Mayhem Film Festival 2014

A man walks into a bar and makes a bet with the bartender that his story is more remarkable than any the tender has heard. After the relaying of his painful – and definitely remarkable – tale is complete the bartender (Ethan Hawke) gives the man (Sarah Snook) the...

Short films are not something people get overly excited about, are they? It was puzzling, then, to enter the cinema on the opening night of Mayhem’s tenth film festival and see the anticipation on the audience’s faces; it felt like an event. And they kept laughing and talking animatedly...

Picking up where its cabin-in-the-woods style predecessor left off, Dead Snow 2’s Martin is in the midst of successfully escaping from a horde of Nazi zombies. His friends have not been so lucky, not least his girlfriend Hanna who died from an axe wound administered by Martin himself. Now,...

What to say on the Scooby–Doo-episode-gone-wrong that is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? In review terms at least, everything that could be said about this landmark, pivotal, groundbreaking (no superlative is too great!) grimefest in less than a 1,000 words pretty much already has been. And so as an...

The darkest of Mayhem’s opening night offerings (though considering the rest of the content was supplied by the irreverent and hilarious Astron-6 collective, that’s not all too surprising), Let Us Prey presented to audiences a taut, beautifully shot horror-thriller with a relentlessly increasing sense of “as if this is happening now…” After...

Expanding their niche of irreverent and madcap throwbacks to the low-budget classics of their childhood, Canadian production company Astron-6 descended on Nottingham with their gore-soaked giallo homage, The Editor. In a loving pastiche of a genre most fondly remembered for its sheer crapness, Astron-6 have gone to great lengths to replicate the shoddiness that makes the...

There is much to fear in The Canal. The chilling sense of dread permeating the whole film, the question of whether David’s house is haunted or just his unwinding mind. The biggest fear, though, is that The Canal has, in my eyes, suffered the same fate that befell 20,000 Days on...