Kingdom of the Vampire (1991)

Director: J R Bookwalter
Starring: Matthew Jason Walsh, Barbara Katz-Norrod, Thomas Brown, Cherie Petry, Shannon Doyle. USA. 1h 10m

Jeff (Walsh) works in a dead end job, working the night shift in a gas station. The lonely young man doesn’t have any friends and no prospect at anything more lavish in his working life than mopping floors and stacking shelves, but his home life is worse. Each morning Jeff returns home to a domineering mother, a woman.. a vampire hell bent on making her son into a cold blooded killer like herself as she feasts on neighbourhood kids and beats him into submission.

The Aplines (2021)

Director: Dante Aubain
Starring: Mally Corrigan, Aaron Latta-Morris .UK. 1h 33m

Meeting up with old friends brings back memories of the good ole days, a chance to catch up and congratulate each other and relive old times, and the perfect setting for a rose tinted reunion is a far away cabin in the wilderness , with no distractions and no neighbors to distract or keep a watchful eye. The only problem, having not seen your old school friends for some time there’s no guarantee that everyone still has all their own marbles. Will this weekend in the Alpines be a few beers and burgers or a weekend of psychological meltdowns and digging up buried true feelings?

In Fear (2013)

Director: Jeremy Lovering Starring:Iain De Caestecker, Alice Englert, Allen Leech. UK, Ireland. 1h 25m

There’s nothing new about a couple going for a fun thrilled romantic break in Ireland, it’s not like the market is swamped and this is a genre movie but with crackers like From the Dark (2014), which sees a more established couple trying to revive a strained relationship while descending on a village overrun by hard to kill vampires, along with this creature feature there’s a brilliant psychological tale Travellers (2011) that involved a group of city boys running into some Irish travellers but until a few magical 360 plot spinning reveal it’s hard to know who’s the worst set of characters. So with these already out and about, for seasoned horror fans, this movie initially kicks off as more of the same, or is it? Jeremy Lovering uses these others as stepping stones and red herrings, helping to throw his audience off and In Fear manages to fool and chill constantly from beginning to end.

Love at 2nd Sight (2020)

Director: Adim Williams. Starring: Frederick Leonard, Peggy Ovire, Onny Micheal, Rita Arum, Philldella Yve, Adim Williams. .Nigeria. 5h +

Falling in love just might be the easy part in this explosive Nigeria classic, not only do a couple of friends both find the women of their dreams, they manage to lose them due to irrational reactions and lack of attention and empathy.

Frederick Leonard plays an attractive bachelor, who’s hooked up with an old flame and within months of reuniting they are getting married. The love is lost and all goes bad on the wedding night when his new bride wakes up, and before she’s got her faculties together and in a total daze, she’s asking to be paid for her nightly rate! Utterly shocked Frederick realises he’s married ex prostitute, disgusted and pained verbally beats the woman down, leaving her in their hotel suite with some cash, the message is clear, the arrangement is over. At her most vulnerable state her best friend also takes advantage of her and ashamed she moves on with her life.

L’étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps \ The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013)

Director: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Starring: Klaus Tange, Ursula Bedena, Joe Koener .France / Belgium / Luxembourg. 1h 42m

This deeply surreal and lavish bizarre movie from French duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani take a step further into dreamy symbolic realms than their previous Giallo Esque romp, Amer, a project which excited cult-movie fans a few years back, both share an experimental blend of imagery with heavy Giallo tones eroitic vingnettes commenting on gender and sexuality with it’s withed dialogue and richly opulent architectural decadence that hides the identity of a killer. On returning home Dan (Tange) finds his girlfriend missing, assuming that she’s met a terrible fate he searches for clues as the world around him begins to flourish with fragmented images of horror and fear.

The Invisible Man (2020)

Director: Leigh Whannell
Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer, Michael Dorman, Oliver Jackson-Cohen . Australia/USA. 2h 04m

So many years after the temptatious story of the Invisible Man by the legendary H G Wells, later made into a Black and White Classic by Universal Studios. The implausible idea of a chemical formula to make humans invisible has now been cleverly updated to an optical genius and a camera suit but why would we need such an application in this day and age? Infiltrating rival governments? To make an invisible army to take over the world or just a tool to torment an ex girlfriend who dared to leave a toxic relationship?

Midsommar (2019)

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Director: Ari Aster
Starring:Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Will Poulter . USA/Sweden. 2h 18m

Ari Aster has a bone to pick with our perceptions of folklore and his method is to scare and intrigue us by old practices which somehow feel familiar to us but also keep us up at night. By his own admission, his own personal demons and fear of germs helped centre him as the central character, something which might have spurred on his need to move away from horror, he loves musicals and rom coms, who’d have thunk it? Despite his love of folky cult themed horrors, he does have a great eye for colour and dramatics, so maybe his distinctive style will happily manifest in other dramatic and loud ways, but I don’t doubt for a second that whatever he dreams up next will be unmistakably Asterish.

Wedding Palaver (2020)

Director: Adim C Williams
Starring. Chioma Chukwuka Akpotha, Frederick Leonard, Chinenye Uba, Sam Obiago, Jennifer Cooper, Praise Gladson, Tracey Edwin, Adim Williams. Nigeria. 4h +.

A wedding can be the most important day of anyone’s life, usually the highly planned and well organised day can be stressful but after years of being happily married it’s worth it, however everything is upside down about this traumatic run up to this less than perfect couples wedding.

The surprising thing about the Wedding Palaver is that it starts with a hurt girlfriend leaving her jealous and over bearing boyfriend played by Frederick Leonard, he’s controlling, rude and doesn’t apologise for belittling his lover when assuming she’s cheating on him when in fact she’s out visiting her cousin, the hurt girl pleads for mercy then realising that he’ll never change, she leaves.

My Wife My Life (2020)

Director: Ugezu J Ugezu
Starring:Frederick Leonard, Queeneth Hilbert, Tana Egbo Adelana, Chinyere Wilfred, Ugo Spunky Obioha. .Nigeria. 4h +

Frederick Leonard stars as a man who has it all, and this puts him in the front running and he’s hit on daily by many beautiful women, but he’s an honourable man and only has eyes for his darling wife Cindy (Adelana).

His overbearing mother is intent on ending his marriage and for him to marry a girl that she chooses, seeing the current union as going against her will and therefore null and void, she spends her waking hours, actively running schemes behind their backs to shroud their marriage in doubt and fear, and doesn’t think twice about telling Cindy that she would like to see her dead… charming!

Videodrome (1983)

Director:David Cronenberg .
Starring: James Woods, Debbie Harry, David Cronenberg, David Dvorsky, Leslie Carlson, Julie Khaner. Canada. 1h 29m.

Having watched Videodrome at quite a young age the film fascinated me for all the wrong reasons, pulsating VHS tapes, clips of dodgy torture rooms and people morphing into guns and machines really lit my young mind on fire, this was something that really carried on through my teens while lapping up underground comic books and really came to life when I discovered tales of the dark web and Tetsuo Iron Man (1989) which hit home this idea of bio mechanics along with my love of Giger’s artwork but nothing was quite on that level of bizarre as Videodrome, covering so many aspects of the darker side of the human psyche it’s science fiction body horror touches on some worrying habits and disgusting practices but all in such a way that it’s almost too clever for it’s own good.

James Woods takes centre stage as Max, as the CEO of a small UHF television station specialising in sensationalist programming he’s constantly displeased with his current line up which is mostly soft core, while looking  for ways to boost the station, he stumbles on a bizarre broadcast featuring extreme violence and torture which he believes is staged and wants the show known as Videodrome for his station as he perceives it as something that everyone wants to see. While searching for the source of the broadcast, he employs his cameraman Harlan,  to record the shows for him, eventually he deduces that the show is being transmitted from Malaysia, and soon Max orders that Harlan to broadcast the show unlicensed via his network. The more Max watches Videodrome the more he begins to hallucinates the world around him, mechanical items become soft and fluid, pulsating with life and breathing, but this is only the beginning.