Since his debut in 1982 with the light-hearted sword and sorcery fantasy, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Albert Pyun has directed over fifty feature-length genre films. So to say that Pyun, as a director, was prolific is an understatement… Just like his cybernetic creations, Albert Pyun was a machine!
When we tend to talk about women in horror, it’s very easy to conjure up the age-old trope and imagery of the female slasher victim, because of their promiscuity and body positivity. Female antagonists however have been more than just the gory, tantalising titillation aimed at bringing hordes of men to the cinema.
If you are looking for a subgenre of horror that emphasized graphic violence and shock value above all else, look no further than the Italian cannibal movies of the 1970s and 1980s.
Friends, Britons and fellow James Bond fans, lend me your eyes – I come to praise Sean Connery, not to bury him. One of the last few movie stars left over from the dying days of the studio system, and arguably the most famous British actor of his, or any, generation, Connery embodied the old Hollywood male lead aesthetic better than most of his contemporaries.
Set in both stunning and imposing locations with tenacious female leads, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) offer an intimate and highly psychological examination of the female mind whilst ruminating heavily and hauntingly on the age-old themes of sex and death.
I’m hooked on the Netflix sci-fi series Altered Carbon. I’m trying to watch more sci-fi and find myself preferring ‘soft’ sci-fi, where the world isn’t too far removed from our own. The premise of Altered Carbon is simple: how would humans cope with immortality? It’s ‘hard’ sci-fi, but I decided to give it a go…
Whilst the 2010s are probably my least favourite decade for creature features, it got me thinking about my favourite monster movies. I’ve focused on the big two horror creatures – vampires and zombies – and then various other monsters…
