue-in-cheek splatter flick about a group of college kids holidaying in an isolated cabin, who find themselves under siege from a colony of undead beavers that have been mutated by a barrel of medical waste.

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 09, 2014  |  0 comments

Set several decades before the events depicted in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel Treasure Island, this cracking new period drama follows the exploits of Captain James Flint (Toby Stephens) and his crew of pirates – including a scheming new cook called John Silver (Luke Arnold).

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 07, 2014  |  0 comments

Director Paul W.S. Anderson takes a break from zombies and mutants for this historical disaster movie recounting the destruction of the titular Roman city. Thrust into the heart of this volcanic maelstrom are slave/gladiator/horse whisperer Milo (Kit Harrington) and Cassia (Emily Browning) the young noble woman whose eye he catches.

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 04, 2014  |  0 comments

Cult label 88 Films kicks off its new 'Slasher Classics Collection' with a hi-def release for this enjoyable 1981 genre outing. Derived from a new 4K scan of the director's own answer print, the disc's AVC 1.78:1 1080p encode may not be completely flawless (there's some obvious print damage during the opening death scene), but overall it holds up much better than expected. The inclusion of a brilliant new feature-length documentary entitled Scream Queen: Horror Heroines Exposed among the many extras only serves to make this Blu-ray even more of an unmissable treat for horror-hedz.

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 02, 2014  |  0 comments

Before dazzling mainstream cinema audiences with The Matrix, Andy and Lana (née Larry) Wachowski made a splash on the indie movie scene with this hugely enjoyable neo-noir thriller.

Anton van Beek  |  Nov 01, 2014  |  0 comments

Scott Cooper's blue collar drama starts with a bang as Woody Harrelson's Hillbilly criminal Harlan unleashes his anger issues on the woman who accompanied him to the drive-in, and then on another patron who tries to come to her rescue.

Anton van Beek  |  Oct 31, 2014  |  0 comments

Greg McLean's 2005 shocker Wolf Creek was among the best of the glut of so-called 'survival-horror' films that flooded the market in the last decade.

Anton van Beek  |  Oct 30, 2014  |  0 comments

A visit to see her older sister Maddie (Annabel Scholey) in Italy is full of surprises for recent university graduate Taylor (Hannah Arterton). Not only does Maddie reveal that she’s getting married following a whirlwind romance with a local, but it turns out that her Italian fiancé Raf (Giulio Berruti) is the boy that Taylor fell in love with while on holiday three years earlier!

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