
Apparently this has been doing the rounds as a “must-see” cult movie for a while, but it’s one that I couldn’t remember hearing about until it was literally shoved into my eyeballs. If I heard of it before and paid it no heed it was probably because it was about The Carpenters and Anorexia, neither of which I have any more than a passing interest in, and because when mainstream critics rave about something being strange that normally means it’s rather dull. I was wrong, and if you haven’t seen this yet either then here is why you should watch it now.
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Tag Archives: gritty realism
The Butcher Boy (1997) is quality Irish strange
The tagline for this is “The antisocial son of an alcoholic father and a bipolar mother grows up in 1960s Ireland”, so forgive me if that and the colour grade on the promo photos meant I went in thinking this would be some overly earnest misery-porn. What we have here is some high-quality bait-and-switch weirdness that simply has to be explored. And, yes, a bit of 60s Ireland misery-porn. Continue reading
Essex Space Bin (2016) Is Amazing

If you ever wanted to know what films Ken Loach would have made if he had been brought up on a steady diet of The Evil Dead and cheap speed on a sink estate in Maldon then do we have a treat for you! Made by the Chelmsford Film Society and distributed by independent film royalty Troma Entertainment, it tackles questions of reality, social degradation, mental health, and quantum physics. Mostly it does it by taking the piss and being cheap as hell, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be groundbreaking in it’s own rights.
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Gold Told Me To (1976) is not that devine

Spooky
This was picked because of it’s title and enigmatic premise. After watching it I found out it was made by Larry Cohen, and then I found it he had directed, written, and produced such genre classics as Q: The Winged Serpent, Maniac Cop, and Black Caesar. He also did The Stuff, which I love but I get why others find a bit tedious. So it’s nice to see where he came from, and how far he had improved.
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