The Big Picture Magazine
It’s become somewhat of a British horror tradition to have a plot based around local country bumpkin-satanist types. Elliot Golder’s found-footage debut The Borderlands, with its unfriendly villagers and sheep-burning teenagers, certainly looks as if it’s going that way. It’s quick to pay homage to Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011) but swiftly skirts the local […]
What’s Your Favourite Scary Movie? Here at The Big Picture HQ, we thought it would be fun to ask some of our regular contributors what their top ten favourite horror movies are. Do you agree with our writers’ choices? Mark Fletcher Horror has been a staple part of my movie watching since I was a […]
The zombie film was, to excuse the pun, a sub-genre that had flatlined at the turn of the century. Movies thrown together by hacks with low budgets and even lower ambitions had consigned the undead to the DVD shelves. What this sub-section of horror needed was an injection of life, and British genre-spanning director Danny […]
We know the drill by now: shaky camera, grainy footage, header – ‘based on true events’ – yes, that’s right, it’s another found footage film! Now a horror staple, this popular subgenre takes its bearings from a nasty little slice of 80’s cinematic controversy: Ruggero Deodato’s simulated snuff film Cannibal Holocaust – a film so successful at […]
Bristol’s Cube Microplex, tucked away off King’s Square close to the city centre, has been banging the drum for Alternative Cinema in all its varied forms for many years. One regular programme entry is the Hellfire Video Club which seeks to screen some of the more esoteric videotape releases of yesteryear for the edification of […]
Beverage of choice for children everywhere, the milkshake is a potent and instantly recognisable American icon: a pillar of blended milk, ice cream and sentiment, offering even the most jaded adult a fleeting taste of youthful abandon. To utter its name alone is to evoke longing for lost innocence, be it Indy (Harrison Ford) reflecting […]
World Film Locations: Glasgow is one of the latest releases in Intellect’s World Film Locations book series. Representing Scotland’s biggest city, it is a book of contrasts, from Glasgow’s kitchen sink social realism by Ken Loach and Peter Mullan to the recent trend for using Glasgow as a set for Hollywood backdrops. Last year the […]
If you look along the shelf of ‘American performing arts student coming-of-age movie’ high school yearbooks, back through time beyond the tans and tooth veneers of Glee and High School Musical, beyond the mullets and leg warmers of Fame, you’ll come eventually to a half-forgotten, suitably geeky, split-frame spectacled 70s gem called Jeremy. It’s one […]
In most accounts of the rise in mainstream popularity of American independent cinema, Wayne Wang’s culturally inquisitive neo-noir Chan Is Missing often serves as a footnote rather than as a prime example, perhaps because Wang arrived too early for the party. 1984 is usually cited as a banner year for American independent cinema, which is […]