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Beast of War (2025) — Sharks, Sweat, and Survival at the Edge of Roache-Turner’s Cinema

15 Monday Dec 2025

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Kiah Roache-Turner has never been subtle. From the splatter-punk bravado of Wyrmwood to the steel-jawed siege mentality of Nekrotronic and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, his films have been fueled by testosterone, gallows humour, and a gleeful refusal to apologise for excess. Beast of War doesn’t abandon that DNA—it just throws it into the open ocean and strips it back to muscle, salt, and desperation.

Set during World War II, the film strands a group of young Australian soldiers on a shrinking raft in the Timor Sea after their boat goes down. There’s no grand campaign, no strategic victory to be won—just survival. The enemy comes in familiar forms: hunger, exposure, paranoia, and the creeping inevitability of death. Then there’s the shark. Big. Hungry. Patient. Circling like a debt that always comes due.

Roache-Turner approaches the material with the same bruised knuckles and dark grin that have defined his career. This is still a male, sweat-soaked pressure cooker of a film—men snapping at one another, egos flaring, leadership eroding under the sun. But where Wyrmwood leaned into anarchic mayhem, Beast of War opts for attrition. The humour is still there, sharp and irreverent, often surfacing in moments of grim resignation rather than punchline gags. A joke muttered through cracked lips. A laugh that dies halfway out of the mouth.

Visually, the film punches well above its weight. The cinematography makes art out of scarcity: endless blue horizons that feel less like freedom and more like a prison, sun-bleached skin rendered almost raw, the raft shrinking not just physically but psychologically. The production design understands that less is more—the sea doesn’t need dressing, and the raft becomes both stage and coffin. For a low-budget production, Beast of War carries itself with remarkable confidence.

The shadow of Jaws looms large, and Roache-Turner doesn’t pretend otherwise. The shark is used sparingly, often implied rather than shown, its presence felt through ripples, shadows, and the soldiers’ growing dread. More telling is the film’s spiritual debt to Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue—men trapped in open water, slowly realising the ocean doesn’t care about bravery or patriotism. Survival isn’t heroic. It’s ugly. It’s luck and endurance and the will to keep breathing one more minute than the bloke next to you.

Where Beast of War occasionally stumbles is in its character depth. The soldiers are broadly sketched—archetypes rather than fully formed men—and while that serves the film’s hard-boiled tone, it limits its emotional reach. When tempers flare or bodies slip beneath the water, the impact is felt more viscerally than personally. It’s effective, but not devastating.

Still, as a continuation of Roache-Turner’s career, Beast of War feels like a natural evolution. It tempers his bombast without sanding down his instincts, trading chainsaws and zombies for saltwater and teeth, while retaining the same irreverent edge. It’s a lean, muscular survival thriller that knows exactly what it is and never pretends to be more.

The Prognosis:

Beast of War isn’t about winning. It’s about lasting. About men pushed past bravado into something rawer and quieter. A gritty, blood-in-the-water chapter in Kiah Roache-Turner’s ongoing fascination with endurance, masculinity, and monsters—human and otherwise.

  • Saul Muerte

The Jester 2: When the Mask Slips, the Magic Fades

13 Thursday Nov 2025

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“You can’t cheat death twice.” The tagline for The Jester 2 knowingly toys with the very predicament its creators find themselves in: how do you resurrect a concept that, while promising, never quite mastered the trick the first time around? Colin Krawchuk’s sequel attempts to double down on the carnival of cruelty he began in 2023’s The Jester, expanding the mythology of its demonic mime while testing the limits of how much showmanship can mask repetition. The result is a film that juggles energy and invention in fleeting bursts, but too often trips on its own elaborate setup.

Picking up the pieces from the first outing’s father–daughter tragedy, The Jester 2 shifts focus to teen magician Max, whose sleight-of-hand becomes both metaphor and mechanism for survival. Her encounter with the titular killer—a supernatural trickster whose violence borders on ritual—sets in motion a classic Halloween-night pursuit that pits illusion against illusion. On paper, it’s a clever conceit: the hunted becomes the performer, blurring lines between spectacle and sacrifice. Yet for all its smoke and mirrors, the film struggles to find genuine suspense amid its flourishes.

What Krawchuk continues to capture well is the tactile texture of fear. His world feels grimy, tactile, and grounded in a kind of dark vaudeville sensibility that distinguishes The Jester from its obvious cousins—Terrifier and The Bye Bye Man among them. The set pieces have an almost mechanical rhythm to them: gears grind, lights flicker, and the inevitable payoff arrives with splattering precision. There are, admittedly, some inspired kills—moments that flirt with invention without surrendering to pure sadism—and they serve as small mercies in a film otherwise content to revisit its predecessor’s beats.

Performance-wise, newcomer Max (played with gritty conviction and just enough pathos from Trentham) gives the film its pulse. She lends emotional dimension to what might otherwise have been a mere exercise in Halloween carnage. The character’s duality as performer and prey allows for some intriguing thematic play—magic as self-delusion, survival as artifice—but these moments are fleeting, buried beneath narrative repetition and pacing issues that dull the edge.

If The Jester was about potential unrealised, The Jester 2 is about potential overplayed. It suffers the fate of many horror sequels: the impulse to explain what should remain mysterious. The mask, the mythos, the magic—all begin to fray under the weight of unnecessary exposition. What’s lost is the eerie enigma that made the character work best in the shorts—a phantom that needed no backstory to haunt us.

The Prognosis:

There’s a decent film hiding beneath the face paint—a story about performance, grief, and female agency wrapped in blood-streaked pageantry—but The Jester 2 can’t quite pull the rabbit from the hat. For every clever twist or gruesome flourish, there’s a scene that drags, a trick that lands flat. It’s an average follow-up that entertains enough to justify the ticket, but not enough to warrant an encore.

In the end, this jest feels familiar, its laughter hollow. The mask remains unsettling, the kills inventive—but the magic? It’s starting to vanish.

  • Saul Muerte

Faith, Fear, and Familiar Demons — Diabolic Tests the Limits of Australia’s “Elevated Horror

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

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Australian genre cinema has been pushing at the boundaries of horror for over a decade now—restless, ambitious, and eager to prove that its terrors can hold their own on the world stage. Daniel J. Phillips’ Diabolic certainly aspires to sit within that tradition. A visually confident piece that leans into the current wave of “elevated” folk horror, it promises grand spiritual torment and supernatural vengeance but settles, unfortunately, into familiar rhythms.

Elise (Elizabeth Cullen) seeks a miracle cure for her mysterious blackouts, joining a fundamentalist healing ritual that inevitably stirs something far darker. From there, Diabolic unfolds as a study in paranoia and possession, invoking the cursed lineage of witches, faith, and the female body as battleground. Phillips, who previously demonstrated a keen eye for atmosphere, drenches his frames in shadow and ritualistic imagery—a visual style that sometimes outpaces the screenplay’s thin sense of dread.

The problem lies in pacing and predictability. The film spends its first act buried beneath exposition, taking too long to let the horror breathe. By the time the vengeful spirit emerges in earnest, much of the mystery has already withered. Its narrative beats—visions, confessions, cursed objects, and escalating hysteria—feel telegraphed, echoing better works from The Witch to The Wailing.

Still, Diabolic finds some salvation in its performances. Elizabeth Cullen anchors the chaos with a quiet, unflinching intensity, grounding the supernatural in something believably human. Her descent feels lived-in, even as the story around her becomes increasingly schematic. John Kim and Mia Challis provide competent support, though their characters are largely ornamental to the central exorcism of guilt and power.

Where Diabolic succeeds is in its texture—the way the camera lingers on faces during moments of dread, the ritualistic hum of sound design, and the sense that Phillips genuinely wants to explore faith as both salvation and curse. Yet it struggles to escape the trappings of the genre it reveres. What could have been a new cornerstone of Australian occult cinema ends up merely competent: handsomely shot, occasionally haunting, but ultimately too cautious to transcend its own formulas.

The Prognosis:

By the time the final act’s firelight fades, one is left admiring the ambition rather than fearing the outcome. Diabolic isn’t unholy—it’s just undercooked.

  • Saul Muerte

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Possession Without Passion: The Missed Potential of An American Haunting

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

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“Possession knows no bounds,” the tagline warns, though sadly, the film’s imagination does. An American Haunting attempts to bring the notorious Bell Witch legend to cinematic life, boasting the acting pedigree of Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek, yet even their combined gravitas can’t save this otherwise weightless ghost story from dissipating into the fog.

Set in 19th-century Tennessee, the film follows the devout Bell family as they are tormented by an invisible force that grows increasingly violent. Courtney Solomon anchors the narrative in a quasi-historical framing device, flashing between the period setting and modern-day correspondences — a decision that feels more distracting than illuminating. The supposed authenticity of the haunting, drawn from one of America’s most enduring supernatural legends, is buried beneath layers of slick art direction and overwrought emotional manipulation.

There are moments where the film almost succeeds. Solomon’s use of stark winter landscapes and period detail captures a genuine sense of isolation and religious repression. The interplay between faith, guilt, and patriarchal authority hints at a deeper psychological reading — particularly in the film’s controversial subtext of abuse and repression. Yet these glimpses of ambition are undermined by generic jump scares and erratic pacing, reducing what might have been an eerie meditation on American folklore into a routine exercise in gothic excess.

Sutherland delivers a sturdy, if uninspired, performance as the tormented patriarch John Bell, while Spacek provides the emotional centre as the devout matriarch, stoic but visibly cracking under the strain. Their efforts, however, are let down by a screenplay that offers them little beyond reaction shots to unseen horrors. The younger cast members, including Rachel Hurd-Wood as daughter Betsy, fare better in the moments of pure terror — though even these are undercut by inconsistent visual effects and abrupt tonal shifts.

The film’s conclusion, which attempts to blend historical tragedy with supernatural justice, arrives with the subtlety of a hammer blow. What should feel revelatory instead plays as exploitative and confused, failing to commit to either psychological realism or full-blooded horror fantasy.

The Prognosis:

An American Haunting ultimately joins the long line of early-2000s supernatural thrillers that mistake gloss for gravitas. For all its promise of ancestral dread and spectral vengeance, what lingers isn’t fear, but fatigue — a ghost story that haunts itself with the shadow of what it could have been.

  • Saul Muerte

Toxic Avenger (2025): The Return of Filth and Fury

29 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Some monsters crawl back from the grave; others crawl from the sewer.
With The Toxic Avenger (2025), writer-director Macon Blair has achieved something bordering on alchemy — turning the sludge of 1980s exploitation cinema into a molten reflection of our contemporary world. It’s less a remake than a resurrection: a grotesque, heartfelt eulogy for a time when bad taste was an act of rebellion.

The original 1984 Toxic Avenger was pure Troma chaos — an anarchic cocktail of slime, slapstick, and splatter. It was both anti-superhero and anti-society, gleefully dismembering the Reagan-era obsession with moral cleanliness. Blair’s revival doesn’t sanitise that legacy; it weaponises it. If the first film was a punk scream from the gutter, the new one is a howl echoing from the biohazard bin of late capitalism.

Peter Dinklage’s portrayal of Winston Gooze — a meek janitor transformed into a radioactive antihero — anchors the absurdity with tragic weight. Dinklage plays the part not for camp, but for catharsis: his deformity becomes the mirror of a system that feeds on deforming its own. Kevin Bacon’s villainous corporate baron, all Botox and bile, feels like a mutant descendant of every Troma CEO caricature — but here, he’s horrifyingly real.

Blair’s vision retains Troma’s vulgar spirit while finding unexpected poetry in the putrescence. His Toxic Avenger is as much about class rage and environmental collapse as it is about geysers of green goo. Every viscera-slick punch lands with the melancholy of a generation choking on the toxins it helped create. The violence is ludicrous, yes, but the laughter catches in the throat — this is camp reimagined as ecological despair.

What’s remarkable is how The Toxic Avenger feels simultaneously nostalgic and corrosively modern. Blair pays homage to Lloyd Kaufman’s transgressive humour, but refracts it through the aesthetics of contemporary superhero fatigue. His monster isn’t an accident of nuclear waste but of bureaucracy — a man destroyed by the very infrastructures meant to protect him.
The film’s gore set-pieces are less about indulgence than excess as indictment: when the blood sprays, it sprays neon, irony, and sorrow.

There’s an undercurrent of empathy that never existed in the original. Blair, ever the humanist even amidst the carnage, treats his freaks with tenderness. The mutants, misfits, and malformed are no longer punchlines; they’re the ones inheriting the Earth — or what’s left of it. It’s as though the spirit of Troma grew up, got angry, and learned how to aim its sludge cannon.

The Prognosis:

In the landscape of 2025 horror, where clean franchises and polished dread dominate, The Toxic Avenger feels like a badly needed contamination. It reminds us that horror’s job isn’t always to terrify — sometimes, it’s to repulse, provoke, and unsettle in the service of truth. Blair’s remake drips with the very stuff most studios would rather wash away.

And that’s precisely why it matters.
Because amid the algorithmic uniformity of modern genre filmmaking, The Toxic Avenger dares to be disgusting — and in doing so, it becomes pure again.

  • Saul Muerte

THE TOXIC AVENGER – BUY OR RENT NOW

Beyond the Crime Scene: Stuart Ortiz and the Cosmic Anatomy of Fear

20 Monday Oct 2025

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In Strange Harvest, Ortiz reshapes the language of true-crime horror, transforming the procedural form into a conduit for cosmic unease — a subtle evolution from his Grave Encounters origins.

In Strange Harvest, Stuart Ortiz — one half of the duo behind Grave Encounters — returns to the found footage-adjacent horror landscape with a surprising degree of control and maturity. Where Grave Encounters (2011) revelled in its haunted asylum chaos and digital distortion, Strange Harvest feels leaner and more deliberate, channelling that same eerie energy into a faux true-crime format that plays like Zodiac meets The Fourth Kind.

The film opens with what seems like a procedural—detectives responding to a welfare check in suburban San Bernardino—but quickly descends into something far darker. A murdered family, strange symbols written in blood, and the re-emergence of a serial killer known as “Mr. Shiny” set the stage for a horror narrative that thrives on implication and dread. Each new crime scene pushes the story further into cosmic territory, hinting at malevolent forces that exist well beyond the scope of human comprehension.

Ortiz demonstrates that he’s learned from over a decade in the horror trenches. His handling of the faux documentary format feels both grounded and authentic, using interviews, news footage, and handheld police recordings to build a layered mythology around the murders. The pacing is steady but tense, and the editing keeps the viewer in that unnerving space between realism and the supernatural — a sweet spot Ortiz has always excelled at.

While the premise is simple, that’s part of its strength. Strange Harvest doesn’t overcomplicate its narrative or chase high-concept spectacle; instead, it leans into its lo-fi authenticity, letting the horror emerge through atmosphere and suggestion. There are shades of procedural TV mixed with cosmic unease, but Ortiz ties it together with a firm grasp of tone and an eye for unsettling imagery.

It’s a testament to Ortiz’s craft that what could have been another run-of-the-mill mockumentary instead feels genuinely unnerving. Strange Harvest proves that the Grave Encounters legacy wasn’t a one-off fluke — Ortiz remains a filmmaker who understands how to weaponise form, texture, and the illusion of truth to make horror hit a little too close to home.

The Prognosis:

A deceptively simple yet chilling faux true-crime horror that tightens the screws through atmosphere and implication. Ortiz’s strongest solo work to date.

  • Saul Muerte

No Finish Line: The Long Walk Turns Minimalism into Masterpiece

22 Monday Sep 2025

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Sometimes when we get caught up reviewing all these films, it’s easy – all too easy – to forget that
as with a painter staring at a blank canvas; a director, when given their brief, is staring at a multitude
of choices in which to tell the story they have written (or in the case of The Long Walk; been given) .
And this particular story is the brainchild of writing grand master Stephen King. So, no presh.
Also throw in the fact that it involves walking, a ton of it, and you might think this is a film for a
novice (too inexperienced to know that this is an extremely tough assignment) or a black belt
filmmaker. Someone who knows enough to know that a movie that’s about walking in the open air
gives you nowhere to go. No immediate cutaways, no car chases, no love scenes to dictate changes
in pace etc.
Heck even your coverage choices are limited by how stylised (or not) you want to go about filming
men walking. And walking. And walking.
So what do you do? Well, there are a few things this pic leans on, and we’ll talk about those in a bit.
But first – some much-needed context for the 0.08% of you who have clicked on this article not
knowing what this movie is about.
Set in a dystopian alternative reality (around 1970’s ish – although the exact time period is never
stated, so I’m going off the novel, which was written in 1979) you soon realise that The Hunger
Games (and King’s own The Running Man) owe a lot to this idea.
Which is, you get people to WILLINGLY go through a trial of fire to get some nebulous sense of
financial freedom, and freedom from bondage.
In this particular case, you walk. As in you collate at a starting line, get assigned a number and you
walk. There is no finish line. Last man standing (and it is all men in this story. Young men, one from
each State of the U.S. – so 50 in total) wins. And wins big. Both in terms of $ and a wish…
The rule is you DO NOT stop. Evah. If you do for more than a few seconds you are given a warning.
If you fall below 3 miles an hour you are given a warning. More than 3 warnings in an hour and you
are executed there and then by one of the volley of military personnel keeping pace with you.
Water and rudimentary rations are given to the walkers, which prolongs their agony if anything.
Because stopping to relieve yourself or sleeping is counted as a warning/shootable offence. Taking a
pebble out of your shoe, bad weather, incredibly steep inclines…. you’d be surprised just how many
things can impede a good walk when halting is not an option.
And that’s what this review will do right now to get the always insightful Chris Dawes to give his take
on the movie. Over to you Chris!

Ok. So. In my view there are two types of Stephen King adaptations – The genre defining classic (The
Shining, Green Mile, Shawshank) and Dreamcatcher.

The Long Walk is the former.
It’s incredible – they have managed to make a minimalist, mid budget film about a bunch of people
walking through middle America deeply engaging.
Even the moments that you can see coming hit you, and hit you hard.
Everyone in this film is acting the shit out of it in the best possible way – I reckon this will be the
breakout movie for a bunch of the next generations’ Oscar winners.
It’s the kind of film that sits with you when it is over.
And boy howdy, do I love a Mark Hamill heel turn – I genuinely hated his character in a way I have
not often hated a film bad guy. Fucker managed to out-Darth Darth.
Glorious. No notes.
See this movie.

So, as you can see – mixed emotions from Chris there.
I kid.
As he touched upon, the best weapon this movie had at its disposal was casting. One way to get
around a story that has limitations in terms of setting is to make sure your actors are world class for
the roles they have been chosen to play. And for this trek, the filmmakers have nailed it.
When all you have is dialogue interspersed with ratcheting tension with each death, it helps that the
baseline words come from Stephen King. But when those words are delivered by young actors who
themselves are clearly gifted craftsmen, then you have the luxury of letting this movie do all the
heavy lifting for you.
And the tone from the outset is thrown down by the only real female member of the cast – Judy
Greer.
Now well and truly in the mother character phase of her career, her heartbreak as she bids farewell
to her son at the starting line hits a perfect balance. Not over-wrought to put you off the film before
it’s even started, but 100% grounded in a reality you can buy into. Because at this point of the
movie you don’t know the rules of The Walk, but in a great example of show don’t tell, you know it
can’t be good. So from the get-go you are intrigued and a little bit tense – the exact sort of tone you
want at the start of a flick like this.
So. Writing and acting. That’s how you make a dangerously simple premise work. [Allow time for
the world’s biggest d’uh].
But another thing that played in favour of this film was its unapologetic refusal to look away. The
way these men die is graphic, and that’s the point. A bullet does horrendous damage to a human
body. Powered metal explodes through bone and tissue and it doesn’t care how you look
when it does, and this film makes sure you SEE that, in all its factually visceral detail.

And it’s not gratuitous either. But rather, the point. Because why would these men sign up for
something that has a 49 in 50 chance of killing you in a physically painful and undignified way?
Well – why would 12 districts send 2 young people each year to fight to the death for the
amusement of the rich masses?
And by extension… why would SO MANY people in a real-life election vote AGAINST their own best
interest?
Because the illusion those in power sell to those without is tantalising and intoxicating. It’s framed
in rules that THEY set, but if you play the game, you can be ONE OF THEM. One of US!
In this case, chances are 49 to 50 against, but the result is binary. It’s either yes, or it’s no. And most
of us think and feel – deep down – we are the lead character of our own story. And rules don’t apply
to lead characters! Lead characters stand out by going against the mainstream and beating the
odds. Lead characters are special and so are YOU! Despite something immutable as math saying
you’re not.
Plus changing an unfair status quo through revolution seems like a lot of hard work. Work that
mostly benefits those who come after you, as revolts usually kill a lot of instigators. Even successful
ones.
So why not choose a path that could immediately benefit YOU instead? Countless money AND a
wish?
So what if the odds are not in favour? If you want anything in life, anything that’s worth it, you gotta
work for it. Bleed for it.
Walk for it. Die for it.

The Prognosis:

Power is an illusion, but it doesn’t make it not real. And this film makes you feel that every step of
the way.
5 stars.

  • Antony Yee & Chris Dawes

Christensen Sharpens His Blade with Night of the Reaper

15 Monday Sep 2025

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Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper wears its genre lineage proudly, a film whose scaffolding is unmistakably indebted to the slasher cycle of the late 1970s and early ’80s. Yet what distinguishes it from mere pastiche is Christensen’s attempt to infuse the familiar architecture of suburban dread with a contemporary reflexivity. The result is a work that gestures toward both homage and reinvention, though it occasionally falters under the weight of its own ambition.

At its core, the narrative is bifurcated: Deena, a college student reluctantly drawn into the liminal domestic space of babysitting, embodies the archetypal “final girl,” while the sheriff’s scavenger-hunt pursuit of a killer injects a procedural dimension that broadens the scope beyond the living-room crucible. This duality lends the film a structural intrigue, complicating the linear inevitability characteristic of earlier slashers. Christensen’s gambit is to stretch the genre’s grammar toward a more fragmented, almost puzzle-box form, and while not always seamless, it sustains an atmosphere of unease.

Thematically, Night of the Reaper interrogates surveillance, communication, and the transmission of violence—whether through mailed evidence or the uncanny ritual of watching over another’s child. The “babysitter” trope here functions less as a mere setup than as a cultural cipher: the guardian of innocence, rendered vulnerable not only by external threat but by the epistemic instability of what she sees, hears, and knows.

Performances, particularly from Clement, anchor the film in an emotional realism that offsets its occasional excesses of plotting. If the twists sometimes feel calibrated for shock rather than inevitability, they nonetheless affirm Christensen’s willingness to deny the audience easy comfort. The film’s refusal to collapse into nostalgia, even while nodding to Carpenter and Craven, positions it as both homage and critique.

The Prognosis:

Night of the Reaper is less about transcending the slasher than about testing its elasticity—stretching a well-worn form to see what new resonances might emerge. Christensen may reach a little too high, but in doing so he ensures that the film, like its protagonists, never entirely succumbs to the shadow of its predecessors.

  • Saul Muerte

Night of the Reaper is streaming on Shudder from Friday 19th Sept

Embrace the Darkness: Dark Nights Film Fest Vol. 2

10 Wednesday Sep 2025

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The shadows are calling again. The screen is no longer a safe window to peer through but a chasm, hungry and alive, waiting to swallow you whole. Strap in, Sydney — Dark Nights Film Fest Vol. 2 has crawled out of the grave and into the Ritz, and this time it’s not here to play nice.

This isn’t cinema for the faint, the casual, or the polite. This is cinema that stalks you through the back alleys of your subconscious, cinema that rips the floorboards off your cozy illusions and drags you headfirst into a pit of worms. Just when you thought the blood had dried and the screams had faded, festival director Bryn Tilly has cranked open the gates again, ushering in a delirious parade of maniacs, monsters, and midnight visions.

Nine Australian premieres. One unholy cult resurrection. Twenty-two short, sharp shocks from across the globe. It’s a full-course banquet of nightmares, each dish steaming with dread and dripping with the strange juices of cinema’s dark heart.

Opening night doesn’t just raise a curtain — it tears open the roof with Hell House LLC: Lineage, an unhinged carnival of terror where haunted basements and clown-faced demons set the tone for what’s to come: fear without safety nets. From there the fest descends into Germany’s tangled woods with Bark, drags you through the neon purgatory of America in A Desert, and burns you alive with the Serbian one-two punch of A Serbian Documentary and Karmadonna — films that don’t just push buttons, they rip them out and swallow them whole.

But the crown jewel of delirium? Peter Jackson’s Braindead in screaming 4K glory. Thirty years since its last Australian theatrical run, and the pus-filled carnage hasn’t aged a day. This isn’t a screening — it’s an exorcism of sanity, an orgy of undead slapstick that makes every Marvel movie look like a children’s nap-time.

And just when your skull’s about to split, along comes Necromorphosis, burrowing into your flesh like a cockroach in heat, and Sun, a fever-dream hybrid of movement and madness that dances straight into the abyss. By the time the anthology Adorable Humans rolls around, Hans Christian Andersen will be spinning in his grave fast enough to power a small Danish village.

Closing night locks the doors and swallows the keys with The School Duel, a dystopian grenade lobbed at society’s fragile bones — ferocious, timely, and cruelly relevant.

This isn’t just a festival. It’s a séance. A bacchanal of blood, dread, and midnight delirium. Between the Aussie and international shorts, the Movie Boutique of VHS relics and arcane treasures, and filmmakers dropping truth bombs about low-budget survival, Dark Nights is where the monsters come to play.

Forget safe cinema. Forget the plush multiplex glow. The Ritz is where the shadows come alive, and the screen bites back.

Dark Nights Film Fest Vol. 2 — October 9–12, Ritz Cinemas, Randwick.
Bring your nerves, bring your nightmares, and leave your soul at the door.

  • Saul Muerte

All the Gods in the Sky (2018): A Bleak Communion of Trauma and Cosmic Longing

04 Monday Aug 2025

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Quarxx’s All the Gods in the Sky (Tous les dieux du ciel) is not easily categorised, and that’s entirely the point. Sitting somewhere between psychological horror, arthouse drama, and cosmic nightmare, this French genre-bender takes its time and isn’t afraid to make its audience uncomfortable—both emotionally and philosophically.

At the centre of this bruising tale is Simon, a deeply troubled factory worker played with quiet intensity by Jean-Luc Couchard. Isolated on a decaying farmhouse in the French countryside, Simon devotes his life to caring for his sister Estelle (Melanie Gaydos), who was left severely disabled due to a tragic accident during their childhood. The pair exist in a shared purgatory of guilt, silence, and unresolved trauma.

Quarxx delivers a slow punch of a film—one that creeps under your skin not with conventional jump scares, but with mood, decay, and despair. It builds its atmosphere with surgical precision, weaving in splinters of sci-fi, existential dread, and surrealism. Simon’s fixation with extraterrestrial salvation offers a disturbing mirror into his desperation—a hope that something beyond this earth might rescue them from their irreversible reality.

While not all of its experimental swings land perfectly, the film is bolstered by weighty performances and a haunting visual style. The bleak, moldy interiors and ghostly farm exterior evoke a tactile sense of rot, both physical and spiritual. Quarxx makes no effort to handhold the viewer, instead demanding that we wade through the same confusion and torment as Simon himself.

All the Gods in the Sky is certainly not a film for everyone. Its pacing is deliberate, its emotional resonance often brutal, and its genre elements veer from subtle to grotesque. But for those willing to embrace its unsettling tones, there’s something strangely transcendent at its core—a meditation on guilt, disability, and the yearning for escape, whether divine or alien.

The Prognosis:

Though it never fully ascends into the upper tier of arthouse horror, it remains a distinct and memorable piece—an otherworldly prayer whispered from the darkest corners of human suffering.

  • Saul Muerte

All The Gods in the Sky premieres on Shudder and AMC+ Monday 4 August