Film Reviews by griggs

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.

A murder, a seaside fortune-teller, and five conflicting accounts of what really happened — The Woman in Question plays like a Rashomon-style mystery before Rashomon even arrived. It’s a post-war British noir that can’t decide if it’s a police procedural, melodrama, or social satire, but it’s far too curious to be dull.

Jean Kent is terrific as the maybe-innocent, maybe-vicious woman at its centre, giving the story real pulse even when the tone wobbles. I was relieved to learn there’s actually a plot-based excuse for Dirk Bogarde’s dreadful attempt at an American accent — though the film would’ve worked better with a more engaging actor in the detective’s shoes instead of a bland narrator. You can feel the class divide bubbling beneath the dialogue: clipped vowels, hard stares, and that polite post-war tension Britain does so well.

It’s an odd, uneven film — clever, dry, and occasionally brilliant — that never quite finds its footing but never loses your interest either. For all its uncertainty, it remains a brisk, stylish curiosity from a time when British cinema was just learning to loosen its tie.

Ridley Scott’s career has always been a duel between brilliance and mediocrity — for every Alien or Blade Runner, there’s an Exodus: Gods and Kings or Robin Hood that barely make a mark. So it’s a real surprise that his first film, The Duellists, is such a knockout.

The setup’s simple: two French officers get into a petty argument and spend the next fifteen years trying to kill each other over it. Keitel, Carradine, and most of the cast skip the fake accents and play it straight, which works — it’s just a shame Cristina Raines decided otherwise. Scott directs like a man with something to prove. The cinematography’s gorgeous — all candlelight, mud, and morning mist — clearly inspired by Barry Lyndon, but with dirt under the fingernails. The duels are tense, dirty, and feel genuinely dangerous.

What really hits is how the story exposes masculine pride for the hollow nonsense it is. Beneath all the uniforms and etiquette, it’s just ego and stubbornness dressed up as honour. Stylish, sharp, and quietly devastating — Scott came out swinging, occasionally looking back.

Few wartime films wear their sentiment as proudly as Mrs. Miniver, and that’s part of the charm. It’s completely sincere — the sort of film where every cup of tea and stiff upper lip counts as quiet heroism. Greer Garson holds it all together with warmth and dignity, giving the Blitz a human face without tipping into melodrama.

For all that sincerity, it’s probably the most effective bit of wartime propaganda ever made — all the more impressive since it was filmed entirely in the US, save a few early exterior scenes. Beneath the polished Hollywood gloss are sly digs at Hitler’s ego, his vegetarianism, and that famous moustache. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a perfectly polite insult.

The speeches swell, the emotions are tidy, but it still works. Mrs. Miniver sells courage, decency, and quiet defiance without apology — proof that even propaganda can be beautifully done.

Werner Herzog’s early films always feel like he’s testing how much madness an audience can take before walking out. This one’s no different. He gathers an all-dwarf cast in a remote institution where chaos slowly takes over — cars spin in circles, chickens run riot, and laughter turns to screams. It’s anarchic, strange, and hard to look away from.

There’s something compelling about watching order collapse, even if it’s never clear what Herzog’s after — human nature, power, or just striking images.

Even Dwarfs Started Small is more curiosity than crowd-pleaser. It’s ugly, absurd, and oddly poetic in that singular Herzog way. I wouldn’t hurry to rewatch it, but it’s impossible to forget.

During a high-adrenaline caving trip, six women find themselves trapped underground after a sudden rockfall seals their only escape. The Descent takes that simple premise and pushes it to the limit, turning claustrophobia into a weapon — every crawlspace tighter, every breath harder to take. Twenty years on, the once-cutting-edge terror feels more familiar — a kind of horror imitated so often it’s started to show its age.

The first half — before the monsters appear — is the most compelling and nerve-shredding. The tension builds naturally and the panic feels real. But once the creatures arrive, the film loses that delicate edge. What starts as psychological and primal gives way to jump scares and gore — effective for a moment, then gone, like echoes in a cave.

It’s easy to see why The Descent made such an impact at the time: it’s visceral, nasty, and beautifully shot. Yet revisiting it now, it feels oddly tame. The scares no longer burrow under the skin, and the shock tactics carry less weight. I watched the original UK cut with its bleaker ending — the one that lets the darkness win — and it fits. The Descent is a reminder that cinema, like the caves it explores, can thrill you and wear you out in the same breath.

For a so-called “revisionist western,” this one still feels a bit conflicted. A Man Named Horse wants to show cultural respect, but it never fully escapes the sense of an outsider looking in. Richard Harris throws himself into the role of an English aristocrat captured by a Sioux tribe, slowly earning his place among them. It walks a fine line between sincerity and spectacle.

The rituals are filmed with care, and there’s genuine effort to portray something deeper than the usual cowboy clichés. Still, it feels slightly exploitative — maybe because there’s no real acknowledgment or thanks to the Sioux nation for what the film takes from their culture. The intentions are good, even if the execution wobbles.

I came across it thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s recommendation, and I’m glad I did. Fascinating, flawed, and very much of its time — a western trying, and only half succeeding, to grow up.