Thrash (2026) – Fishy

Released: 10th April
Seen: 16th April

In 1975 Steven Spielberg changed the world of cinema forever by introducing the world to a shark named Bruce in the movie Jaws. Jaws was the original summer blockbuster, proving that action spectacle done well can be a massive hit at the box office. It’s also the quintessential shark movie, laying a blueprint for all other movies about sharks that would inevitably follow over the years. Shark movies are kind of ubiquitous at this point, every year there’s at least a couple and they can range from being surprisingly good to absolute dog shit, from serious to goofy. Then you get a film like Thrash which seems to be trying to see just how many kinds of shark movie it can copy during its runtime but just ends up making for a film that’s at best just kind of OK.

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Primate (2026) – Monkey Business

Released: 22nd January
Seen: 14th April

On Feb 16th 2009, a chimpanzee named Travis mauled a woman. Travis was owned by Sandra Herald and on this day he was acting oddly, including stealing Sandra’s car keys and refusing to stay inside the house. Sandra asked her friend Charla to help get Travis inside, using his favourite toy as bait to try and lure him… Travis would end up disfiguring Charla, tearing off her face, destroying limbs and leaving her blind for life. He would be shot 4 times by police officers and still somehow had the strength to walk to his enclosure where he died. Charla would need extensive surgery, including a face transplant but she is still currently alive. This event really was a moment where a lot of people realised that chimpanzees could be incredibly violent and do a lot of damage to the human body… naturally this means a horror movie was kind of inevitable and damn, Primate is brutal in the exact way you would kind of want a movie like this to be (and yes, we can enjoy a film that does a fictional take on a real horror like the one that I just described, if we couldn’t then we just couldn’t enjoy films in general)

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28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) – Bonkers

Released: 15th January
Seen: 1st April

28 Years Later was genuinely one of the best additions to the zombie movie genre in recent years, a visual treat filled with some of the most purely horrifying imagery. It was an absolutely great entry into the 28 Days Later franchise that promised to be the start of its own little trilogy, continuing the post-apocalyptic story by pushing it into a bold new direction. Well, if 28 Years Later was this franchise swinging for the fences, then 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple loads the franchise into a catapult and throws it over the fences with absolute fucking glee while doing so.

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Twisted (2026) – Uninspired

Released: 6th February
Seen: 1st April

The label Torture Porn was first used around 2006 when it was applied to films like Saw, Hostel and Wolf Creek. It was an easy way to describe some of the more extreme horror-slasher films of the era that almost revelled in how much gore they could get away with showing. They were some of the most extreme films in the genre that were also major hits in the mainstream cinemas and kind of opened a floodgate that we’re still dealing with. One of the people whose films first got this label, who really just seems to have embraced it in the years since, is the director of Saw 2-4 Darren Lynn Bousman, who used to be really good at making these films… but sadly, Twisted is far from his best work.

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Fackham Hall (2026) – Hilarious

Released: 19th February
Seen: 30th March

From 2010 until 2015, Downton Abbey was a mainstay of the television landscape. It was a cultural phenomenon that absolutely drowned in awards from all directions and is one of the rare TV series that would get to continue after its cancellation in the world of Feature Films. It could be suggested that without Downton Abbey being such a massive hit, we might not have series like Bridgerton or The Crown. It effectively started a wave of historical British dramas focused largely on the upper class that could live in lavish houses and only see a poor person whenever a servant was needed to clear out a chamber pot. Basically it’s the kind of genre that has been almost begging to have the almighty piss taken out of it for quite some time and with Fackham Hall, someone finally came along to do exactly that.

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