It’s called Threads (1984) because of spider webs; do you get it??

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Raggedyman

The Eighties; a period defined by the birth of the blockbuster, a wave of colourful and creative developments in pop music, and the ongoing fear of global annihilation from thermonuclear warfare. Thus it was that national TV services over the globe, starting with The Day After in 1983, decided they could crank out Premium Water Cooler TV by showing everyone how nukes could really mess up your day in one landed in your backyard. So obviously the BBC had to have a crack at it, in an incredibly British way…

Spoiler Warning – a lot of things get wrecked.

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The Disappearence of Flight 412 (1974) is paranoid propoganda for tweens!

Posted on June 24, 2024 by Raggedyman

I cracked this open as it looked like some 70s UFO-Mania hockem, and, on that front, it started pretty well with a lot of men in uniform talking military-sounding things, and had repeated group laughter done with such a sense of exhausted terror that I had to assume the director had the casts loved ones held just off camera and this was take 173.

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Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up And Scold Myself With Tea (1977)

Posted on June 10, 2024 by Raggedyman

As this film was made in Czechoslovakia during the Communist dictatorship, I went in assuming I would miss most of the cultural references within. I have some limited knowledge of Russian Science Fiction of that era, especially Solaris and Stalker, so I know that the genre was often deeply metaphorical, but comedy tends to hinge on the context of its time. I left feeling that I knew nothing more about that part of that then nation’s history, but with a deep awareness that some films are just damn funny and fun to watch.
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Devil De Story (1983)

Posted on May 13, 2024 by Raggedyman

And now for a film that was made in 1983, made almost no impact in it’s native Japan, and is only now doing the round because someone was offered the 16mm print in 2022 and then Marty McFiles spent two years doing a fansub of it. It’s an hour long, it’s got some of the most hilariously realistic disappointing sex scenes in cinema, and it’s a delight of strangeness.
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Bomb City (2017) is a brilliant social drama

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Raggedyman

This film recants the story of the murder of Brian Deneke, a 19-year-old Amarillo, Texas punk killed by a 17-year-old jock in 1997. Directed by Jameson Brooks, produced by Cheldon R Chick, and written by the pair, it’s a deeply evocative look into the immediate events that lead to that situation. It’s both a singular story and a repetitive one (Sophie Lancaster springs to mind), but the film goes beyond a simple reenactment. Continue reading →

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) is heartwrenching and amazing.

Posted on February 8, 2024 by Raggedyman

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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The Butcher Boy (1997) is quality Irish strange

Posted on January 31, 2024 by Raggedyman

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 →

Christmas Evil (1981)

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Raggedyman

People can complain about Christmas themed horror all they want, but it taps into three key traditions. You have the Northern European tradition of telling horror stories at Christmas, the horror genre tradition of taking happy situations and warping them, and the horror movie tradition of ripping off anything succesful. You also have the great tradition of misleading posters, which occasional leaves you with something other than a lump of coal.

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Essex Space Bin (2016) Is Amazing

Posted on November 23, 2023 by Raggedyman

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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Rising Storm (1989)

Posted on October 27, 2023 by Raggedyman

I went into this knowing practically nothing about it, either with it’s original title or AKA of “Rebel Waves”. Given the amount of post-apocalyptic nonsense I watch, and the number of books I read on the subject (like the rather excellent https://pulsestore.net/produit/after-the-world-ends/?lang=en After The World Ends by Claude Gaillard, that I encourage all fans of the genre to check out), that surprised me, but after about 10 minutes I’d worked out why. And for the cynics amongst you it wasn’t because it was yet another low cost Mad Max lite Continue reading →