Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

When a film comes into the world with the kind of uncommonly bad reputation as The Grudge, 2020 edition – simultaneously a remake of and sequel to the 2004 film of the same name, and the 13th feature film in a multi-national horror franchise with at least three different continuities – the obvious first question […]

A review requested by Yourself, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! How to go about discussing the 1964 Kwaidan? It’s historically important as the first Japanese horror movie to […]

Rings is the horror-movie equivalent of stumbling across a decade-old photo of yourself wearing God knows what kind of fashion disaster. Of course you recognise yourself; it’s so recent that you can easily remember that outfit. And yet it feels impossibly long ago that that was the style, that this once seemed normal. So it […]

A review requested by Andy P, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. “It’s like a dream turned into imagery” is a sentiment that I confess to relying on much too lazily and much too often, but after seeing Horrors of Malformed Men, I might have to retire it. […]

A third review requested by Sara L, with thanks for contributing three times to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I expect that some of my loyal readers will be surprised to learn that it is only now, in the year 2016, that I’ve finally seen The Ring. There are reasons for this: […]

Natalie Dormer has an interesting face. I don’t necessarily mean to say that she’s enormously attractive, though of course she is, in an unconventional way. That “unconventional” makes the difference – the shape of her head is flatter than you’d expect from a Hollywood-type star, and that pushes her features together in an unusual way, […]

There us a great deal to admire around the largely French-made Turkish-language film Mustang. It scores two major coups even before you start watching it: it’s a study of adolescent female psychology and sexuality in a cloistered Turkish family, which is rare enough; and it was directed and co-written by a Turkish woman, Deniz Gamze […]

Daiei Film’s third and final film centered around yokai, 1969’s Along with Ghosts (a very unlovely title, but the literal translation isn’t much better), is certainly the weakest of the three. And the least centered around yokai. In fact, while 100 Monsters would be hollowed out to almost nothing without having the paranormal entities covered […]

Daiei’s second yokai film in 1968, which is most readily found in English under the title Spook Warfare, and with the implication that it came out first (the actual title is much closer to “great yokai war”, which would eventually be used in the Western distribution of a different film 37 years later), is a […]

October at Antagony & Ecstasy means weekends dedicated to classic horror films. This year, rather than tackle a franchise, I’ve decided to have two little series running in tandem, one on Saturdays and one on Sundays. The Saturday series I’ve picked is thanks entirely to the fun I’ve had in the past year reviewing a […]

The best thing to do with complex topics, I have found, is to ease into them simply. So: House. This is, apparently, what you get when an experimental filmmaker, Obayashi Nobuhiko, who turned to making TV commercials to make ends meet, was given the chance by a big studio to direct what it hoped would […]

There are enough reasons to like The Woman in Black and virtually no reasons to love it; but the one that got me the most is its awareness of history. The fourth feature film released by the newly-resuscitated Hammer Films, and only the second to get an actual push, after the 2010 revisionist vampire picture […]