horror
Sam Marlowe
Dark this new one-act drama by American playwright Neil LaBute may be; deep, not so much. It has all the author’s usual hallmarks: an accumulation of sinister tension, disturbing sexual politics, the threat of violence. And in a taut, pacey production heralded by an opening soundtrack of punishingly loud grunge-rock music and directed by LaBute himself, it’s acted with conviction by Olivia Williams and Matthew Fox, best known for TV’s Lost. The writing also makes murkily playful use of fairytale imagery and undercurrents of classical tragedy. But for all its slick style, its narrative is a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If you’ve seen Tomas Alfredson’s remarkable Swedish adaptation of John Alfrede Lindqvist’s vampire novel Let the Right One In, then this US remake by Matt Reeves is far from required viewing. He shadows the original so closely, you’ll never be surprised or scared. But like a loving cover version of a favourite hit, there are pleasures in the riffs he plays.The idea of a lonely, bullied 12-year-old boy bonding with a similarly isolated girl who tells him she’s been 12 “for a very long time”, due to being a vampire, works as well in Los Alamos, New Mexico as on Alfredson’s bleak Swedish housing Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Like the misbegotten monster at its heart, this stage version of Mary Shelley’s seminal novel is stitched together from a number of discrete parts; and though some of the pieces are in themselves extremely handsome, you can all too clearly see the joins. Here’s a bit of half-baked dance theatre, there a scene of simple, touching humanity. And for each dollop of broad ensemble posturing, there’s a visually stunning scenic effect. In the midst of it all are two excellent performances by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, who alternate in the roles of vauntingly ambitious Read more ...
theartsdesk
It is one of the most hotly anticipated new productions at the National Theatre in years, for which all but day seats have long since been sold out. Danny Boyle has been lured back to the stage to direct a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In a rare and daring instance of double casting, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller will share the duties of playing Victor Frankenstein and the creature which, in popular mythology, has taken his name. NT Live will thus be screening two separate performances. But in the first instance, the names which will make the box office tick over can do Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Tainted by its origins and association with the pulp cinema of the 1950s (classics like Bwana Devil, It Came from Outer Space and House of Wax were pioneers of stereoscopic technology), 3D cinema has remained the province of entertainment cinema, a novelty no art-house auteur would touch. Spin The Hurt Locker’s shock Oscar win in 2010 any way you want, it made an emphatic statement about the value the cinematic academy placed on technological advancement. For that was surely the terminal problem with Avatar. A thrilling visual spectacle, it harnessed its innovations to a recycled plot Read more ...
howard.male
A young girl runs in slow motion through the woods, the cameraman in hot pursuit: this is only the opening seconds of ITV1’s new drama series, and already I was wondering to what degree this new five-parter was going to test my cliché tolerance level. But fortunately Marchlands pulled itself together and settled down to spend most of its first hour just letting us get to know the three families who had lived in the Marchlands house over the four previous decades.Via a series of inventive dissolves we were moved with seamless ease from 1968 to 1987 to 2010, and quickly made aware that the Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The spinning roulette wheel, the revolver, the devil’s mask, and above all that lissom semi-naked female gyrating in silhouette against flickering infernal flames: we all remember the opening titles to Tales of the Unexpected, which made its first TV appearance in 1979. Anyone who has also read the stories that spawned the series can vouch for their sublime slipperiness, the wicked, cackling glee that rattles through their understated prose, their winkling out of the awful and the uncanny in what appear socially ordinary situations.Now, in a follow-up to last year’s hit show Ghost Stories – Read more ...
howard.male
Don’t you just hate it when your favourite cult show becomes everybody’s favourite cult show, and then to make matters worse even the damned Americans embrace it? But how could you not love a scarier, bloody version of the sitcom Spaced, or a funnier version of the horror movie Let the Right One In? Yes, the latter does sound particular unlikely, yet in 2008 Toby Whithouse managed to create a central trio of characters who are first and foremost endearing and achingly vulnerable, and only secondly a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire.Lenora Crichlow plays the goofily sexy, touchingly optimistic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
They’re calling Black Swan BS on some of the dance websites, and while they’re right about the dancing, this is a whale of an enjoyable outing to the flicks: lush, Gothic, psycho and flavoursomely OTT. I don’t much care that Natalie Portman can’t dance for toffee - Tobey Maguire probably didn’t satisfy jockeys with his style in Seabiscuit, or Hilary Swank the boxing clubs in Million Dollar Baby. It’s down to the character study, and who wants well-balanced yoghurt-eaters at a ballet movie anyway? We want girly fantasy, motherly obsession, blood in the shoes, Carrie at the ballet, and Darren Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fairy tales are fear tales really, the sweetening (and sharpening) of every child’s worst nightmares, emotions long buried in adulthood but very easily tapped back into with good theatre productions. The Witch in Hansel and Gretel should be the queen of the team of the ogres who lurk in forests or homes waiting to kill children, along with lieutenants the Wolf in Red Riding Hood, Snow White’s wicked stepmother and Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty. Last night’s opening of the Royal Opera’s revival of its jaunty 2008 production fielded in a splendid cast a tremendous Witch, Jane Henschel, the Read more ...
neil.smith
It is not uncommon for opportunistic film-makers to put together a flashy promo in the hope it will attract enough investors to turn it into a full-length feature. When Robert Rodriguez made the Machete trailer for 2007 double-bill Grindhouse, though – an all-action spoof featuring striking bit-part actor Danny Trejo as its titular knife-wielding protagonist – he had no intention of taking this parodic in-joke any further.Watch the original Machete trailer:Three years on and countless fan entreaties later, Rodriguez has expanded that earlier gambit into a 104-minute opus whose “strong bloody Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You’re casting a deputy sheriff from Kentucky who wakes from a coma to find the landscape littered with corpses and overrun by flesh-eating zombies, so who do you call? Well obviously Andrew Lincoln, the irritatingly drippy English actor from Teachers and This Life. But it’s amazing the difference a reasonably plausible Southern accent and a hunk of iron from Smith & Wesson can make.Right from the opening of this pilot episode of director Frank Darabont’s ghastly horror saga, Rick Grimes (Lincoln’s character) was shooting zombies point-blank through the head or coolly battering them to a Read more ...