Watching Herself Unravel — “Other” Struggles to Find Its Focus

13 Monday Oct 2025

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David Moreau, best known for his sleek genre work (Them, The Eye, It Boy), returns to the psychological horror fold with Other — a moody, paranoia-laden mystery that tries to blend domestic trauma with techno-surveillance dread. On paper, it’s an enticing setup: Olga Kurylenko’s Alice returns to her childhood home following her mother’s sudden death, only to find herself under constant watch by a high-tech system that seems to know more about her than she does. What unfolds is a slow burn of suspicion and shadow, where the hum of hidden cameras replaces the creak of haunted floorboards.

There’s an admirable restraint in Moreau’s direction. He builds atmosphere through cold precision — lingering frames, muted lighting, and uneasy stillness — but the payoff rarely matches the setup. The house itself, eerie and static, becomes a sterile stage rather than a vessel for emotional tension. Kurylenko shoulders most of the film’s weight, her performance caught between brittle vulnerability and steely detachment, yet the script gives her little room to evolve beyond a cipher.

Hints of a darker, more personal horror flicker beneath the surface — grief, guilt, and identity all swirl in the static — but the film never fully tunes in. Other wants to be a modern ghost story for the surveillance age, but it feels more like a polished echo of better work.

While there are moments that capture Moreau’s visual confidence — particularly in how the camera mirrors Alice’s fractured psyche — the pacing drags, and the final revelation lands without the intended sting. After last year’s MADS, this feels like a creative step backward: beautifully shot, conceptually intriguing, but emotionally hollow.

The Prognosis:

A technically sleek yet curiously empty thriller. Other watches its heroine fall apart but forgets to make us care what she finds in the end.

  • Saul Muerte

Guts, Gears, and Gore: The Chaotic Carnage of Meatball Machine

13 Monday Oct 2025

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Japan has long specialised in splatter cinema that fuses body horror with outrageous imagination, and Yudai Yamaguchi and Jun’ichi Yamamoto’s Meatball Machine (2005) is no exception. Equal parts grotesque creature feature and tragic love story, the film delivers a heady mix of practical effects, nihilistic violence, and gooey romance—though its impact depends on one’s tolerance for viscera and chaos.

The premise is gloriously absurd: alien parasites crash-land and infect human hosts, transforming their bodies into biomechanical nightmares called NecroBorgs. Once fused, these creatures are compelled to fight each other to the death, their flesh weaponised in ever-more creative and revolting ways. At the centre of this carnage is a budding romance between two lonely misfits, whose connection endures even as they’re overtaken by the infestation.

Visually and tonally, Meatball Machine is unashamedly indebted to Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), trading in similar industrial grit and fetishistic body horror. But where Tetsuo is a lean, avant-garde nightmare, Meatball Machine takes a more chaotic, popcorn-splatter approach, reveling in its outrageous gore. The special effects are commendably tactile, with oozing prosthetics and clunky mechanical designs that give the film its visceral punch.

The downside is that beneath the outrageous spectacle, the narrative feels thin. The love story offers a beating heart, but it’s sketched more as a tragic afterthought than a fully developed arc. The film’s pacing often sags between its bursts of carnage, and its attempts at poignancy sometimes clash with the gleefully trashy violence.

The Prognosis:

There’s a certain charm in its refusal to play safe. In retrospect, Meatball Machine is emblematic of mid-2000s Japanese splatter cinema—a scene that thrived on pushing boundaries and daring audiences to look away. It may not have the visionary clarity of Tsukamoto’s work or the cult staying power of contemporaries like Tokyo Gore Police (2008), but it holds its own as a bizarre, bloody curiosity.

For fans of the genre, it’s a fascinating if uneven ride—part horror, part romance, all drenched in slime.

  • Saul Muerte

Fragile: A Haunted Hospital That Lacks Staying Power

13 Monday Oct 2025

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Jaume Balagueró, best known for his later work on [Rec], tried his hand at the English-language supernatural chiller with Fragile (2005), a film that blends gothic atmosphere with familiar ghost story tropes. While the set-up carries promise, the end result is a middling effort that neither reinvents the genre nor fully capitalises on its cast.

The story centres on Amy (Calista Flockhart), a nurse haunted by her own professional tragedy who takes a position at a crumbling children’s hospital on the Isle of Wight. There, she discovers the young patients live in fear of “the mechanical girl,” a spectral figure stalking the halls and punishing those who try to leave. It’s a classic haunted-hospital premise, filled with creaking corridors and flickering lights, but one that quickly leans on convention rather than innovation.

Flockhart, coming off her Ally McBeal fame, delivers a serviceable performance as the fragile yet determined Amy. However, her casting feels almost like a gimmick, as though the film relied too heavily on the novelty of seeing her in a horror context rather than developing a character with genuine depth. Richard Roxburgh, an actor capable of commanding presence, is oddly sidelined in a role that fails to give him much to do beyond lend some authority to the hospital staff.

Balagueró brings atmosphere, of course—the dilapidated hospital is a moody, effective setting, and the ghostly imagery has the right amount of menace. But unlike his Spanish-language work, which brims with urgency and invention, Fragile feels cautious, as though designed to play it safe for international audiences. The result is a film that has plenty of eerie window dressing but lacks the substance or scares.

Fragile sits as an intriguing but underwhelming waypoint in Balagueró’s career. It showcases his eye for atmosphere but not his knack for redefining horror, something he would prove just two years later with [Rec]. Flockhart’s presence gives the film a certain curio appeal, and Roxburgh’s involvement hints at what might have been, but the film itself remains a fairly standard ghost story—watchable, but not remarkable.

  • Saul Muerte

When the Devil Fell Flat: Lost Souls and the Forgotten Millennial Apocalypse

12 Sunday Oct 2025

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At the turn of the millennium, Hollywood seemed obsessed with the end of days. Films like End of Days (1999), Stigmata (1999), and The Ninth Gate (1999) all dove headfirst into Catholic mysticism, demonic prophecy, and the anxieties of a new century. Into this crowded field came Lost Souls (2000), the directorial debut of renowned cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, armed with Winona Ryder as its headliner and the promise of a brooding religious thriller. What audiences got instead was a film that quickly faded from memory.

The plot follows Maya (Ryder), a young woman convinced that Peter (Ben Chaplin), a respected New York crime journalist, is destined to become the Antichrist. Her mission is to awaken him to this truth before evil consumes him—and the world. On paper, it could have rivaled Stigmata’s heretical thrill ride or End of Days’ action spectacle. Instead, it delivered long stretches of gloom with very little pulse.

Kamiński’s cinematography skills are on full display—sepia shadows, oppressive yellows, and compositions that scream menace. Unfortunately, visuals alone can’t carry a two-hour film. The story crawls forward, recycling the same beats of Ryder’s pleading and Chaplin’s disbelief without ever building toward real urgency. Even the climactic moments arrive with a dull thud rather than the fiery damnation the premise demands.

Performances can’t salvage the material. Ryder plays her part with conviction, but the script gives her little dimension. Chaplin, saddled with a thankless role, never sells his character’s shift from skeptic to potential vessel of evil. Even veteran talents like John Hurt and Philip Baker Hall are wasted in supporting parts that add gravitas but no depth.

In the millennial apocalyptic boom, Stigmata leaned into controversy, End of Days embraced blockbuster excess, and The Ninth Gate played with ambiguity. Lost Souls aimed for a meditative, moody parable—but ended up inert, remembered mostly for its look rather than its impact.

The Prognosis:

Lost Souls stands as a relic of its time: an atmospheric curiosity drowned by the weight of its own seriousness. Where its contemporaries burned brightly (if unevenly), Lost Souls simply flickered out.

  • Saul Muerte

Silver Bullet (1985) – Full Moon, Half Thrills: A retrospective

10 Friday Oct 2025

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“It started in May. In a small town. And every month after that whenever the moon was full… it came back.”

Dig into the horror aisle at your local video store and you’ll find Silver Bullet, a werewolf yarn soaked in King mythology and slathered in small-town Americana. Directed by Daniel Attias, this 1985 adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf promises fur, fangs, and full moons—but only partially delivers the bite.

The sleepy town of Tarker’s Mills is rocked by a string of grisly murders. Whispers of a beast grow louder as the body count rises, and while most townsfolk hide indoors after dark, one brave boy in a souped-up motorised wheelchair dares to face the lurking horror head-on. The premise has all the makings of a great ‘80s creature feature, and with King himself penning the screenplay, the setup drips with lore and that unmistakable New England dread.

But here’s the rub: Silver Bullet is a film forever caught in the shadows. On one side, it wants to be a heartfelt coming-of-age tale, steeped in nostalgia. On the other, it reaches for werewolf horror glory. In the end, it struggles to rise above being a middle-of-the-road monster movie with more bark than bite. The creature effects—courtesy of Carlo Rambaldi—are clunky by modern eyes, and even back in ’85 they looked a little tame compared to the lycanthrope heavyweights of The Howling and An American Werewolf in London.

Still, there’s fun to be had. Corey Haim delivers a charming performance as Marty, the young hero on wheels, while Gary Busey goes full throttle as Uncle Red, equal parts lovable and unhinged. Their chemistry injects life into the otherwise plodding hunt for the beast. And that climax, when silver meets fur under the glow of the moon, has just enough punch to remind you why werewolf movies never go out of style.

Looking back four decades later, Silver Bullet is soaked in nostalgia, saturated in mythology, and baked in King. But it never quite breaks free to bask in the moonlight. It’s not the best werewolf movie of the ‘80s, not by a long shot—but for horror fans prowling the aisles in search of VHS-era chills, it’s still worth a late-night rental.

📼 Staff Pick!
“Stephen King writes it. Gary Busey chews it. A kid in a turbo wheelchair vs. a werewolf—how can you not at least take this home for the weekend?”

  • Saul Muerte

V/H/S/Halloween (2025): Analog Nightmares, Digital Fatigue

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Eight films in, and the V/H/S franchise has reached that strange liminal space between reinvention and redundancy. V/H/S/Halloween promises another grab bag of analog nightmares, but what it ultimately offers is a reminder that this format — and perhaps found footage itself — is struggling to justify its continued revival.

Segmented through Bryan M. Ferguson’s Diet Phantasma, a frame narrative about a possessed soft drink, the film pulses between absurdist body horror and tongue-in-cheek satire. It’s gory, chaotic, and knowingly silly — a kind of VHS-era Cronenberg-lite filtered through Slimehouse aesthetics. It’s amusing enough, but its placement between each short becomes little more than a sugar rush: a filler designed to jolt, not haunt.

Anna Zlokovic’s Coochie Coochie Coo aims for Barbarian-esque weirdness but collapses under its own shaky-cam chaos. It’s conceptually interesting — exploring the monstrous side of motherhood and lost innocence — yet the execution feels forced, desperate to shock rather than unsettle.

Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic Infra is easily the standout. The [REC] director flexes his mastery of dread with a metaphysical descent into ritual horror and the supernatural. It’s slick, moody, and genuinely disorienting, proving that when the right filmmaker takes the reins, the V/H/S anthology format can still bite.

Casper Kelly’s Fun Size, however, is a regression — an infantile splatter piece that mistakes noise for novelty. Whether its deliberately bad performances are meant to parody ‘80s horror cheese or are just poorly handled is anyone’s guess, but it grates either way.

Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint ends things on a troubling note, tackling child abduction and snuff imagery with an uneasy hand. The idea — a man unwittingly complicit in a ring of video-taped killings — could have been chilling, but the tone wobbles between exploitative and hollow. It’s a grim finish that leaves you numb rather than disturbed.

And that’s the core issue here: V/H/S/Halloween feels like it’s circling the drain of its own nostalgia. The analog grime, the static, the jittery cuts — once the aesthetic of underground menace — now play like ritualised pastiche. There are sparks of invention, but they’re buried under too many loud edits and too few genuine scares.

The Prognosis:

Maybe it’s time to admit what’s been lurking behind the flicker for years: the found footage format — once raw, immediate, and terrifying — is finally running out of tape.

  • Saul Muerte

The Drowned: A Mythic Thriller That Never Quite Breaks the Surface

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Greek myths meet murky waters in a low-budget thriller that almost makes it to shore.

Samuel Clemens’ The Drowned attempts to merge myth and morality within a low-budget psychological thriller, dipping into the murky waters of Greek legend to find something ancient beneath the surface. The results, however, are mixed—an ambitious premise buoyed by striking influences but ultimately weighed down by pacing and atmosphere that never fully submerge the viewer.

Drawing on the myth of Hylas and the nymphs—immortalised in John William Waterhouse’s 1896 oil painting—Clemens reimagines the seductive call of the sea as a modern-day reckoning for guilt and greed. Three thieves hole up in a seaside safehouse after stealing a priceless painting, only to find their fourth member missing and an ominous presence rising from the tide. The film’s mythological undercurrents give it a literary backbone, but they’re never quite fleshed out enough to transform into something transcendent.

There’s a palpable sense of ambition here: The Drowned tries to swim in deep waters, blending folklore, crime, and psychological tension. Yet much like the doomed figures in its inspiration, it finds itself lured by its own reflection—entranced by imagery but unable to escape the shallows of its limited scope.

Performances by Alan Calton, Lara Lemon, and Lily Catalifo lend the feature some stability, grounding its mythic aspirations in believable tension. The cinematography occasionally captures the desolate beauty of the coast with painterly intent, echoing Waterhouse’s haunting stillness. But the low budget is keenly felt, particularly in its uneven pacing and abrupt tonal shifts.

The Prognosis:

The Drowned deserves some credit for attempting to do more than most thrillers in its range—it’s an atmospheric, if uneven, meditation on temptation and consequence. Yet, despite its mythic intentions, it never quite earns its place among the more evocative modern fables. The sirens sing, but their song doesn’t linger.

  • Saul Muerte

House on Eden – Where Found Footage Finally Flatlines

03 Friday Oct 2025

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Kris Collins’ House on Eden feels like a film caught between admiration and imitation. On one hand, there’s a clear love for the stripped-down mechanics of low-budget horror — a small cast, a single creepy location, a reliance on atmosphere over spectacle. On the other, its DNA is so heavily indebted to The Blair Witch Project that it struggles to escape that long shadow, never quite finding its own voice in a subgenre that has already been mined for all it’s worth.

The setup is textbook found footage: paranormal investigators Kris, Celina, and their videographer Jay stumble into an abandoned house in the woods, where unsettling sounds, missing crew members, and unnerving presences steadily erode their sanity. To Collins’ credit, the film knows how to milk tension out of a flickering flashlight and a half-glimpsed shadow. There’s a genuine appreciation for the lo-fi aesthetic, which at times gives the film a scrappy, grassroots charm.

But charm isn’t enough when the beats feel so familiar. Every missing person, every static-laden frame, every anguished scream into the darkness calls back to 1999 — but without the raw novelty or cultural punch that made Blair Witch revolutionary. Instead of reinventing the formula, House on Eden seems content to echo it, and in doing so highlights just how stale the found footage format can feel in 2025.

The biggest frustration is that there are hints of potential. The lore surrounding the house suggests something ancient and malevolent, but the film barely scratches at it before retreating into shaky cam hysteria. A stronger commitment to its own mythology might have given it some distinction. Instead, what lingers is the sense of a genre on its last legs — a reminder that what once felt like the future of horror may finally be ready for burial.

The Prognosis:

House on Eden isn’t unwatchable, and diehard found footage fans may appreciate its sincerity. But for most, it lands as a pale reflection of a classic, underscoring that sometimes the scariest thing a horror movie can show us is that the format itself might be dead.

  • Saul Muerte

House on Eden is currently streaming on Shudder.

Roots of Guilt: Bark Ties a Man to His Own Demons in the Depths of the Forest

03 Friday Oct 2025

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The forest doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about your excuses, your regrets, your carefully constructed lies. Out there, among the trees, the world strips itself down to its bones — dirt, bark, roots, breath. That’s where Marc Schölermann drags us with Bark, a taut psychological thriller that ties both its protagonist and its audience to the raw elements of survival, guilt, and reckoning.

It begins with a man bound to a tree — a literal prisoner of nature and a figurative captive of his own sins. Charismatic Nolan Bentley wakes disoriented, tied down in the belly of a remote German forest. Enter the mysterious stranger, a figure both tormentor and liberator, whose taunting presence digs deeper than any rope ever could. The question isn’t just whether Bentley can escape. The question is whether he deserves to.

Bark is at its sharpest when it leans into this elemental battle: man vs. nature, man vs. stranger, man vs. himself. Schölermann uses the forest not as a backdrop but as a psychological weapon — the trees loom like silent judges, the soil feels heavy with secrets, and every snap of a branch echoes like a gavel slamming down in a cosmic courtroom.

At its core, the film isn’t about knots and ropes, it’s about consequences. You can’t disassociate from your own past forever; eventually the demons scratch their way through the bark and claw at your skin. Bark dramatises that inexorable truth with sweat, soil, and tension so tight it feels like the trees themselves are holding their breath.

The performances ground it — Bentley sells both desperation and denial, while the enigmatic outdoorsman needles and prods until every scab of guilt bursts open. And though the film runs its tension on a fairly narrow track, the payoff is a psychological unearthing that hits with the force of an axe to the trunk.

The Prognosis:

Bark is not just a thriller. It’s a meditation on accountability, guilt, and the way nature can strip us bare until we are nothing but the truth we tried to bury. Some secrets don’t stay hidden. Some forests don’t let you out.

  • Saul Muerte

Bark will screen as part of Dark Nights Film Fest on Fri 10 Oct at 7pm

Freddie Francis and a Star-Studded Descent into Victorian Horror

03 Friday Oct 2025

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A man of medicine… A pair of murderers… An unholy alliance.

By the mid-1980s, horror was dominated by slashers and supernatural spectacles, but The Doctor and the Devils offered something older, bloodier, and more rooted in history: a reimagining of the infamous Burke and Hare murders of 19th-century Edinburgh. Directed by veteran Freddie Francis, the film promised prestige horror, boasting a glittering cast and the bones of a Dylan Thomas script. Yet, for all its pedigree, it sits uneasily between period drama and gothic horror, never fully committing to either, and settling into a curious middle ground.

The story is well-worn: two unscrupulous grave robbers—here played by Jonathan Pryce and Stephen Rea—strike a deal with an ambitious anatomist, Dr. Thomas Rock (Timothy Dalton), who requires a steady supply of fresh cadavers for his medical research. Initially content with digging up the dead, the pair soon realise that creating their own corpses is a far quicker route to profit. The tale’s themes of science, morality, and exploitation are timeless, yet Francis’ film struggles to give them the bite they deserve.

What elevates the material is the cast. Dalton lends Rock a stern gravitas, a man torn between his lofty ideals and the sordid means that fuel them. Rea and Pryce inject menace and pathos into their criminals, turning what could have been caricatures into unsettling portraits of greed. Add to this the likes of Patrick Stewart, Julian Sands, and Twiggy, and The Doctor and the Devils becomes a veritable parade of British talent. The performances are sharp enough to carry the film through its slower patches, giving the gothic material a theatrical weight.

For Freddie Francis, this film represents a late chapter in a long and varied career. Having cemented himself in the 1960s and ’70s as both a director of Hammer horrors (The Evil of Frankenstein, The Creeping Flesh) and as one of Britain’s most celebrated cinematographers, Francis brought to The Doctor and the Devils a painterly eye. The cobblestone streets, shadow-draped laboratories, and candlelit taverns all bear his meticulous touch. Yet, as we’ve seen across his career, Francis was often at the mercy of the scripts handed to him. Here, despite the Dylan Thomas connection, the film leans too heavily on period trappings without fully exploiting the macabre potential of its subject matter.

The Prognosis:

In retrospect, The Doctor and the Devils stands as a respectable but flawed effort—a prestige horror that never quite finds the balance between gothic chills and dramatic weight. Its star-studded credits and Francis’ steady craftsmanship make it worthwhile, even if it lacks the raw energy or daring that might have elevated it into a classic.

  • Saul Muerte