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The Neuchâtel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival (Nifff) is never afraid to ask questions.

As per tradition, the Swiss genre showcase will frame its annual retrospective through a sociological lens, this year turning its focus to health with a 20-film deep dive cheekily titled Take Care.

“I was struck by an idiom that’s more common in English than in French,” says Nifff artistic director Pierre-Yves Walder. “Telling someone to ‘take care’ can be taken as an order or a veiled threat. At the very least, it feels like an oxymoron, especially when the person being told to do so has little control over their situation. And as always, fantastic cinema provides the perfect space to explore these tension and contradictions between fragility, control, vulnerability and power. That’s where genre thrives!”

‘Coma’

Covering a full century of cinematic malady — exploring how we care for others and ourselves and all the...

Frédéric Hambalek with Anne-Katrin Titze on What Marielle Knows (Was Marielle Weiß): “I love it when a film gives me this devilish grin on my face …”

Frédéric Hambalek’s What Marielle Knows (Was Marielle Weiß), produced by Tobias Walker and Philipp Worm, premièred at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and is a highlight in the Viewpoints program of the 24th edition of the Tribeca Festival.

We soon learn what Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) knows in Hambalek’s somewhat supernatural family drama. After being slapped by a schoolfriend she insulted, the young girl can see and hear everything her parents do all day; whom her mother, Julia (Julia Jentsch), flirts with at work and how her father, Tobias (Felix Kramer), actually behaved during a staff meeting at his publishing job, as opposed to the rearranged facts he dishes...

What does Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) know in Frédéric Hambalek’s somewhat supernatural family drama? After being slapped by a schoolfriend she insulted, the young girl can see and hear everything her parents do all day; whom her mother, Julia (Julia Jentsch), flirts with at work and how her father, Tobias (Felix Kramer), actually behaved during a staff meeting at his publishing job, as opposed to the rearranged facts he dishes out during the family dinner that night about his nemesis, Sören (Moritz von Treuenfels).

What Marielle Knows (Was Marielle weiß), produced by Tobias Walker and Philipp Worm, premièred at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and is a highlight in the Viewpoints programme of the...

The year 2019 was a particularly good year for Brits in Hollywood, culminating in half of the Primetime Emmys heading to the other side of the pond with the likes of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Succession creator Jesse Armstrong winning big.

British and Irish writers have always done well in the U.S. both in television and on the feature side, but the last few years have been particularly kind to those making the 6,000-mile trek to Tinseltown, from The Mentalist and Gotham’s Bruno Heller to Saving Mr Banks and Terra Nova writer Kelly Marcel and Catastrophe co-creator Sharon Horgan.

As such, Deadline is taking a look at the next generation of British and Irish writers who are making waves in the UK and stand a good chance of landing a hit U.S. series.

Kirstie Swain

After working on long-running British dramas including Holby City, Casualty and EastEnders via the BBC Writers Academy,...

Starring Steve Coogan as a billionaire who is literally named “Rich,” Greed cannot be accused of being a subtle movie—but then, these are not subtle times. Reusing a comically raspy, manly baritone from The Trip, and kitted out with a set of absolutely blinding false chompers, Coogan is Sir Richard “Greedy” McCreadie—“King of the High Street,” per an opening exposition-via-YouTube, a flashy fast-fashion magnate obviously modeled on Sir Philip Green, the Topshop chairman notorious for asset stripping and general fat-cat arrogance. In Greed, McCreadie’s teetering empire is signified through flashbacks to Parliamentary testimony covering his shady dealings and reliance on sweatshop labor, intercut throughout the looming hubristic disaster of his 60th birthday weekend. You might groan at the symbolism of a modern-day robber baron throwing a multimillion-dollar toga party, was the concept not in fact directly lifted from Green’s 50th.

Here, the island is Mykonos,...

A weekend getaway goes sour even before the corpses start accruing in “Trespassers,” a good-looking indie thriller that’s diverting, but could have used another script draft or two. Depicting two quarrelsome if hard-bodied couples who find themselves in deep peril at a rented desert home, Orson Oblowitz’s film has a leisurely enough buildup that room should have been made for more fully developed characters. Fine-tuning the pileup of eventual violent crises wouldn’t have hurt, either. The result falls short of being especially credible, let alone memorable. Still, this is a polished genre exercise that provides a decent night’s home entertainment. IFC Midnight is opening it July 12 on screens in New York and Los Angeles, simultaneous with its launch on demand.

A brief prelude leaves us no doubt that the owners of a handsome modernist manse in the Mohave meet a very bad end at the hands of three masked,...

On June, 10, a couple of nights before “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese” dropped on Netflix, I attended an event for the movie following its premiere at Lincoln Center. At the party, I got to sample reactions to the revelation that roughly 10 minutes of Scorsese’s back-to-the-’70s rock doc consists of prankish fake-documentary footage, like something out of a Christopher Guest movie.

It wasn’t hard to gauge the reaction, since in just about every case, when I asked people what they thought about the fakery, that was the very first they’d heard of it. Most of the people I spoke to were wide-eyed with disbelief yet kind of bummed. Over and over, they said that they felt duped, suckered, maybe even a little betrayed. Of the 20 or so people I had conversations with, not one said, “Really? That’s kind of cool!” The...

Ever wonder what really goes into the making of an independent horror film? Charles Band's Full Moon Features will take fans behind the blood-stained curtain for a live look into the making of ten new movies with their "Deadly Ten" initiative, and principal photography is about to begin on the first two films, Halloweed Night: Meet the Weedjies and Necropolis: Legion.

From Blade: The Iron Cross to The Grim Rapper, the making of the "Deadly Ten" movies will be live streamed on the official "Deadly Ten" website beginning this month, with all ten films slated to premiere on February 14th, 2020, on the Full Moon Amazon Prime Channel:

Press Release: Hollywood, June 10, 2019 – Full Moon Features will start principal photography on two of their feature films in their Deadly Ten anthology commencing on June 11, 2019. The Deadly Ten is Full Moon's highly anticipated initiative that sees the studio producing ten original feature films,...

Dull vampire pix were once as ubiquitous as zombie pix are now, but when a good one came along we’d certainly take notice. The predatory Fran and Miriam are a wholly new twist on the ‘Wicked Lady’ highwayman theme — the picture transcends the softcore horror genre with class and style. Fringe director José Ramón Larraz found himself filming in England, and his output outclassed what were passing for Eurotrash horror epics across the channel. How did he do it? The answers become clear in Arrow’s special edition. Although only available in a boxed set, it’s reviewed here separately.

Vampyres

Blu-ray

Arrow Video USA

1974 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 88 min. / Street Date March 26, 2019 / Available in the collection Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz, from Arrow Video / $72.89

Starring: Marianne Morris, Anulka (Dziubinska), Murray Brown, Brian Deacon, Sally Faulkner, Michael Byrne, Karl Lanchbury, Bessie Love.

Cinematography: Harry Waxman

Film Editor: Geoff R. Brown...

David Crow Mar 19, 2019

Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement on the What We Do in the Shadows TV series...and using their movie characters this season.

For a certain set of horror and comedy enthusiasts, What We Do in the Shadows remains the best vampire movie of this decade. The definition of an instant cult classic, the picture from Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, who both wrote, directed, and starred in the film, follows several Eurotrash vampire roommates as they attempt a daft documentary about their Undead lifestyle in New Zealand. The prospect of turning this Halloween delight into an ongoing comedy series was always going to be a challenging one, but FX might’ve struck on a novel idea by having the original creators involved in numerous ways on the upcoming What We Do in the Shadows TV series.

Which is exactly what we wanted to discuss when we sat down with Waititi and Clement,...

Review by Roger Carpenter

After George Romero’s remarkable international success with Dawn of the Dead (entitled Zombi in Italy), the Italians, always ready to hop on the celluloid bandwagon, rushed to churn out tons of unofficial sequels to the film as well as their own originals, just so long as “zombie,” “living dead,” or something similar was featured in the title. Thus, we have films such as Hell of the Living Dead, Burial Ground, and Zombi Holocaust, as well as the “sort-of” zombie film, Nightmare City, along with many others. But the first of the zombie films to hit theaters after Dawn of the Dead was Zombie.

Though the title certainly was a blatant ploy to ride the coattails of Dawn of the Dead, director Lucio Fulci always chafed at the notion the film itself was a rip-off of Romero’s smash hit. I won’t go into the arguments here because frankly,...

From starring roles in films such as The Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence to smaller parts in the likes of The Last Temptation of Christ and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Bowie made as much a mark on the world of film as it did on music and fashion. But it wasn’t just his acting that left an impression on movie-going audiences; numerous films have made use of his music to powerful effect. In honor of his recent passing, here are a few of our favorite appearances of David Bowie songs in the movies. We’ll miss you, starman.

“Cat People (Putting Out Fire),” Inglourious Basterds (2009)

I’m not much of a fan of Quentin Tarantino or his movies, but I still love this scene from 2009’s World War II fantasy Inglourious Basterds. Not only does “Cat People,” which Bowie originally penned...

Emma de Caunes joins the jury for the 26th British Film Festival in Dinard Photo: Richard Mowe

Actress Emma de Caunes (daughter of former Eurotrash host Antoine de Caunes) will join president Jean Rochefort as a member of this year’s jury at the 26th edition of Dinard British Film Festival, it was announced today (13 Sept).

Among the other jurors at the event from 30 September until 4 October will be actress Melanie Doutey, Virginia Efra, Amara Karan, Alexandra Lamy, actor Bernard Lecoq and producer Bertrand Favre with a few names still to be confirmed. Among the awards to be deliberated will be the top accolade the Golden Hitchcock.

A Long Way Down, directed by Pascal Chaumeil and starring Pierce Brosnan, will be presented as a tribute to the director in the opening slot at the Dinard British Film Festival

The opening film will be A Long Way Down, directed by Pascal Chaumeil and starring Pierce Brosnan,...

Purveyors of Eurotrash should delight in the resuscitation of the obscure 1979 eroto-giallo Play Motel, directed by Mario Gariazzo under the pseudonym Roy Garrett (a director of twenty or so features best remembered for casting into a sea of Friedkin capitalizations with 1974’s The Sexorcist, aka L’Ossessa aka Enter the Devil). By this period, the provocative Italian subgenre was already well into its dog days, with imitators churning out murder mysteries imbibed with a healthy dose of pornographic soft-core elements. It would be unfair to rightly classify Gariazzo’s film as classic giallo, a muddled narrative cramped significantly by enough naked women to rival Jesus Franco.

The sleazy Play Motel is a den of infamous iniquity, and wealthy businessman Rinaldo Cortesi (Enzio Fisichella) hires the voluptuous Loredana (Marina Frajese) for a kinky round of S&M. The next day, explicit pictures are sent to his office via registered mail in...

A somewhat flummoxed John Godfrey took a grilling from .mystery. interviewer Tony Jackson during the session .Sbs in the Spotlight. held at Net-Work-Play on Tuesday. Godfrey, Head of Documentary at Sbs, opened the session stating .We had a few complaints last year from producers saying that we give the same presentation every year and that our message is always the same. .Tony was one of those who complained the loudest. So, basically, I said .Alright, you interview us, you make it fun. So if this is really tedious you know who to blame... Jackson was listed as a mystery interviewer in the Aidc program. Having worked in factual television for 25 years and now with his own company, Chemical Media Productions, Jackson took the opportunity to ask Godfrey and members of the Sbs commissioning team some hard-hitting questions, as well as accuse Godfrey of being allergic to anything he or his company pitched.

Eurotrash? I would call it Eurotreasure. But that’s just me. Folks are used to the mid to high brow films coming from our Continental friends. Virtually everyone has heard of Bergman, they may have no clue of his films but they know they are high art gloominess. Now I happen to be a huge fan of old Bergy and if I felt like it, I could discuss his films until the cows come home.

But I am schizophrenic in my tastes. As much as I love Through a Glass Darkly, I also love The Seduction of Inga - a Swedish sexploiter. As happy in the gutter as I am in the arthouse, I have put aside my Bresson DVDs to bring you the Top 50 Eurotrash films. These films are not ranked by the best as that would have scrambled my mind, but it is a pretty good general guide...

Fans of early 1990’s direct-to-video sequels and early 1980’s European Nazi zombie flicks have reason to celebrate this February as Night of the Demons 2, Jean Rollin’s Zombie Lake, and Jesus Franco’s Oasis of the Zombies make their debut on Blu-ray.

First up on February 19th, Olive Films is set to give the Blu-ray treatment to Night of the Demons 2, director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s well-regarded 1994 direct-to-video sequel starring Christi Harris, Amerlia Kinkade, Robert Jayne, Zoe Trilling, and a pre-Mrs. Ben Stiller Christine Taylor.

In this diabolical sequel to the popular shocker, the students from St. Rita's Academy throw a party at a haunted house, only to have it disrupted by Angela, the hostess from Hell, and her ghoulish pals. The kids try to find refuge at a teen dance, but things get even scarier there! Bobby Jacoby and Amelia Kinkade star in this special effects-filled terrorthon...

No disc specs as of yet.

The new-look Total Recall is more of a walk down memory lane than an update of the 1990 original. John Patterson is already trying to erase it from his mind

The thing I like most about the Total Recall remake is the – I have to presume ironic – name of its production company. The first words that appear on screen are "Original Film". After 20 minutes of this well-designed and passably kinetic, albeit utterly humourless and derivative retread, I began to feel those two words like some kind of goading, pulsing taunt, as if they'd been implanted in my brain like the bespoke memories you can buy in the movie.

This may be because I loved the first Total Recall of 1990, even with its wilful crassness and ultra-violence, and its mixture of big ideas and graphic B-movie space operatics on a hefty studio budget. I saw it three times in its opening week – I was a fan.

The Movie Pool takes aim at the first-ever DVD of the 1992 film version of Captain America!

This DVD is offered as part of MGM's "Limited Edition Collection," which is available from select online retailers and manufactured only when the DVD is ordered. The DVD features a simple menu with no menu for chapters or scenes. Manufacture-On-Demand (Mod) DVDs are made to play in DVD playback units only and may not play in DVD recorders or PC drives. This DVD did not play in our laptop DVD drive but did play in our Toshiba DVD recorder.

DVD Specs

Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 full frame

Running Time: 97 minutes

Rating: PG-13

Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0

Subtitles: None

Special Features: Theatrical trailer

The Set-up

During World War II, a science experiment turns a weak army recruit (Matt Salinger) into a super soldier. After being frozen in ice, the soldier reawakens, battles an old nemesis (and assorted...

The last time I saw Antoine de Caunes onscreen was years ago on Channel 4′s hugely successful and popular TV show, Eurotrash. I had absolutely no expectations of him as an actor in this movie so was pleasantly surprised to discover that he’s actually rather talented.

This alternative French ‘Rom-Com’ is a bit of an odd one though… Simon (Antoine de Caunes) is a deeply unsettled, out gay man whose non-committal ways soon catch up with him when he’s faced with the pressures of dealing with his sick and sexually orientated disapproving mother, his estranged wife and son, and two lovers, both of whom are vying for his affections. Simon is an extremely selfish and introspective character, who struggles to deal with everything and everyone as his world comes crashing down around him.

To be honest, the concept alone is far more interesting than the film actually is.

Carla Bruni’s 1996 appearance on the talk show Eurotrash is today’s Very Controversial YouTube Upload. In the clip, Bruni chats with hosts Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gaultier about Hot International Love and Sex Guides, which appear to be nothing more than books that instruct on how to pose sexually explicit questions in a variety of languages. (Little could Bruni predict that Google Translate would soon serve this exact purpose for the Web’s population of giggly schoolchildren.) “For example, what can you say?” Gaultier asks gamely. Bruni replies that one could say “you make me hot,” in German, and goes on to do exactly that (and so much more). See also: Maureen Orth talks to Carla Bruni in the September 2008 issue of Vanity Fair.

In Paul Morrissey’s eccentric and utterly unhinged 1974 Eurotrash classic Blood For Dracula (often erroneously credited as the brainchild NYC art guru Andy Warhol), the opening imagery of Dracula (played by iconic German weirdo Udo Kier) painting his face kabuki white has always haunted me. The sequence is the spine and soul of the picture, showing the good Count as a tired, lonely showman who has long been forgotten by time and by the audience he once terrified.

And as eerily gorgeous as that bit of credit crawling business is, it’s the delicate piano waltz playing in the background that truly sells it.

Like Morrissey’s 3D companion film Flesh For Frankenstein the music for Blood was composed by Italian musician Claudio Gizzi. It’s orchestral, elegant, full of melancholy mourning and sadness. And truthfully it’s that dichotomy between the excessive gore, sex and general insanity on screen with Gizzi’s sophisticated,...