Had the Tom Cruise-led revamp of The Mummy not crashed and burned at the box office upon its release in 2017 then we’d be seeing, or more correctly not seeing, a very different Invisible Man. In an optimistic strategy from Universal Pictures – in their bid to compete with fellow juggernauts Marvel and DC –…
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John Krasinski returns to direct the follow-up to his 2018 box office monster A Quiet Place, although he won’t actually be taking any screen time on this outing. That will be left to his wife Emily Blunt, who is once again on the run from noise-sensitive aliens with her two kids in tow. The highly…
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What a strange little arthouse horror flick Koko-di Koko-da is. What starts out as a relatively straight-forward tale of a once-happy family trying to maintain a sense of worth before breaking down entirely, quickly descends into an experiment of madness, one that is often repetitive and unlikeable but no less inherently fascinating. The aforementioned once-happy…
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There is good reason Stephen King’s story of It has endured for decades. Amongst his best work, the famed horror author has always been strongest when he’s sketching elegant parallels between fight and flight. Sure, that’s been done to death in modern cinema, and the dynamic between the two states has been mined by horror…
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Just as much of a surprise as the delightfully twisted original – 2017’s Happy Death Day – Happy Death Day 2U is revelatory not because it improves on its predecessor’s horror temperament, but because it completely bypasses the slasher genre trope and cements itself firmly within the grounds of science-fiction. Given how much fun writer and director…
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When you think of zombie comedies, it’s difficult to look beyond the witty brilliance that is Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004). Whilst we’ve had our share of interesting takes on the walking dead in the years since, the arrival of Anna and the Apocalypse stands as the choreographed high-kick the genre needed. Not…
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Trick: The 2018 incarnation of Halloween acts as a direct continuation of the 1978 original, essentially wiping out all seven sequels (and the two Rob Zombie-helmed revisions) that succeeded in the years since. Treat: It’s good. Like really f***ing good! After surviving the maniacal clutches of psychotic killer Michael Myers forty years prior, Laurie Strode…
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Before Truth or Dare even begins, you know exactly what kind of movie you’re about to see. Hoping to be some sort of new-era Final Destination, but failing miserably in the process, Truth or Dare follows every beat you expect it to, and it’s in this predictability that the film succeeds in being a massively entertaining ride for all the…
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Even when working off a plot device that doesn’t exactly test the limits of originality, a clever script and utter dedication from its workers can transform the familiar to something beyond our expectations. Such is the case with A Quiet Place, an impossibly eerie chiller that presents civilisation as a fallen project, and those who…
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Spoilers for the first two seasons of Stranger Things follow. Read on at your own risk! Or just watch the show first. It’s seriously very good. It was just last year that Netflix introduced the world to Stranger Things, a science-fiction serial with a fond appreciation for Eighties pop-culture. Clever, scary and heart-warming, the series…
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Beginning its streaming season on the rather appropriate date of Friday the 13th, Netflix’s nasty, bloodied The Babysitter proves a suitable entree for the feast that is the Halloween film season. Playing with the conventions of an 80’s style slasher whilst simultaneously maintaining an air of modern self-referential wit, McG‘s splatter comedy is a quick…
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As varying subsets of the horror genre have forged ahead in 2017 as some of the year’s biggest successes (Split, Get Out and It remain three of the most fruitful ventures), it only makes sense that the slasher genre attempt the resurgence it so desperately deserves. It simply isn’t enough however to let a film…
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Returning to the genre that arguably brought him to fruition, Gore Verbinski’s (The Ring) A Cure For Wellness is a decidedly morbid slice of cinema that revels in its own jarring weirdness. Here’s a film that has considerable monetary backing (something of a surprise for a particularly eerie horror experiment) yet comes off more like…
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2012’s Prometheus marked the beginning of a franchised prequel to Ridley Scott’s original Alien, not only taking fans back to the origins of this iconic sci-fi franchise, but diving deeper into the meaty philosophies such a concept brings, finding purpose with the motif of creation. The introduction of synthetic android David (Michael Fassbender) emerged as…
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Outcast, originally a comic published by Image Comics and created by Robert Kirkman and artist Paul Azaceta, is another Robert Kirkman TV creation that is slowly taking the world by storm. It may be a TV show that has a much smaller scale than Kirkman’s The Walking Dead series, but hey, even I remember watching…
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A delightfully nasty horror movie that draws on real-life inspiration, Lake Bodom hopes to be more than just a Friday The 13th-type slasher, in large part to its true crime connection, but ultimately can’t overcome its conventionality – not that there’s anything wrong with that. What still remains one of Europe’s greatest unsolved mysteries, the…
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After spending the better part of two years playing musical chairs with the release schedule, Rings arrives with a considerable thud to remind us how unnecessary certain sequels are. Presenting a messy storyline that wants to both adhere to the formula of Gore Verbinski‘s (supremely superior) 2002 original The Ring and place its own stamp on…
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Halloween is right around the corner, so it’s time turn off the lights and scare yourself silly with The Iris’ list of new and upcoming horror games.
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Scares were flat when Stiles White made his directorial debut with 2014 film Ouija, a supernatural horror which got by commercially on its formulaic, same-same structure – and the release date being Halloween – but ultimately faltered in the face of superior genre films released that in the same year. Nothing about Ouija was particularly…
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Let us take a trip back to a simpler time. The year is 1999. Bluetooth technology was officially announced, MySpace was released on the internet, people were in the grips of Y2K hysteria and a few critics actually thought Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace was a good film. It was a year of changes…
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Apparently we live in a world where members of boybands decide that writing and starring in a post-apocalyptic zombie filled cowboy shoot-em-up Western is a good idea. Initially when I saw the trailer for this film I had a little optimism that it could be one of those “so bad it’s almost good” type of…
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Richard Kuipers, Programmer of the “Freak Me Out” program strain for Sydney Film Festival preceded a recent screening of The Eyes of My Mother with a fairly apt description: “the point where extreme art house and extreme horror meet”. While art house may outweigh horror here, Kuipers primed viewers correctly, Nicolas Pesce disturbing feature playing…
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In an assault on horror, popular critic and academic Morris Dickstein wrote that the genre had become a “routinized way of playing with death, like going on the roller coaster”. It’s not impossible to see where his criticisms are founded, given the whole genre has been so formulated; mathematicians have actually developed a generic horror…
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Horror Movie Campout is Australia’s first horror movie festival and possibly the scariest event to ever hit Sydney. Horror Movie Campout (as the name suggests) is a totally immersive, horror, overnight camping experience to be held on Saturday the 12th of March, in the eerie parklands of Mount Penang on the Central Coast. Campers will…
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The director of the classic Australian horror film Wolf Creek is bringing new horror film The Darkness to audience this May. The Greg McLean-directed film stars Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, Matt Walsh and Jennifer Morrison and centers on a family that returns home from a trip to the Grand Canyon – only to bring a malicious supernatural force along…
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After the lackluster Annabelle last year, fans of the 2013 supernatural-horror The Conjuring have been anxiously waiting to see what Director James Wan would do for the direct sequel, The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Poltergeist. Now, we get to a glimpse at what’s in store as the original’s stand-outs, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return…
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Another entrant in the found-footage genre of horror that might have reached its expiry date. The Gallows would have had to do something exceptional (and exceptionally different) to tear it apart from the usual suspects. This all started with Blair Witch Project, reprised by the Paranormal Activity franchise, and many many others that never saw…
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Making the third film in the Insidious series a prequel was the smartest move this franchise could have pulled; a respectable decision that could completely be overshadowed if a fourth one is ever released. Cutting the franchise off as a trilogy would be a good idea; the second Insidious was underwhelming and came nowhere close…
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Whatever your thoughts on the Human Centipede film series, you’re going to be hard-pressed finding a horror movie as unique and extreme in concept as Tom Six’s trilogy. From the first film, bound to become a cult horror in 2010, to what is said to be the final entry in the series, Human Centipede III,…
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Cinema Nova in Carlton and Yah Yah’s Collingwood in Melbourne are set to host Monster Fest, a 10 day marathon dedicated to cult horror movies. Running from November 20-30, the two venues will be hosting over 40 films, trivia nights, master classes, Q&A’s with film directors and parties. Films on offer include the follow up to the…
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