There’s still some screenings today, but Fantastic Fest 2026 is over for me at least. I had a good festival this year. I didn’t get to watch all the films I hoped to, but it’s hard to be disappointed when I know I’ll see most of them eventually. […]
Kev Dooley’sTerms & Conditions (USA, 2026) was the only short–and the last film–I watched at Fantastic Fest this year and it was a delight. I enjoy translation and summoning based-humor. Fun, genderqueer demons are my favorite demons. And I enjoy seeing ironic, comedic justice done to people who […]
Cyclops (1987) Japan made a good number of direct-to-video horror shorts in the ’80s, and Cyclops is one of the better ones, even though the story is almost incomprehensible. Takamori (Kazuhiro Sano) is obsessed with birth defects, specifically “cyclopia,” where the two eyes fuse together in the womb […]
It’s not meteorological summer here in the Northern Hemisphere yet, but it’s June. It’s hot and my a/c is on. I have been sticky with sweat and sunscreen. I have had my first Arnold Palmer of the season.(And my first Dinah Shore—lemonade with seltzer). It is summer as […]
The past is very present in writer/director Jang Jae-hyun’s Exhuma (South Korea, 2024). There is familial and imperial history reaching back to World War II and even further. And if there are not precisely demons in the film, well, there are things that are close enough.
At Biff Bam Pop, friend of the Gutter Robert A. Mitchell takes a look at the devil in the machine in John Carpenter’s Christine! “In John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) based on the best-selling novel by Stephen King and working off an adapted screenplay by Bill Philips, the devil […]