The Daily Scoundrel

I’m a real sucker for vintage horror anthology flicks. There was a veritable raft of scary gems produced by studios like Amicus and Hammer during the 1960s and 70s including titles like The House That Dripped Blood, Tales From the Crypt and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. These portmanteau films comprise a selection of supernatural [...]

Gangs in movies these days are far too cool for their own good, with their spotless sports wear, complicated hand signals and Shakespearean dialogue like “Suck on this you bitch ass trick”. In fact this piece of dynamite dialogue from 1993’s Menace II Society pretty much sums up cinema’s current depiction of gang members. They’re [...]

Sitting in with the lady, we decide at half 10 to start watching Happy Feet.  It’s a film that… well, one I knew pretty much nothing about.  It’s about a dancing penguin – that’s about as much as I’d gathered.  Lady’s dad said she’d love it, which, since we tend to share pretty much the [...]

A first date is all about showcasing your best qualities, your good side. For many a person a trip to the cinema or watching a film at your house is the perfect situation in which to show how cultured you are whilst essentially sitting in the dark, eating snack food and not talking. But [...]

I’ve a tinny of Double Dutch on the  go for this.  Which should be quite apt when writing about football hooliganism flick The Firm – at least, it would be if it were one of those inexplicably small 80s lager cans that crops up so frequently in the movie.  Except, really, it’d probably be close [...]

Bloody Hell, where to start with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist? It is perhaps the most intense, unrelenting piece of film making since Gasper Noe’s Irreversible, which is quite a feat. What the majority of film goers might find especially difficult about Antichrist is that it does not fall easily within a particular genre, at no [...]

The third instalment of genre pioneer George Romero’s ‘Dead’ series Day of the Dead is a fantastically grubby movie positively swimming in muggy greys, blues and other assorted autumnal tones. Romero himself has gleefully described fans of the film as ‘trolls’. In that case troll-me-up George!
This jaw dropping display of high camp, unutterable dread, political [...]

District 9’s been coming under a bit of flack lately for its alleged racism towards the Nigerian populace of its unspecified-time-in-the-future Johannesburg.  The lady and I plodded along to see it earlier today, and there’s certainly a talking point there.  It’s relevant, though superceded by the utter lunacy of the rest of the film.  Neill [...]

This is interesting.  I’ve not seen District 9 yet, though I do intend to in the near future, as I hear from multiple sources that it’s very good.  But over the past couple of weeks, a number of people have been questioning the film’s depiction a Nigerian population as bloodthirsty and inhuman.
Nicole Stamp’s been key [...]