Tags: blog, film, horror, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday August 10th, 2025
Picking up where we left off
I've loved Danny Boyle since the start. Literally the start of Shallow Grave, when the sound of Leftfield hits you in the chest and the camera hurtles off down the streets of Edinburgh. What an introduction.
I loved him 1as his career exploded, taking him to Hollywood. I loved him as a couple of critical and commercial duds brought him back from Hollywood.
I loved him even more after his absolutely astonishing made-for-tv not-quite-movies.
So when I went to the cinema to see his ultra-low budget, niche-genre, horror film 28 Days Later it felt like there was something at stake, namely his career. It needed to prove to the wider world, people who weren't already on board the Danny Boyle fan train like I was, that he should be given money to keep on making astonishing films.
And that sense of risk was shot right through the film. It was a film that came out swinging, determined to land punch after punch, knowing this could be the last chance its creators got to be this…this much.
But post 2012 Olympics, I’ve found his work…not bad…worse…uninteresting.
-A tepid thriller - Yawn
-Apple Guy : The Movie - Pass
-Exciting young guys are now old and boring - Err, no thanks.
-Rich people : the TV show - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
-What if : Not The Beatles -Absolutely Not
-The Sex PisFUCKOFF!
I haven’t watched anything of his since Trance. Some of it’s probably good but why would I bother when there’s so much more interesting stuff in the world? And what if it wasn’t good? Do I really want to watch as an artist I deeply love slides into mediocrity. No, I absolutely do not.
Boyle revisiting the world of 28…Later was not something I had any enthusiasm for, like a past-it band touring their seminal album on a re-union tour, why would I want to go back to that? Especially as the Zombie/Infected/Undead genre that 28 Days brought roaring back to life has now been thoroughly flogged to death again.
But that trailer though!
So again I go into a Danny Boyle zombie movie with a sense of trepidation, a worry that maybe this won’t work out, a sense that something is at stake. Because failure here means having to admit it’s over, that we’ve drifted too far apart. I’m risking a part of myself just by watching this movie.
Gloriously, this is Garland & Boyle pushing everything as far as they can, trying to be as fresh as possible in a very stale genre. Boyle, my Danny Boyle, is very much back.
Where to start? Firstly, whilst Garland & Boyle understand the genre, they also understand people. Almost all zombie movies and tv shows since 28 Days… have understood the former but not the latter. So here we get people who behave like people, not walking plot devices. 28 Years Later is largely free of the neo-liberal wet dreams of constant, violent individualism that pervades the Walking Dead shows.
Secondly, it’s a British movie. I mean the Brexit analogy is pretty much thrust upon it by default2 but the cutting in of old British movies, the use of actual historical archery techniques and of course, Rudyard Kipling, gives this a heft and feel that’s unique to the genre.
Visually, there’s been a lot of effort put in to just about everything. The movement of the actors playing the infected is particularly impressive. It’s not just some extras running/shuffling around going “aaarrrgghh”. Shaun of the Dead on FFWD, this is not. The motion of the infected is itself grotesque, disturbing and inhuman.
The most commented on camera technique is the use of a bank of iPhones to get a grungy, Matrix style “Arrow-Cam” effect, which is interesting and fun if not revolutionary. However, there’s a scene in a Happy Shopper that is visually stunning. It’s a situation that’s been done a thousand times before but I’ve never seen it shot like this. Shocking, grotesque and beautiful, it’s moments like this that make the film stand out from the pack.
If I have a criticism it’s that I can’t fully form an opinion on the film until I see its sequel(s). This is very much a Part 1 that ends on a To Be Continued… Which means that whilst you would be hoping that the film would wind itself so tight it explodes at the end, that doesn’t happen here. Instead, the film gently, but emotionally, tapers off into the denouement. Which, in a way, is highly atypical of the genre and another reason this film is a bit special. But it does mean that we’re going to have to wait to find out if the early promise resolves into something truly special.
It will be the first Danny Boyle film I’ve been excited about for a long, long time.
1. It’s worth pointing out that Danny Boyle usually works as a team with writer John Hodge (and later, others) and producer Andrew Macdonald. ↩
2. Mainland Britain almost entirely populated by rage-fuelled psychopaths that the rest of Europe want to stay well away from. This shit writes itself. ↩︎
Tags: blog, film, 2025, horror, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday August 14th, 2025
For everything I long to do
Halfway through this movie, there’s a scene that the entire film is built around. Everything before it is working towards this scene. Everything after happens as a consequence. Its premise is a sequence of artistic expression and communal joy so spectacular that it tears a hole in reality. And the thing is, the film barely explains this to you, you get to experience it.
It is spectacular one of the greatest pieces of pure cinema I’ve seen in a long time. A spine tingling, eye-popping, aural overload of the senses. An absolute bravura piece of film making.
The scale of ambition here is breathtaking. Take the sieged-by-vampires horror genre, set it in the prohibition era deep south, have the main characters deeply morally flawed, deal with the racial problems of the time bluntly and with nuance and, and throw in some of the best musical song-and-dance numbers for years.
None of this should work but the scale of the ambition is eclipsed by the scale of the talent and, quite frankly, the swagger of the film makers. Because there’s barely a single element of this movie that is anything below astonishing. I defy anyone to not, at some point in this movie, fall completely in love with the costumes.
Hell, at one point, even the aspect ratios made me gasp.
If I have one criticism and, sadly, I do, it’s that the film has too many endings. They’re all good ones, and it’s clear that Ryan Coogler had a lot to say and wanted to get it all out. But they end up getting in the way of each other, so none of them end up landing as hard as they should.
It’s the only part of the movie where the ambition is too much. Still I would rather watch a film that tries to do too much rather than one that plays it safe. And there is nothing safe about Sinners, it’s electric.
Tags: blog, film, horror, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday September 13th, 2025
Well Weapon
Sometimes I think I just have to accept a film isn't made for me. The premise of Weapons, revealed in the trailer and, admirably, laid out within the first few minutes of the film, is that one night, at the exact same time, seventeen children from the same class at school get out of their beds and run away, never to be seen again. Only one boy from the class is left.
The implications are obvious: as inconceivable as those events are, it's equally inconceivable that the classes teacher, Justine, doesn't know something about it. Her class is the only thing connecting all those kids.
And so, in the absence of literally anything in the way of explanation or closure, the parents start to lash out, at the school and at Justine. It's an excellent premise: what happens to a town when an inexplicable tragedy occurs? How do they cope with that? It's a perfect theme for horror stories to explore.
Sadly for me, the film isn't interested in exploring those ramifications at all. It does just enough to make a juicy set up, full of tension, and then instead starts to focus on what actually happened that night.
It does a pretty good job of that. It utilises a structure that keeps switching the character that we're following. Building tension to breaking point with one character before switching to another. Releasing the tension a little before building it right back up again and repeating the process.
The sense of dread is palpable, the jump scares are well done and used sparingly, the violence is shocking and gruesome. Everything works really well...until it doesn't.
After a few time-line switches, we start to receive diminishing returns. As the characters get more and more peripheral, it starts to get frustrating. Instead of advancing the plot we're now following characters who matter less and less to the story. One character could be cut completely and it wouldn't make any difference.
When we eventually do snap back to the core characters it's run out of steam and worse, stops making sense. It turns out that what happened that night isn't all that interesting.
Or at least to me. See, I wanted to watch the film that the opening implied we were going to get. I wanted to watch a film about a small town tearing itself apart with grief and suspicion. I wanted to watch a horror with subtext, that gets under your skin and questions your relationships with your community.
What I actually watched was a reasonably well done, gruesome horror story about magic and scary kids1. It wasn't for me.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. VERY MINOR SPOILER: If you find kids scary that is. I, for the record, do not. Which meant that the ending was howlingly funny. My wife and I disagreed with the intentionality of this. She thought it was supposed to be funny, I thought it was inadvertent. It's certainly memorable, I'll give it that.
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Tags: blog, film, horror, 2024
Author: KickingK
Date: Friday May 31st, 2024
Love is a knife with a blade for a handle
A couple who ‘collect’ old, near forgotten Irish folk songs get a lot more than they bargain for when they find a song so old it’s in a forgotten language.
This is deliciously creepy and unsettling. There’s little in the way of shocks or scares, but there is an unrelenting commitment to an ever tightening sense of dread. Little is explained, answers as to what is going on just lead to more questions. It’s grim and nasty and always has a sly grin at the side of its mouth.
The sound design is superb. When ‘the song’ is sung it’s really something, absolute dread chills.
There’s something about the measuredness and intelligence of the film making that makes me believe that there’s a lot of Irish folklore and history that’s gone into the backstory of the film. I can imagine that people who are more knowledgable about this subject will get a lot more out of this than I can.