It doesn’t take much for director James Ashcroft to create the most horrific of situations from the simplest of ingredients laid bare in the early stages of the eerie Coming Home in the Dark. Â A loving family, an idyllic New Zealand locale, and a duo of passing strangers provide all that is needed for Ashcroft’s […]
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Coming off of such aggressive roles in features as Dragged Across Concrete and Brawl In Cell Block 99, the thought of Vince Vaughn flailing his arms and strutting with the poise of a flustered teenage girl is one that’s all the more appealing when you view it in its actuality. Â And it’s the hulking 6’5 […]
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As the trailer for Christopher Landon‘s body-swap horror-comedy Freaky premieres across the globe, The AU Review’s Peter Gray was fortunate enough to chat with the director, touching on the casting of Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton, his love of the horror genre, and if we can expect a third Happy Death Day. After seeing […]
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Prior to watching Natalie Erika James’ Relic, I’d read constant comparisons to Hereditary and The Babadook. The former has too strong a grasp on literal malevolence to align in any way with James’ debut feature, but The Babadook certainly shares a great deal with this Australian-made indie-horror, given both are rooted in German expressionism and […]
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If we have learnt anything throughout cinema’s depictions of estranged families, it’s that the more alienated you are from one another, the more unpredictable your journey will be. This proves especially true in Come To Daddy, a pitch black comedic thriller that director Ant Timpson bathes in gory oddity. There’s an unease immediately present from […]
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*The AU Review will continue with its planned SXSW 2020 coverage. Â We have been in contact with the respective representatives for available films in order to give them the coverage they intended. Perhaps diving a little too heavily into the metaphorical stance on storytelling, Claire Oakley‘s Make Up is a self-discovery tale dressed up like […]
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*The AU Review will continue with its planned SXSW 2020 coverage. Â We have been in contact with the respective representatives for available films in order to give them the coverage they intended. The Midnight Shorts Competition has long been an audience favourite at SXSW. Â A bite-sized marathon of twisted ideas that usually fuses gore, overt […]
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Had the Tom Cruise-led revamp of The Mummy not crashed and burned at the box office upon its release in 2017 then we’d be seeing, or more correctly not seeing, a very different Invisible Man. Â In an optimistic strategy from Universal Pictures – in their bid to compete with fellow juggernauts Marvel and DC – […]
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John Krasinski returns to direct the follow-up to his 2018 box office monster A Quiet Place, although he won’t actually be taking any screen time on this outing. That will be left to his wife Emily Blunt, who is once again on the run from noise-sensitive aliens with her two kids in tow. The highly […]
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What a strange little arthouse horror flick Koko-di Koko-da is. Â What starts out as a relatively straight-forward tale of a once-happy family trying to maintain a sense of worth before breaking down entirely, quickly descends into an experiment of madness, one that is often repetitive and unlikeable but no less inherently fascinating. The aforementioned once-happy […]
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There is good reason Stephen King’s story of It has endured for decades. Amongst his best work, the famed horror author has always been strongest when he’s sketching elegant parallels between fight and flight. Sure, that’s been done to death in modern cinema, and the dynamic between the two states has been mined by horror […]
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Just as much of a surprise as the delightfully twisted original – 2017’s Happy Death Day – Happy Death Day 2U is revelatory not because it improves on its predecessor’s horror temperament, but because it completely bypasses the slasher genre trope and cements itself firmly within the grounds of science-fiction. Given how much fun writer and director […]
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When you think of zombie comedies, it’s difficult to look beyond the witty brilliance that is Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004). Â Whilst we’ve had our share of interesting takes on the walking dead in the years since, the arrival of Anna and the Apocalypse stands as the choreographed high-kick the genre needed. Â Not […]
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Trick: The 2018 incarnation of Halloween acts as a direct continuation of the 1978 original, essentially wiping out all seven sequels (and the two Rob Zombie-helmed revisions) that succeeded in the years since. Treat: It’s good. Like really f***ing good! After surviving the maniacal clutches of psychotic killer Michael Myers forty years prior, Laurie Strode […]
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Before Truth or Dare even begins, you know exactly what kind of movie you’re about to see. Hoping to be some sort of new-era Final Destination, but failing miserably in the process, Truth or Dare follows every beat you expect it to, and it’s in this predictability that the film succeeds in being a massively entertaining ride for all the […]
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Even when working off a plot device that doesn’t exactly test the limits of originality, a clever script and utter dedication from its workers can transform the familiar to something beyond our expectations. Such is the case with A Quiet Place, an impossibly eerie chiller that presents civilisation as a fallen project, and those who […]
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Spoilers for the first two seasons of Stranger Things follow. Read on at your own risk! Or just watch the show first. It’s seriously very good. It was just last year that Netflix introduced the world to Stranger Things, a science-fiction serial with a fond appreciation for Eighties pop-culture. Clever, scary and heart-warming, the series […]
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Beginning its streaming season on the rather appropriate date of Friday the 13th, Netflix’s nasty, bloodied The Babysitter proves a suitable entree for the feast that is the Halloween film season. Playing with the conventions of an 80’s style slasher whilst simultaneously maintaining an air of modern self-referential wit, McG‘s splatter comedy is a quick […]
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As varying subsets of the horror genre have forged ahead in 2017 as some of the year’s biggest successes (Split, Get Out and It remain three of the most fruitful ventures), it only makes sense that the slasher genre attempt the resurgence it so desperately deserves. It simply isn’t enough however to let a film […]
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Returning to the genre that arguably brought him to fruition, Gore Verbinski’s (The Ring) A Cure For Wellness is a decidedly morbid slice of cinema that revels in its own jarring weirdness. Here’s a film that has considerable monetary backing (something of a surprise for a particularly eerie horror experiment) yet comes off more like […]
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2012’s Prometheus marked the beginning of a franchised prequel to Ridley Scott’s original Alien, not only taking fans back to the origins of this iconic sci-fi franchise, but diving deeper into the meaty philosophies such a concept brings, finding purpose with the motif of creation. The introduction of synthetic android David (Michael Fassbender) emerged as […]
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Outcast, originally a comic published by Image Comics and created by Robert Kirkman and artist Paul Azaceta, is another Robert Kirkman TV creation that is slowly taking the world by storm. It may be a TV show that has a much smaller scale than Kirkman’s The Walking Dead series, but hey, even I remember watching […]
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A delightfully nasty horror movie that draws on real-life inspiration, Lake Bodom hopes to be more than just a Friday The 13th-type slasher, in large part to its true crime connection, but ultimately can’t overcome its conventionality – not that there’s anything wrong with that. What still remains one of Europe’s greatest unsolved mysteries, the […]
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After spending the better part of two years playing musical chairs with the release schedule, Rings arrives with a considerable thud to remind us how unnecessary certain sequels are. Presenting a messy storyline that wants to both adhere to the formula of Gore Verbinski‘s (supremely superior) 2002 original The Ring and place its own stamp on […]
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Halloween is right around the corner, so it’s time turn off the lights and scare yourself silly with The Iris’ list of new and upcoming horror games.
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Scares were flat when Stiles White made his directorial debut with 2014 film Ouija, a supernatural horror which got by commercially on its formulaic, same-same structure – and the release date being Halloween – but ultimately faltered in the face of superior genre films released that in the same year. Nothing about Ouija was particularly […]
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Let us take a trip back to a simpler time. The year is 1999. Bluetooth technology was officially announced, MySpace was released on the internet, people were in the grips of Y2K hysteria and a few critics actually thought Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace was a good film. It was a year of changes […]
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Apparently we live in a world where members of boybands decide that writing and starring in a post-apocalyptic zombie filled cowboy shoot-em-up Western is a good idea. Initially when I saw the trailer for this film I had a little optimism that it could be one of those “so bad it’s almost good” type of […]
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Richard Kuipers, Programmer of the “Freak Me Out” program strain for Sydney Film Festival preceded a recent screening of The Eyes of My Mother with a fairly apt description: “the point where extreme art house and extreme horror meet”. While art house may outweigh horror here, Kuipers primed viewers correctly, Nicolas Pesce disturbing feature playing […]
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In an assault on horror, popular critic and academic Morris Dickstein wrote that the genre had become a “routinized way of playing with death, like going on the roller coaster”. It’s not impossible to see where his criticisms are founded, given the whole genre has been so formulated; mathematicians have actually developed a generic horror […]
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