Festivals: Grimm Up North
Grimmfest 2012 Review: THE WRONG HOUSE Is So Very Wrong, But So, So Right
For a movie about a real-estate bargain that turns out to be far too good to be true, it seems perversely appropriate you have to forgive a lot - I mean a lot - to get into The Wrong House...
Grimmfest 2012 Review: You'll Be Dozing Off Long BEFORE DAWN
Very few zombie movies are actually about the zombies. Whatever their scope and scale, these are generally stories about troubled people trying to keep on doing what they do even while the world's coming to an end. And the idea...
Grimmfest 2012 Review: DEVOURED Has Very Little Behind The Curtain
Back in my Creative Writing classes at university the lecturers would explain one way to create a fictional character was to start with one thing - a name, say - and extrapolate from there. Is it a weird name? If...
Grimmfest 2012 Review: WAKE UP AND DIE is GROUNDHOG DAY ... With Murder!
Seriously, "Groundhog Day with murder" seems like such an obvious idea it's hard to imagine some low-budget splatter production house hasn't tried it yet (correct me if I'm wrong), but Miguel Urrutia's Wake Up and Die appears to be the...
Grimmfest 2012, Day 3: Step Inside THE WRONG HOUSE
Day three of Grimmfest 2012 and the crowds were still turning up in force, even with a full 12 hours of screenings to get through. Saying Wake Up And Die is "Groundhog Day with murder" might be a smartass...
Grimmfest 2012, Day 2: DEVOURED Will Swallow Your Soul
Round two of Grimmfest was another half day - the festival is packing everything into the weekend. As the day began, the Grimmfest crew was riding high off the first day reviews in the UK mainstream press for the...
Grimmfest 2012 Review: COMEDOWN - The Slasher Movie, Once More, With Feeling
Menhaj Huda's Comedown isn't so much the morning after the night before as the moment that night when you realise the booze has run out, the pills are all gone and you're desperately trying to eke out the last...
Grimmfest 2012, Day 1: COMEDOWN Is One Hell Of A Rush
Grimmfest 2012 kicked off in earnest - after the special preview night on Wednesday 4th October - with a gala screening of the world premiere for Comedown, the new film from Mehnaj Huda (Kidulthood) swapping social commentary for stalk-and-slash. To...
GRIMMFEST 2012: Final Films Added! More Shorts!
Attention UK ScreenAnarchy readers! Wondering if you should head down to Manchester's upcoming horror festival, Grimmfest, in early October 2012? Not yet taken the plunge and picked up some tickets? Here's something that might tip you over the edge: the festival...
UK Film Festivals: GRIMM UP NORTH 2012 Full Lineup! Fear And Tremblingly Buy Tickets!
Manchester film festival Grimm Up North have announced the full lineup for their 2012 event, running from October 3rd-7th, and it looks to be up to their usual high standards. We've been following Grimmfest for the past couple of years...
LIFF 2011: THE DIVIDE review
Xavier Gens' superb The Divide basically posits that should the bombs drop and the world get blown to radioactive splinters, the scariest thing that could happen wouldn't be finding out you were screwed. It'd be finding out that given the...
LIFF 2011: THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS review
The Whisperer in Darkness is a fan film through and through - an enthusiastic celebration of a subject a core group of believers think is just awesome (classic, literary-minded horror fiction from one of the fathers of the genre). It's...
Grimm Up North 2011: THE WICKER TREE review
If you're going to mash up horror and comedy ideally your writer or director needs to have it straight what it is the audience are supposed to be laughing at. The idea of a quiet English village hiding a pathologically...
Grimm Up North 2011: THE THEATRE BIZARRE review
Horror's pretty dumb, right, when you get down to it? Subjecting ourselves to seedy vicarious thrills when if we took pleasure in the same things in real life we'd be clinically insane. Lots of people level this argument against genre...
Grimm Up North 2011: REVENGE: A LOVE STORY review
Wong Ching-Po's salacious little thriller Revenge: A Love Story is the second film from production company 852 - who previously gave us Edmond Pang's Dream Home, an ultraviolent slasher (emphasis on ultra) where Pang's trademark sly social commentary sat somewhat...
Grimm Up North 2011: THE REVEREND review
(PLEASE NOTE: The version of The Reverend that screened at Grimm Up North 2011 was a final edit that had only been completed several days before the festival started, and it is certainly possible director Neil Jones may choose to...
Grimm Up North 2011: THE WOMAN review
What you get out of Lucky McKee's The Woman, a piece of ultraviolent drama that's brilliant and infuriating by turns, is probably dependent on how serious you think the director and his writing partner, novelist Jack Ketchum are being. The...
Grimm Up North 2011: SOME GUY WHO KILLS PEOPLE review
It's not the best title, is it? Trying to sell the excellent Some Guy Who Kills People is a lot harder than it ought to be when the name makes it sound like a slacker's Film Studies final year project...
Grimm Up North 2011: HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982) review
Halloween 3 seems bizarre enough in 2011 before you've even started watching. A Halloween with no Michael Myers, the masked killer who became the star of the first two films - the idea Hollywood would green-light a major franchise sequel...
Grimm Up North 2011: BY DAY AND BY NIGHT review
Alejandro Molina's By Day and by Night is the kind of bittersweet little fable that only an arthouse film could come up with. The plot does hinge on a patently ridiculous idea Molina could probably have done more to ground...
