Watched in the cinema (2nd visit in 2025)
Robert Eggers likes to recount how he watched "Nosferatu" - an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" - on VHS at the age of nine and how this had a formative influence on him. At the age of 17, he directed a theater adaptation at his high school, and the influence of F.W. Murnau's work has also been felt time and again in his previous films. Eggers seems to be a little…
Watched on Disney +
Even before Zack Snyder's popular and successful remake of the horror classic "Dawn of the Dead", it was the Englishman Danny Boyle who breathed new life into the languishing zombie film in 2002. In his work "28 Days Later", Boyle had England overrun by the highly contagious "Rage" virus. People who came into contact with the virus mutated into instinct-driven maniacs in a matter of seconds, hunting down their fellow human beings in a zombie-like yet…
Watched in the cinema (198th visit in 2024)
Hugh Grant is currently experiencing the peak phase of his career. Although the British actor is certainly known to most people from the days of "Notting Hill" or the "Bridget Jones" movies, Grant has been enjoying such success in various roles and genres for several years now that the former British lover boy has probably never been as good as he is now. Whether as a smooth gangster with a penchant for…
Watched in the cinema (191st visit in 2024)
Horror films in which a bag plays a central role have become surprisingly popular in recent years. "Baghead", "Bag of Lies" and now "Bagman" could be the first representatives of a new sub-genre - "bagsploitation". Similar to nunsploitation films, which feature nuns as central characters in horror films, the metaphorical wheel is not reinvented here either. A horror film in the run-up to Christmas with an entity that puts children in a…
Watched on Blu-Ray
"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." An iconic quote from George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead", the pop-cultural significance of which is familiar even to non-genre fans, given how often this classic has been plagiarized, reconstructed and parodied. But what if, and Romero did not categorically rule out this idea in 1978, hell is not a mythical-religious place of torment that is ravished by reality, but the earth, our…
Watched in the cinema (179th visit in 2024)
Hardly any other animal instinctively triggers as much disgust or fear in many people as the spider. This naturally makes the little creepy-crawlies ideal antagonists in horror films, where they are allowed to scare the audience. Whether classics such as "Kingdom of the Spiders" and "Arachnophobia" or the more recent horror comedies "Eight Legged Freaks" and "Lavalantula", there are a whole series of examples in the genre of what something like this…
Watched in the cinema (177th visit in 2024)
Writing synopses for movies is always a tricky business. How much can I say without it becoming a spoiler? How much do I have to say so that the audience knows what to expect? The usual thing is to simply describe the initial situation, on which everything else is built. But sometimes even that is difficult, as the case of "Strange Darling" shows. The beginning here is not the beginning of the…
Watched in the cinema (173rd visit in 2024)
After "The Lodge" and two episodes of the series "Servant", Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz return to their native Austria with the oppressive psychological drama "Des Teufels Bad". Right from the prologue of this slow burner, it becomes clear that the directors are focusing on a subject that is uncomfortable, painful and, above all, terribly sad.
A young woman stands in front of a waterfall. She is holding a baby in her…
Watched in the cinema (171st visit in 2024)
When you read about the internet phenomenon of Red Rooms, it sends shivers down your spine. Allegedly, these are websites on the darknet where people are murdered, tortured or sexually abused via live stream. Spectators can take part for large sums of money. The actual existence of these sites has never really been proven; in fact, streaming within the darknet would not even be technically possible. The rumours are based on a…
Watched in the cinema (169th visit in 2024)
"Monster on a Plane" has a fairly standard running time of 88 minutes, but always feels like a terribly drawn out short film of perhaps half an hour. The film wastes the first ninety seconds presenting names on the screen that will mean absolutely nothing to most viewers, but rather evoke the question of whether this is a narcissistic display or whether an audience is actually being entertained. Most of the time,…
Watched in the cinema (165th visit in 2024)
Schocktober 2024 #31
Stephen King's 1975 novel "Salem's Lot" served as a model time and again. In fact, a TV two-parter was made as early as 1979, one of the first ever adaptations of a work by the horror author. This was followed in 1987 by "A Return to Salem's Lot", a direct-to-video film that told a specially invented story set years after the novel - the first of many pseudo-sequels based…
Watched in the cinema (164th visit in 2024)
Schocktober 2024 #30
Art the Clown has had a stellar career: It started with appearances in short films and a horror anthology, followed by his first feature film for home cinema with "Terrifier" and finally even went straight to the cinema with "Terrifier 2". The latter triggered a little hype among horror fans and ensured that the psychopathic killer clown was suddenly on everyone's lips. The worldwide box office takings of just…