THE PURGE. (2013) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE PURGE. (2013)

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY JAMES DEMONACO.

STARRING ETHAN HAWKE, LENA HEADEY, EDWIN HODGE AND RHYS WAKEFIELD.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I thought this film was a good idea, well-executed. Typically, however, I am at odds with other reviewers who hated it.

Rotten Tomatoes describes the film thusly: “Half social allegory, half home-invasion thriller, The Purge attempts to make an intelligent point, but ultimately devolves into numbing violence and tired clichés.” It’s certainly violent but I liked the idea behind it.

Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey play James and Mary Sandin, an ordinary- though wealthy- married couple with two kids who live in a nice neighbourhood in Los Angeles.

It’s a gated community they’ve been able to afford to live in due to Dad’s success selling security systems, including to their rich neighbours. (This will become important later…)

They live in an America of the near future. A new political party called the New Founding Fathers of America has been in power for the last eight years.

The economy is going great guns and unemployment and crime are at an all-time low. Some say this is because of ‘the Purge,’ one of the government’s more interesting policies…

How does it work? One night a year, all violent crime is nice and legal. You can go out and smite your enemies, or you can stay home comfortably with your security system activated and sit it out.

Just put out your Purge flowers to let fellow Americans know that you support this night of letting off steam and getting rid of the country’s poor and marginalised ‘useless eaters,’ as a certain dictator might have put it, who are nothing but a drain on society…

Anyway, on this particular Purge night, James and Mary secure their beautiful home and bed in for the duration. (There’s already an uninvited guest in the house no-one but their teenage daughter Zoe knows about. All will be revealed in due course…)

Outside, the night of chaos and terror has begun. But the Sandins aren’t too worried. This is a nice neighbourhood and their neighbours are all well-to-do and moderate, sensible people like themselves.

Without the consent of the Sandin parents, their young son Charlie has disabled their security system and allowed a complete stranger into the house, an injured and bleeding black man being pursued by active Purgers. (He’s not Zoe’s boyfriend, that’s a different situation…!)

James and Mary are appalled, especially when a bunch of masked marauders turn up and demand ‘their’ prisoner back so they can kill him. If the Sandins don’t hand the man over, the masked thugs will break in and kill everyone in the house.

What to do, what to do? Should the Sandins hand over the stranger and stay safe, or should they stand up to these bullies and defend themselves and their home from assault?

It’s an interesting moral question, certainly. Do the easy thing, the smart thing, the safe thing, or do the right thing? They haven’t long to decide…

If you thought the maskless Polite Leader of the Purgers looked super-familiar, it might help you to know that he played Lucas Holden in popular Australian soap opera Home and Away from 2005 to 2008. He’s excellent here as the sinister, smiling psychopath who threatens the family so evilly through their front door camera.

Ethan Hawke is very good at playing Everyman, or the ordinary family man caught up in extraordinary circumstances who has to sink or swim.

In Leave the World Behind (2023), he plays a similar role as the nominal head of a household caught up in an apocalyptic situation. I say ‘nominal’ head of the household because his wife, played by the ever-beautiful Julia Roberts, clearly wears the trousers in that family.

In ‘The Purge,’ James is a weak beta-male who ultimately fails to protect his wife and children from the terrifying home invasion and it’s left to his wife, Mary, to save the day.

I genuinely think this was an interesting premise for a movie, though I don’t know if I’ll watch the multiple sequels, as these are not often as good as the original film. Anyway, we’ll see. The Purge is out now on Netflix, and it’s well worth a watch. Over and out…

WHALEFALL. (2026) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

WHALEFALL. (2026)

BASED ON THE BOOK BY DANIEL KRAUS.

DIRECTED BY BRIAN DUFFIELD.

SCREENPLAY BY BRIAN DUFFIELD AND DANIEL KRAUS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I saw this survival thriller in the cinema over the weekend and for the most part enjoyed it. If you know the basic premise of the film before you go see it, you’ll obviously spend the whole time waiting for the good shit to happen. I didn’t know in advance exactly what was going to happen, only that something was, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Here’s the gist of it, anyway: An American college student called Jay Gardiner goes deep-sea-diving to find the body of his grumpy fucker of an old man who’s selfishly committed suicide-by-ocean, rather than die of the cancer that has him in its grip.

Jay doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going or what he’s doing. What could possibly go wrong? I’ll tell you. He becomes collateral damage in the fight between a giant squid and a massive sperm whale, the silly sausage.

The squid wraps a tentacle around his leg and, lo and behold, Jay, with only an hour of breathable air on him, is dragged into the whale’s stomach along with the squid.

The movie then becomes a race against time. Will Jay make it out before his air runs out…? And will anything his sea-obsessed old man ever taught him come in handy now, at this crucial time…?

The whale is not AI, which is good. It’s actually a thirty-foot animatronic head and physical silicone-and-foam sets for the stomachs, plural, as the sperm whale has four. I was completely invested in Jay’s struggle to stay alive inside Moby Dick, Jonah-style.

In Jay’s attempts to escape, he accidentally at one stage ends up in the stomach with the gastric acid so strong it causes his flesh to start dissolving, which is completely icky.

He has to then try to get into one of the slightly-less-dangerous-to-humans chambers. Although, in fairness, there’s no part of the inside of a whale that’s, like, completely safe for humans…

Moving onto Mitt Gardiner, Jay’s dad, for a minute, it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that he and Jay have a horrible relationship. Jay is so traumatised by his death- or, more likely, by their interactions with each other in life- that he can’t even read his dad’s personalised suicide note to him.

Mitt’s wife and daughters seem okay with him, so he was clearly one of those asshole fathers who leave their daughters to grow up their own way or be brought up by their mother but are much too tough on their sons in order to turn them into ‘real men’ like themselves.

He’s the kind of father who’d bang on your bedroom door at the crack of dawn yelling Let’s go, let’s go! in order to force you to join him in some horrible physical activity like going camping or deep-sea-diving or something, whether you want to or not. In fact, he does this in the film.

He’s the kind of dad who would count shouting, scorn, ridicule, contempt and even physical violence among the tools in his parental tool-box.

I love Josh Brolin, the actor playing Mitt Gardiner, and generally find him very attractive, but I have no time for Mitt Gardiner the father. If I were his son Jay, I would leave him in his watery grave, instead of risking my own life to save his crumbling carcass.

The whale’s ultimate end is very sad. Who knew orcas were such jerks? Sob.

However, I love that this film has opened up conversations online about things like whether or not the film is based on a true story or could what happens in the film happen in real life and other great stuff like that. I’ll leave you all to do your own researches…!

After watching Whalefall, I treated myself to the book on which it’s based. I’m not sure if the writer can do a whole series of books about people being trapped in whales the way Steve Alten did The Meg books about the fearsome shark known as the megalodon, but only time will tell. His success with this first film will spur him on, lol.

I much preferred the whale action to the flashbacks to Jay’s interactions with his father. The whale is magnificent and majestic and is the star of this movie. The guy playing Jay, Austin Abrams, comes a close second, though.

He really makes you believe his terror and horror about ending up where he does, and you can also really identify with his attempts to be the son his father wants him to be whilst realising that that’s not always possible and that’s okay too.

Anyway, enjoy the film if you go and see it. It’s visually stunning, and Josh Brolin spends most of it topless to show he’s still got it. If you like that sort of thing…!

THE BROOD. (1979) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE BROOD. (1979)

DIRECTED AND WRITTEN BY DAVID CRONENBERG.

STARRING OLIVER REED, SAMANTHA EGGAR, ART HINDLE AND SUSAN HOGAN.

MUSIC BY HOWARD SHORE.

DISTRIBUTED BY NEW WORLD PICTURES.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

The first time I saw this film (recently, on the horror streaming service, Shudder), I genuinely didn’t have a clue where it was going.

It’s a Canadian psychological body horror film by the man who is probably best known for bringing us The Fly (1986), the ultimate body horror. The closer The Fly gets to its shocking climax, the closer I come to hiding behind the sofa. It’s just so visceral.

While not as visceral as The Fly, The Brood is still blood-and-gutsy enough to repulse/disgust maybe a fair-sized percentage of its viewers. I didn’t see that climax coming so I was probably as shocked as anyone seeing it for the first time in the cinema in 1979.

Beefy hellraiser Oliver Reed, aka Bill Sikes from Oliver! (1968), plays Dr. Hal Raglan, a psychotherapist who runs his own mental facility, Somafree. He is the inventor of a highly dubious form of healing therapy known as ‘psychoplasmics.’

Through intensive role-plays in which Dr. Hal plays a personal part, patients are encouraged to heal from past traumas not only mentally but also somatically. In other words, they manifest their repressed and long-buried emotions through horrible physical symptoms like skin cancers or skin abnormalities.

Why anyone would want to sign up for this deeply disturbing ‘therapy’ is a complete mystery to me. It hasn’t done Dr. Hal’s bank balance any harm at all, however, if his fancy medical centre is anything to go by.

His favourite patient, or ‘teacher’s pet,’ if you will, is Nola Carveth, played by English actress Samantha Eggar. Nola is married with a small daughter, and Dr. Hal is subjecting her to a series of intense role-plays in an attempt to get her to heal from her complicated, abusive relationship with her parents.

In the outside world, Nola’s husband Frank, played by Canadian actor Art Hindle who was also in Black Christmas (1974), is dealing with the impact of his wife’s mental struggles on their five-year-old daughter Candice, also known as Candy. (Candy is a stripper’s name, lol.)

Frank thinks that Nola has been physically abusing Candy on her weekly visits to see her mum in the therapy centre. He threatens to stop all visits by Candy to see Nola.

Then Nola’s parents are brutally and inexplicably murdered by hideous-looking, dwarf-sized ‘child’ assailants. Don’t Look Now, lol…

Then Ruth Mayer, Candy’s concerned teacher, is also murdered by similar child-sized attackers, who abduct Candy and bring her back with them to Dr. Hal’s Institute, from where they appear to have originated.

A seriously disturbed Frank dashes to the Institute, both to get his daughter back and to confront Dr. Hal about whatever the hell he’s been allowing to go on in his therapy centre. What he learns there will turn his stomach…

I won’t give away the ending but, as I said at the beginning, I genuinely hadn’t worked it out. It’s gory and grisly but it’s well worth a watch, despite being a wee bit bonkers in places.

Samantha Eggar is probably the stand-out actor here. In her white dress/robe, she gives me Piper Laurie from Carrie (1976) energy, which is no bad thing.

Art Hindle, who portrays Frank Carveth, plays a similar role in Black Christmas. As the boyfriend of a missing co-ed, he rushes around a lot with lovely hair while wearing a nice heavy winter coat trying to find stuff out.

Just like in The Brood. No offence, but he’s always struck me as the kind of actor for whom good looks kind of take the place of any real acting. Sorry, I know he’s cute and all but that’s just the way I feel.

I feel kind of similarly about Oliver Reed. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore him and I consider him to be every bit as much an English national treasure as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, that’s for starters.

However, I often feel like his sturdy, stocky build and heavy, brooding presence are what got him the television and film jobs as much as any acting ability. Don’t kill me but he can be a tad wooden at times… (I still love him, though!)

The Brood was distributed by New World Pictures, a company founded in 1970 by cult director Roger Corman and his brother Gene. Roger Corman left as his legacy a mighty body of work but might be best known for the eight films he directed that were adapted from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and which came to be known collectively as his ‘Poe cycle of films.’

Anyway, The Brood is streaming now on Shudder. It’s a good opportunity to see a genuine curiosity of an old movie that you might otherwise not get to experience.

I’ll leave you with the words of one reviewer at the time, one Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times: “Perhaps Cronenberg means to make an extreme comment upon the irresponsibility of psychiatrists and parents, but The Brood is so totally sickening it’s an irresponsible work itself.”

I agree with the first part, but maybe not so much the second…

MONSTER: THE LIZZIE BORDEN STORY. (2026) A NETFLIX HORROR SERIES REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS.

MONSTER: THE LIZZIE BORDEN STORY. (2026)

SHOWRUNNER: IAN BRENNAN.

RYAN MURPHY: CO-CREATOR, DEVELOPER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER.

ORIGINAL NETWORK: NETFLIX.

STARRING ELLA BEATTY, VICKY KRIEPS, CHARLIE HUNNAM AND REBECCA HALL.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

Gave her mother forty whacks

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one

(A children’s skipping rhyme)

This eight-part series is the fourth instalment in Ryan Murphy’s and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology series, each one featuring a different serial killer.

The first one, the one about Jeffrey Dahmer the gay cannibal, was absolutely fantastic and very realistic. The second one, concerning the Menendez brothers who murdered their parents, was not as interesting to me personally but still watchable.

The one about Ed Gein, who inspired the movie Psycho and was also known as the Butcher of Plainfield, was good as far as it went but it went off on a couple of tangents.

It included segments about concentration camp guard Ilse Koch, the so-called ‘Bitch of Buchenwald,’ and Christine Jorgensen, the first man to undergo ‘sex reassignment’ surgery. The tangents were interesting but it did make me wonder if the makers of the show were a little short on material…?

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story could have been two episodes shorter, six instead of eight, if the producers had left out the tangents here, of which more later.

The main story concerns Lizzie Borden, the woman who was famously- or infamously- acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother in Falls River, Massachusetts, in 1893. Lizzie was thirty-two years old at the time.

The way Monster tells it, Lizzie wasn’t a monster at all but a shy, sensitive young woman desperately lacking in confidence. She adored the doves she kept in a massive dovecote and the cherry trees in the Borden’s beautiful garden.

Her only friend and ally- and secret lover- is the Borden’s strange and eccentric housemaid, Bridget Sullivan, known as Maggie. Maggie is also having sex with the master of the house, Mr. Borden.

Bridget/Maggie enchants Lizzie by reading to her from a book about Elizabeth Bathory, the ‘Blood Countess’ and Hungarian aristocrat who was a serial killer of the young, attractive women in her homeland. (This is the first tangential storyline.)

Lizzie’s father, Andrew Borden, played here by Charlie Hunnam who was Ed Gein in the last instalment of Monster, is an extremely emotionally detached father to Lizzie. He mourns the loss of his first wife, detests his current one, Lizzie’s ‘wicked stepmother,’ and opts out of family life as much as he can.

His coffin-making business has made him an extremely wealthy man. He has sex with the family servants in his workshop and he seems sexually attracted to his collection of axes, which he uses to chop off the legs of taller ‘clients’ so they’ll fit in their coffins. Oh, and he’s an alcoholic, too. Nice guy…

Lizzie’s stepmother Abby is portrayed as the wickedest of wicked stepmothers. She seizes every opportunity to run her stepdaughter down and call her names such as stupid, useless or ugly.

She shames and humiliates her for her ‘heavy menses,’ which are no-one’s business but Lizzie’s, and, in a fit of rage, she kills Lizzie’s beloved doves. These scenes are deeply distressing.

You’re probably feeling right now reading this what the viewers feel: kill the bitch already! And her bastard of a husband, too! That’s exactly what Lizzie, heavily egged on by Bridget, decides to do. The scenes of murder are almost excessively shocking and gory and not, as they say, for the faint of heart.

How they get away with it is a miracle. Clearly, no-one had heard of forensic evidence back then. There was so much blood in nearly every room in the house, and we’re supposed to believe that Lizzie and Bridget were able to clean away every last little speck of it.

The timeline is non-linear and frequently confusing. One minute, Lizzie is packed and at her front door, about to be conveyed to the police station and from there to the prison where she’ll await trial. In the next scene, she’s back in her own home, holding court and baking cookies for the cops involved in her case. It’s bizarre.

Equally bizarre is the- mercifully short- storyline that sees Bridget the maid cut her hair to resemble Meryl Streep’s Auschwitz do in Sophie’s Choice and get hitched to an elderly frontiers-type bloke who lives in his long johns and could be imagined hocking into the spitoon at the saloon. Jesus Christ. What in tarnation does this have to do with Lizzie Borden?

The second tangential storyline (we touched on Elizabeth Bathory earlier) is the inclusion in the show of man-killer Aileen Wuornos. She was executed in 2002 by the state of Florida, having spent ten years on Death Row there, for the murder of six men she picked up while hitch-hiking. She claimed the murders were self-defence because the men had all raped her or were going to.

In the show, Aileen is obsessed with Lizzie Borden and the murders she committed, and she even goes to stay in Lizzie’s old house, which has become a boarding house you can rent out. In real life, there’s no evidence to support a connection between the two women.

I don’t know whether the producers are trying to pad out their eight episodes with these tangents, or trying to float the idea that Aileen Wuornos and Countess Bathory might be featured in future episodes of the Monster anthology series. (We’ve heard there could be as many as ten serial killers given the Monster treatment.)

I wholehearted agree that both lady serial killers would make great shows, but especially Aileen Wuornos, who had by all accounts a desperately tragic, wasted life.

I also think that Sarah Paulson, who does a stunning job of playing Aileen here, is the obvious choice to play the crude, foul-mouthed but deeply vulnerable murderess in a new Monster series. Aileen deserves her own show, and Paulson is the woman to do it.

Overall, I didn’t love Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, but I didn’t hate it either. It’s worth a watch. I’m looking forward to future series as well, and hope they feature Aileen as well as maybe Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and David Son of Sam Berkowitz. Or even Jack the Ripper. There’s no shortage of possibilities…

SACCHARINE. (2026) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

SACCHARINE. (2026)

DIRECTED, WRITTEN AND CO-PRODUCED BY NATALIE ERIKA JAMES.

STARRING MIDORI FRANCIS, DANIELLE MACDONALD AND MADELEINE MADDEN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

This is the kind of film you know is made by a woman even before you find out for sure. It’s actually the work of the woman who also made Apartment 7A (2024), the decent enough prequel to horror smash hit Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

Saccharine is an Australian supernatural body horror film currently streaming on Shudder. It has mostly female characters and is very much centred around a female topic, that of weight loss in this era of so-called ‘miracle cures.’

Hana is a medical student ‘struggling’ with her weight. I put ‘struggling’ in inverted commas because she looks to be a perfectly normal healthy body weight to me, but it’s obviously the female condition to be endlessly ‘struggling’ against creeping weight gain.

Long story short, Hana is given a ‘miracle’ weight loss pill by a ‘friend.’ Some friend! When she finds the unprescribed mystery pill to be effective, she uses her skills as a medical student to study the pill’s composition.

When she discovers that the pill is mostly composed of human ashes(!!!), she decides to make her own mystery pills(!!!) by- and this is the really mind-bogglingly stupid action on Hana’s part, even stupider than taking a mystery weight loss pill from a friend that could have literally anything in it- burning parts of the corpse she’s studying in class…

The corpse is that of a woman who was very heavy in life. Now she is bald, naked and laid out on a table for the next generation of doctors and researchers to study.

The students working on the cadaver disrespectfully nickname her ‘Big Bertha.’ The film-makers have kindly made her look like Buster Bloodvessel from English ska band Bad Manners…

I must be quite squeamish, because the cutting-up-the-body-and-seeing-what’s-inside scenes made me feel sick. So did the later scenes of binge-eating. Seems like not everything to do with the human body comes all neatly tied up in a perfect bow…

Hana sneaks the odd rib here and there from Bertha and burns it, before swallowing the ashes in pill form. It’s the most shocking abuse of her body but, hey, if she wants to be a tiny bit thinner than before, who are we to argue?

The downside of the weight loss is the haunting of Hana by… you guessed it, Big Bertha. It seems like Bertha appears when Hana’s blood sugar goes below a certain level, and it also appears to be the case that Bertha gets bigger while Hana becomes thinner. Is she taking on Hana’s discarded weight?

Bertha is definitely an evil, harm-doing spectre, as opposed to Casper the Friendly Ghost. It’s really quite depressing from a feminist point of view. Hideously ugly old hags, or even just very old hags, have long formed the basis of a huge swathe of horror movies and stories.

Now we can add hugely fat, bald-headed naked women to that list. Childbirth and pregnancy are already there, with films like the aforementioned Rosemary’s Baby making us fear and dread what’s going to come out of the birth canal after nine months.

Don’t forget menstruation. I sat down to watch the addition to the Ryan Murphy Monster series stable on Netflix last night, The Lizzie Borden Story. I was surprised and a bit disappointed to find that a large part of the first episode was taken up with a chaise longue fatally stained by the lead character Lizzie’s ‘ridiculously heavy menses.’

The poor girl is relentlessly period-shamed by her awful stepmother. Is it really necessary to go on and on about it? I get it that the director is probably trying to show us how Lizzie ended up brutally murdering this woman, but is there anything of ours (of women’s) that isn’t up for grabs in this way…?

Anyway, back to Saccharine. In addition to grievously violating poor Bertha’s right to dignity in death (she was good enough to donate her body to science, after all), Hana is infatuated with a skinny, super-fit personal trainer lady at her gym.

She joins up to this woman, Alanya’s, weight loss programme, but is she destroying her health to be thinner for herself, or to impress the beautiful Alanya…?

Either way, she’s shamefully abusing her body and and her position as a medical student, not to mention disrespecting Bertha and showing us how crazy the desire to be thin can sometimes be, and what kinds of mad lengths some people will go to achieve it. Look at the celebrities who’ve gone a bit mad on the old Ozempic…

I like the backstory of Hana’s skinny mother and shut-in, grossly overweight father, and I would have loved to see it developed more than it was. Our families and backgrounds shape who we are, and this could have been a really interesting area to explore a bit more.

I also love Danielle Macdonald as Hana’s friend and fellow student Josie. She actually acted in a really good Netflix drama called Unbelievable (2019) about a rapist who breaks into women’s homes to carry out his nefarious crimes.

It’s also about how one female victim in particular isn’t believed, and the kind of damage that can lead to in someone’s life. It’s worth checking out if you can.

So is Saccharine, to be fair, and I did appreciate the way the corpses who donated their bodies are eventually honoured in a ceremony in the film, Bertha included, but for me it’ll just be a one-time watch. Some things you just don’t need to see more than once.

THE OUTWATERS. (2022) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE OUTWATERS. (2022)

WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY ROBBIE BANFITCH.

STARRING ROBBIE BANFITCH, ANGELA BASOLIS, SCOTT SCHAMELL AND MICHELLE MAY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I don’t usually like saying bad things about people’s films when I review them, because, as a writer myself, I can appreciate the huge amount of work that goes into something prior to its being put before the public; a film, a book, a song, whatever it is.

And this film is quite obviously a labour of love for one Robbie Banfitch, who did everything for it but write the theme tune, sing the theme tune (a reference to a running gag on comedy sketch show Little Britain!), which makes it even harder to savage it, so I’ll try to be gentle.

I thought the film had a great premise, even though I’m getting fed up with the genre of found footage, which can so easily nowadays end up as ‘thirty Blair Witch knock-offs,’ as warned against by Principal Seymour Skinner from The Simpsons, when he sets the students of Springfield Elementary a photography assignment.

The Outwaters, however, does not, I feel, live up to its initial promise, and disintegrates into a series of cool images that really need a plot to hang them on, but that plotting element could just be what’s missing here.

The basic plot sees Robbie, a film-maker from Los Angeles, head out into the Mojave Desert with his brother Scott and their friends Angela and Michelle. Why? Well, they’re going to shoot a music video starring Michelle, who sings.

The first fifty minutes or so has the four friends doing a bunch of pretty boring stuff before they even get to the desert, like visiting the boys’ mom who clearly hasn’t seen at least one of them for a long time, judging by her tearful reaction. Bad son, eh…?

Only when we’re fifty minutes in does anything resembling horror start kicking off. As the film lasts one hour and fifty, I feel like it may have been a mistake to spend so long on the set-up, for no other reason, it seems, than to be able to include some scenes from it in the hodge-podge of images that come later.

Once they actually get to the desert, a lot of weird, unexplained bloody stuff starts happening to, well, Robbie primarily. It’s completely unexplained to the viewer, who, despite the lengthy set-up, has no context whatsoever for what’s going on.

For example, take the Mojave Desert, which in the past was home to the Mojave tribe of Native American Indian hunter-gatherers. There’s tons of history there. No mention of it in the film, even though the place, a popular destination for the shooting of music videos, must be literally haunted AF.

There are no mentions of any legends or bits of folklore that might give the setting some texture. No-one warns them off going to the desert because of X, Y or Z that might have happened there and make it dangerous for a bunch of civilians to spend time there unprotected.

At least the people in The Blair Witch Project were researching an actual witch in some haunted woods, and we’d seen interviews with ‘townspeople’ who had stories about the witch and the woods to give some back-story to what eventually happens there.

There’s one cool image (I did mention the film’s not short of cool images) of a naked man holding an axe silhouetted against the night sky, but who is he? Is he the ghost of a vengeful Indian? Nope, the desert’s history doesn’t even get a mention.

So who- or what- is he? His appearance signals the start of the weird stuff happening but it’s all very confusing from there. A series of images seen by the light of a torch, and the passing of seemingly several days and nights without any food or water being consumed and the camera being held and operated by Mr. Nobody, apparently.

I love the five donkeys who appear randomly in the film, and the way Robbie puts the microphone in the hole in the rock (nothing comes of it, sadly) and the screaming snakes. I genuinely didn’t know snakes could scream. No, wait, Google says they don’t/can’t. Oh well…

Once I realised the film wasn’t going to explain literally anything, I kind of just wanted it to end, especially as it’s nearly two hours long. I think someone was trying to ‘show, not tell’ and be all, like, ‘less is more’ but the film takes it too far and suffers as a result.

I feel so bad for poor Robbie Banfitch that I can’t say anything nicer about his oeuvre, but, hey, mine is only one opinion. There might be loads of people out there right now clapping and shaking their heads in amazement at how brilliant his movie is. They’re the ones he should be listening to, not me…

This film is streaming now on Shudder.

THERE’S A PIGEON AT MY DOOR: A TINY POEM BY SANDRA HARRIS.

there’s a pigeon at my door

he’s, like, lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in lemme in

me: come on in, little buddy!

pigeon: no

SWALLOW. (2019) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

SWALLOW. (2019)

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY CARLO MIRABELLA-DAVIS.

STARRING HALEY BENNETT, AUSTIN STOWELL, ELIZABETH MARVEL, DAVID RASCHE, DENIS O’HARE AND LAITH NAKLI.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I watched this excellent psychological-slash-body-horror film on horror streaming service Shudder, something we usually sign up to in the months leading up to Halloween. I’ve seen some great films on it, but also some absolute turkeys, make no mistake about it.

Swallow is definitely a woman’s film, though it was directed by a man, and I loved it despite the fact that it’s not without its plotholes.

Haley Bennett does a phenomenal job as Hunter Conrad, a pregnant housewife trapped in a beautiful glass box of a show-house and an unfulfilling marriage.

Her husband Richie is a spoiled brat nepo baby who’s preparing to take over as CEO of his obnoxious father’s Manhattan corporation.

Richie doesn’t love Hunter or even pay much attention to her. One wonders why he married her at all, unless he just wanted a sweet, pretty, compliant and mostly silent wifey to take care of the house and provide an heir to the throne.

His awful parents barely tolerate Hunter, who comes from a non-rich working class background. It’s obvious they think she’s punching way above her weight in this marriage and that she got super-lucky marrying into this wealthy family.

Bored, lonely, depressed, mostly house-bound and dealing with some unresolved trauma in her past, she develops the disorder known as pica: the craving for and/or consumption of non-food objects not normally considered edible. Here’s a list of some of the things it can include:

Sharp objects

Dirt/soil/sand

Ice

Soap

Paper

Hair/wool/other fibres

Paint chips

Glass

Wood

Stones

Metal

Faeces

Vomit

Urine

In Hunter’s case, she starts by consuming ice and marbles and then moves on to swallowing thumbtacks(!), batteries, needles and pins. It’s absolutely stomach-churning and horrible to watch.

The theory behind this bizarre behaviour is that it gives the person swallowing these objects some modicum of control over their own life or body.

Hunter’s life is completely controlled by her awful new ‘family,’ and, now that she’s pregnant, she has the baby taking over the inside of her body as well. Which part of Hunter’s life or body still belongs to Hunter…?

Speaking of the baby, when the doctors remove a frightening amount of objects from Hunter’s intestine, I would have liked to know if the foetus was in any danger from the things her mother was ingesting. After all, the baby eats what the mother eats, right?

We’re told that if the batteries(!) Hunter swallows had leaked their acid in her stomach, she, and presumably, the baby as well, could have been in big trouble. Agreed!

But what about things like the needles and safety pins and the pushpins? Could they not end up perforating your oesophagus on the way down into your stomach? A little more information regarding the possible ill effects of swallowing these objects would have been welcome.

Hunter’s husband and in-laws react extremely angrily and unsympathetically to her plight. They force her into therapy, which isn’t the worst idea. It is revealed that she has a reason in her past to still be traumatised to the present day.

Can Hunter overcome this trauma and be well again? Is the method she chooses to deal with it the right one, or the safest one? And what about the ongoing trauma of being trapped in a deeply unhealthy, controlling and loveless marriage? What can she do about that…?

I like the character of the male nurse, Luay, from the war-torn Syria. At first, he clearly implies that being blown up or shot at would leave Hunter no time to be floating around the place bored and putting non-food objects in her mouth.

Eventually, however, he becomes sympathetic to her plight and may even be instrumental in helping her to reclaim her life and bodily autonomy. By the way, you know the song Louie Louie by the Kingsmen? ‘Luay Luay…!’

Although most of the Shudder reviewers who watched this film declared it to be a success, a lot of them suggested that it be rebranded as a Lifetime movie, a made-for-television film often inspired by true-life crimes or events. That is, because they don’t consider it to be a horror movie.

I disagree. I think the body horror element in the film is extremely strong and powerful enough for this film to be able to proudly call itself a superbly-acted horror offering.

Plus, it shows us the real-life horror of what it’s like to be trapped in a marriage that’s slowly suffocating you and tying you up in knots you can’t get free from. Real-life horror is horror, right?

I’m not one hundred percent sold on the neatly tied-up ending, but I still think this is a film well worth watching. Also, it introduced me to the disorder known as pica, for which I’m grateful as I love learning new things from films.

For those who prefer their horror not to teach them anything because that makes it seem too much like school, don’t worry. They don’t shove it down your throat or anything…

TWO. (2021) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

TWO. (2021)

DIRECTED BY MAR TARGARONA.

STARRING MARINA GATELL AND PABLO DERQUI.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I found this strange Spanish language body horror-slash psychological thriller film on Netflix when I was looking for something else. It’s received mainly bad reviews from what I can make out, some deserved.

It’s a film with an interesting premise that started out all right but just fell apart fairly quickly and the rushed ending is something of a disaster.

David and Sara are two people, unknown to each other, who wake up naked together in a strange place with no memory of how they got there. The main thing they have no memory of, however, is being sewn together at the abdomen after the manner of Siamese twins.

Someone has quite obviously stitched them up, excuse the pun, and deliberately placed them in this position for a reason. For their own amusement or gratification, maybe, as in the Saw or Hostel movies or in Squid Game, or for some other mad reason not immediately known to the couple.

Naturally, they’re a bit panicked, but not as panicked as they should be, really, considering they’ve been sewn together without their knowledge. The seventy-minute film sees them trying to manipulate themselves into standing and sitting (for the purposes of peeing) positions and exploring the room they’re in for clues to their captivity.

A lot of the reviews heap ridicule on the film for allowing David and Sara to move about and/or lie down in positions that shouldn’t be possible given they’ve been stitched together.

Also, where’s all the blood, the agonising pain, the horror they feel as the truth of their situation dawns…? Their reactions are not extreme enough, people obviously feel, for people who’ve woken up in such a nightmare situation.

David and Sara mistrust each other too, as they don’t know if the person they’re now attached to has had anything to do with what’s happened. David is an unlikely male gigolo, who’s been paid by men to have sex with their wives. Sara is married to a jealous, controlling older man, a bit of a mad scientist by profession. Any clues there…?

Is it likely that you’d feel horny at all in such a terrible situation? David and Sara not only feel it, but they actively have sex while stuck to each other. Woman on top, as well. How is it even physically possible, given their situation? You tell me, mate…

The ‘reveal’ at the end is rushed and a bit bonkers and unbelievable. It did, however, do one thing for which I’m thankful. It brought the Bunker Brothers, Chang and Eng Bunker, to be precise, to my attention for the first time.

These were Siamese-American conjoined twin brothers whose existence and condition coined the term ‘Siamese twins.’ They lived very long as well, from 1811 to 1874.

They became rich and famous through the ‘freak shows’ beloved of European and American audiences, became American citizens and even owned slaves up until the Civil War set the slaves free.

They married local sisters (twins as well?) and between them fathered a whopping twenty-one children. Nothing wrong with their reproductive organs, clearly, and the lack of privacy to carry out sexual acts obviously wasn’t a deterrent…

The brothers died within hours of each other in 1874, and their fused livers were preserved in fluid and displayed in a jar in Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum, along with their death casts.

The brothers featured in The Greatest Showman (2017), a film about the early years of the P.T. Barnum and Bailey circus. I hated this film with every fibre of my being and I don’t remember the Bunker Brothers being in it, probably because I’ve tried to blot out all memory of the film.

Anyway, the question of Siamese twins and other of the so-called ‘freaks’ of these unenlightened eras, for example, John Merrick, otherwise known as the Elephant Man, has fascinated people for decades.

The infamous Nazi ‘doctor,’ Josef Mengele, was particularly fascinated by all things relating to twins and I daresay would have been beside himself with glee had a pair of Siamese twins turned up in his examining rooms in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

He is estimated to have studied up to a thousand sets of twins in the camp and a popular rumour, most likely untrue, has him sewing up a set of twins to produce conjoined or Siamese twins.

He was also interested in people with eyes of a different colour to each other, people with dwarfism and people with physical abnormalities. He was responsible for sending the preserved heads and organs of children with the facially disfiguring cancer known as ‘noma’ to various Nazi medical facilities for research purposes after failing to cure them.

It is also not known what the ultimate goals of these medical ‘studies’ were supposed to be. Was he just a madman who would have sewn a cat to a dog purely to view the outcome or had he actually a serious goal in mind? Even if he did, it’s unlikely to have been for the benefit of mankind.

Ironically, people sometimes pretended to be twins in order to get into Mengele’s hospital block, where they were better treated and fed than the other camp inmates. Unfortunately, this was only as long as they were useful to the evil ‘doctor.’

I can’t even describe this man as a ‘doctor’ without putting the word in inverted commas. He made a mockery of ‘First do no harm.’ He doesn’t deserve the title of a respected medic.

Anyway, briefly back to Two, the film that’s brought us together today. I found it an interesting concept, but in all honesty it was poorly executed. The end is a shambles, though the actual end scene is artistic and beautiful.

The images of Siamese twins, including the Bunker Brothers, at the end of the film are enthralling and prompted me to do this deep(ish) dive into the subject of nature’s so-called ‘freaks.’ It was probably the best thing about this film.

Enough said…