Film Reviews by griggs

Few prison films hit as hard or feel as tightly wound as Brute Force. It’s a sweaty, furious piece of postwar noir, all shadowed cells and pent-up rage. Jules Dassin directs with a sense of fatalism that feels almost operatic — like Rififi behind bars. Every corridor hums with tension, every conversation carries the weight of confinement.

Burt Lancaster leads a powerhouse cast of inmates plotting one desperate bid for freedom, while Hume Cronyn delivers a quietly chilling turn as the sadistic guard who seems to enjoy the system more than the prisoners. It’s grim, bruising stuff, but never dull — the violence comes not from gunfire, but from frustration and futility.

Like Le Trou, it finds dignity in endurance and solidarity, showing men defined less by their crimes than by how they face captivity. It’s noir stripped of glamour, replaced with sweat, steel, and the faint hope of sunlight through the bars.

I found Sundays and Cybele while working through the Oscar winners list — the 1963 Best International Feature winner — and it turned out to be one of those quiet surprises that actually earns its prize. What starts off looking simple, even a little suspect in premise, slowly unfolds into something tender, strange, and deeply moving.

Serge Bourguignon’s direction is luminous yet grounded, drifting between dream and realism. Hardy Krüger plays Pierre, a traumatised ex-pilot haunted by war guilt, and Patricia Gozzi is astonishing — direct, natural, and heartbreakingly clear-eyed. Their friendship is innocent, but it’s the adult world’s suspicion that turns it tragic.

Those Sundays together feel like borrowed time — small pockets of grace before the world closes in. It’s more Léon: The Professional than Lolita: less about exploitation, more about two damaged souls trying to feel human again. Troubling, tender, and quietly devastating, Sundays and Cybele lingers like a dream you don’t want to wake from — even though you know it ends in heartbreak.

Little Trouble Girls is one of those debuts that feels way too assured for a first film. Urška Djukic takes the old “Catholic girl’s awakening” setup and gives it a jolt — smart, modern, and quietly intense. The mix of faith, control, and desire is handled so confidently it’s almost uncomfortable to watch.

The sound design is incredible. The music isn’t just background; it shapes everything — sometimes soothing, sometimes suffocating. Saša Tabakovic is brilliant as the choirmaster: charming one minute, quietly predatory the next. He’s got the kind of authority that makes your skin crawl even when he’s smiling.

The rehearsal scenes are where the film really hits. Every breath and glance feels like a battle for control. It’s haunting, beautifully shot, and impossible to shake off. Little Trouble Girls gets under your skin and stays there — not loud or flashy, just quietly devastating.

Compact, grimy, and straight to the point — Railroaded! is a tough little noir that doesn’t waste a frame. Anthony Mann takes a pulpy story about a framed man on the run and turns it into a sweaty, claustrophobic exercise in tension. For a low-budget picture, it looks fantastic; every shadow feels alive, every room ready to choke on its own smoke.

The film runs on pure attitude — everyone sweats, snarls, and double-crosses their way through a plot so cynical it almost folds in on itself. You can already see Mann’s style taking shape: that mix of moral doom and visual precision he’d later perfect in his Westerns.

It’s rough around the edges, sure, but that’s part of its charm. Railroaded! moves fast, hits hard, and leaves just enough grit under your fingernails to remind you where it came from.

Italian horror never did subtle, and Zombie Flesh Eaters is no exception — but that’s exactly why it works. Lucio Fulci takes Romero’s undead idea, ships it off to a Caribbean island, and swaps social commentary for maggots, machetes, and magnificent decay. It’s sweaty, sunlit horror that feels exotic, grimy, and gloriously gross.

The acting’s as ropey as ever for Italian horror — all stiff delivery and post-dubbed voices — but you can tell they threw real money at it. The gore, the makeup, and that wild underwater zombie-versus-shark scene all look incredible for what’s basically pulp cinema. Fulci might revel in trash, but he makes it look expensive.

The result’s pulpy, grisly, and weirdly beautiful. Every squelch, scream, and eyeball puncture lands with purpose. It’s nonsense, sure — but the kind of nonsense that gets under your skin and stays there.

Few debuts land as confidently as Cronos. Guillermo del Toro’s first feature is a melancholic horror — a gothic fairy tale about time, decay, and the quiet sadness of wanting to live forever. It’s elegant, strange, and full of sympathy for it’s monsters; the kind of horror that makess you sigh more than scream.

The plot’s simple enough — a clockwork scarab that grants immortality — but del Toro gives it real weight. Faith and machinery blur together here: salvation made from cogs, gears, and a little blood. Federico Luppi brings warmth to a role that could’ve been pure grotesque, while Ron Perlman adds dark comedy as a thuggish heir who couldn’t care less about the myth, only the money.

Still, it’s the bond between Jesús and his granddaughter Aurora that gives it heart. She’s the film’s conscience — silent, innocent, and quietly devastating. Cronos might not be perfect, but it’s rich with atmosphere and feeling. You can already see the filmmaker del Toro would become — one who knows monsters aren’t evil, just heartbreakingly lonely.

It’s all a bit bonkers, but that’s part of the charm. The Amityville Horror sits somewhere between supernatural thriller and domestic meltdown, with enough psychological unease to keep it interesting. The story of a family haunted by their new home’s bloody past feels familiar now, but there’s a raw conviction here — the sense that everyone involved really believes the American dream’s gone sour.

James Brolin goes convincingly off the rails, Margot Kidder does her best “Lois Lane meets haunted housewife,” yet somehow ignores the only character with instincts — the dog. Meanwhile, Rod Steiger’s terrified priest battles clouds of flies and divine interference in scenes that somehow make the house feel genuinely cursed.

It’s dated, overwrought, and occasionally absurd, but its hysteria and sincerity give it power. Unlike The Conjuring and its glossy descendants, this one actually feels possessed — by guilt, paranoia, and 1970s furniture.

Cinematic folk horror at its finest, Witchfinder General burns slow but leaves scars. What starts with a flicker of feminist curiosity about witch-hunting hysteria soon hardens into something bleaker — a vision of England where power and cruelty go hand in hand. It’s grim, grounded, and all the more powerful for it.

Vincent Price is superb as Matthew Hopkins, less a cartoon villain and more a petty, joyless functionary of evil. Ian Ogilvy and the rest of the cast keep pace, their quiet restraint making the bursts of violence land harder.

Shot with eerie beauty by Michael Reeves and cinematographer John Coquillon, every hill and village feels steeped in dread. It’s one of the defining works of British folk horror — a film that shaped everything from The Wicker Man to The Witch, and still feels horribly relevant in its cruelty.

A Sapphic, vampiric, satanic folk horror that also doubles as a nunsploitation public information film — Alucarda is a fever dream only the 1970s could have produced. It feels as if Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ken Russell joined forces to out-blaspheme one another. Blood gushes, nuns shriek, and somewhere amid the hysteria is a warning about what happens when passion and faith collide.

Director Juan López Moctezuma shoots the convent like a pressure cooker for repression — a place where innocence curdles into guilt the moment desire appears. The friendship between Alucarda and Justine starts as tender and ends in possession, exorcism, and mass hysteria. It’s less about Satan than what society does to women who dare to feel too much.

Every frame drips with candles, crucifixes, and chaos. The acting swings from hypnotic to hysterical, the imagery from grotesque to gorgeous. Uneven, lurid, but shot through with conviction, Alucarda is the perfect mix of pulp and provocation — proof that when repression and religion share a roof, the devil hardly needs to knock.

A calm but cutting look at oppression, The Round-Up is quietly brutal in its precision. Miklós Jancsó turns a sun-scorched plain into a theatre of control, shooting it so it feels both beautiful and punishing. Inside the camp, cruelty unfolds in slow, ritualistic loops — violence reduced to routine, humanity to gesture.

There’s barely a plot to follow, but that’s the point. The film is all mood and movement, power and repetition. The camera glides gracefully but never kindly, its beauty as merciless as the regime it captures.

Cold and distant, yes, but that detachment gives it real weight. You don’t watch The Round-Up to be entertained; you watch it to see power stripped bare. Beautiful, punishing, and still painfully relevant, it’s a film that lingers like heat on stone.

The Child aims for gritty social realism but never quite gets its hands dirty. Everything looks too neat, too staged — the kind of poverty you could wash off between takes. For a story about people living rough by a river, the cast seem suspiciously well-scrubbed.

The Dardennes fill the film with long, wordless stretches of walking and drifting that promise meaning but mostly test patience. What should feel raw immediate plays more like filler dressed up as art. There are flashes of something stronger — a modern Dickensian tale of hardship and redemption — but the film never digs deep enough to make it land.

The acting’s fine, the production’s fine — and that’s the problem. Earnest and polished, sure, but strangely bloodless. You can see why it impressed the festival crowd, yet it left me cold.

Absolute nonsense, but incredible fun — House of Dark Shadows is pure pulp horror chaos. It tears through plot, tone, and logic like a bat in a belfry, leaving behind a trail of fog, velvet, and fake blood. Overstuffed, overwrought, and oddly self-satisfied — yet that’s exactly what makes it work.

Everything teeters on the edge of madness. The acting’s all over the place, the sets look borrowed from a haunted wax museum, and the editing feels done with a stopwatch. But it’s never dull — not for a second.

Messy, loud, and weirdly charming, it’s the perfect kind of nonsense: the sort that knows exactly what it is and goes for it anyway. If pulp horror is a guilty pleasure, this one sinks its teeth right in.

Something strange was clearly in the water in 1970s Britain. Continental filmmakers flocked here, drawn to the post-swinging cities and haunted countryside. Few caught that mix of decay and counterculture better than Jorge Grau in The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. With an outsider’s eye, he turns Britain’s green fields and grey skies into a backdrop for doom.

It’s cheap, cheerful, and horribly dubbed — Ray Lovelock sounds halfway between a rebel and Michael Caine — but it’s also full of energy and invention. Once the corpses start rising, the gore comes fast and wet, the camerawork bold and atmospheric. Grau balances pulp thrills with environmental paranoia and post-’60s cynicism, creating a grimy bridge between Romero’s Night and Dawn.

The acting’s wooden and the dialogue laughable, yet it hardly matters. Beneath the scrappy chaos beats a film alive with sly ideas and strange intent — a European riff on British horror that sees the country more clearly than many of its own filmmakers ever did.

The Grissom Gang should’ve been a bullet of pulp fiction, but it misfires into something just plain nasty. For all its sweaty energy and Aldrich’s knack for chaos, it’s hard to care about anyone on screen. Everyone’s either awful, stupid, or both, and Kim Darby’s supposed leading role is written so thin you could trace through it.

It’s not short on time — just short on reasons to care. At over two hours, it still feels half-baked. The tone lurches between grim and grotesque, like Bonnie and Clyde remade after a bad night’s sleep.

Still, credit where it’s due: the final shoot-out is a gloriously unhinged bit of filmmaking. For five wild minutes, the film finally earns its hysteria — before collapsing right back into the mess it always was.

A man exposed to radiation begins to shrink — a daft idea on paper, but The Incredible Shrinking Man turns it into genuine horror. Under Jack Arnold’s sharp direction, the film makes fear itself the monster. No aliens, no mad scientists — just an ordinary man disappearing while the world around him grows hostile.

Arnold’s craftsmanship is remarkable. The 1950s effects still look convincing: clever angles, oversized sets, and pure invention make every room feel like a trap. The cat attack is domestic horror at its finest — absurd, tense, and oddly tragic. You believe every second of it.

What lingers is the psychology. This is a man shrinking in every sense — pride, power, purpose. Seventy years later, it still stings. And that final monologue — calm, cosmic, quietly devastating — turns pulp into poetry, ending on a note that’s small, infinite, and unforgettable.