Review by Joe X Young 

Who’s Watching Oliver has done rather well for itself on the festival circuit, gathering numerous awards with five for Best Picture, two for Best Actor (Russell Geoffrey Banks) and one each Best Supporting Actress (Sara Malakul Lane and Margaret Roche respectively), and it’s easy to tell why when you see it. Oliver has an undisclosed mental illness, but given the nature of his actions during his ‘normal’ but very OCD daily routine it’s possibly an Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which in no way validates the more abnormal parts of his day. He’s quite the visually awkward specimen, tall and slim with a look initially reminiscent of a young Elvis, in this case though it’s Costello with his lean pallid face, NHS glasses and old fashioned dress sense. Already someone who may stand out in a crowd, but Oliver stands out even more when considering that he is living in an area of Thailand where there aren’t that many English people around, which makes it somewhat implausible that he could be a successful serial killer as his description would be simple to give. ‘Last seen with tall, skinny, nerdy four-eyed white guy’ would certainly narrow things down.

REVIEW BY JOE X YOUNG 

 
Devil Town from Corporeal Films is a short film at just under 17 minutes, yet 17 minutes is all that it needs to very effectively tell the tale of Patrick Creedle (Matthew Hebden), an estate agent with an attitude problem and of a ‘down-and-out’ called Driscoll (Johnny Vivash) who accosts him in the street and follows him to a coffee shop. With a tight focus on the two lead characters what could have been a dull interchange is instead a charged argument with excellent, and more importantly, believable dialogue in a script which perhaps could have been a little stronger but for an Indie film is pretty darned good. The acting is natural; we take the fly-on-the-wall seat whilst Driscoll attempts to convince Creedle that all is not as it seems in the streets of London. Both leads are flawless. There are other actors in the film, but their task is to remain unconsidered until required, and none of them in any way distract or detract from the tale as it unfolds.

Kudos to Nick Barrett for writing and directing a story which although giving more than a nod in the direction of John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ still manages to capture the paranoia of that classic without directly aping it. The film takes place in West Hampstead, but largely in the La Brocca café/bar, a very normal location for such an abnormal story. The quality of the filming is as professional as it gets, with everything just right.

Like I said earlier, it’s just under 17 minutes long, it’s already started gathering pace on the festival circuit and will be part of a supernatural compilation due out later this year. If you don’t have 17 minutes spare to watch this you are missing out, so be sure to keep an eye out for Devil Town.

Review by ​George Ilett Anderson

REVIEW BY JOE X YOUNG 

This is a mixed review; stick with it as in spite of what I start off saying, this is actually a good film. I am not sure if it is just me, but I am increasingly aware that the majority of horror films which I have seen lately are unable to deliver the full package expected. There’s quite a bit about pitchfork which doesn’t sit well, the plot is the basic bunch of young people escaping the maniac, and for the most part even that is decidedly poor. The acting is of varying quality, as is dialogue in most cases. The technical aspects of the film are spot on, with opening landscape shots being beautifully lit panoramas David Lean would have been proud of, indeed the entire production is fantastic, with a great score, perfect sound editing and much better than average special effects.

Review by Joe X. Young 

​I approached this film with curiosity, why was what appeared to be a 'made for tv biopic' making its way across the tables of GNOH when we do Horror reviews? Well, there are many types of horror, and this film deals with one of the worst aspects of man's inhumanity towards it's fellow man, or in this case women, thousands of them.
 
Fortunately we live in a more enlightened age, still not truly egalitarian, but certainly taking steps in the right direction even though taking a hell of a long time to get there. This film is set in America in the late 1800s, a dangerous time to be female as women had no rights and could be put into an asylum for no better reason than disagreeing with a man. It was such a common practice that very few people took much notice of it going on. The potential to be incarcerated for the flimsiest of reasons was the tip of the iceberg as once within the institutions women were routinely drugged, starved and forced to endure physical and mental abuse from those meant to be caring for them.

​From its earliest mid-production shots and promotional material, the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods has kindled more than a few embers of faith.
 
I keenly recall discovering the original novel for the first time, back during my earliest years of university, when I at long last had a -very little- sum of expendable cash floating about my person; enough to feed my consistent obsession for the absurd and fantastical that has consumed me for as long as I've had a mind to dream with...
 
American Gods came hot on the heels of Neverwhere for me; a very different beast not only from that most Kafka-esque of gems, but all of Gaiman's work: darker, grittier, bloodier; more grounded in traditions of horror than arguably anything else he'd ever written (barring, perhaps, a handful of short stories, one or two comics). A tale of violence and need and sacrifice; of blood and death and mourning, the tone and structure of the tale reminded more than a little of the many, many Clive Barker books that were my bibles of the era (and, in certain instances, remain so), the story nevertheless also maintained a certain abstruse whimsy; a sense of the mythological and folkloric that is very, very difficult to pin down and define, much less capture in another medium.
 
The kind of work that was almost pre-destined to snare my attention; to reach its parasitic tendrils into my mind and find itself willing anchor.
 
Like most of Gaiman's works, its specifics are hard to express without descending into what sounds like a lunatic's wall-scratched poetry: 

​Released from jail early to attend to his late wife's funeral, the unfeasibly named Shadow Moon encounters the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday (guess who?); a grifter, a liar, a cheat, a scoundrel...a man who seems to be able to make miracles and keep company with entities beyond easy imagining. Drawn into a game of predatory, parasitic metaphysics, in which old gods war with the new for the collective soul of humanity, Shadow finds himself learning far, far more about the world and his species than he ever wished, and more about himself than he can ever forget.
 
Given that the promotional and pre-release material for the TV show was so good (that most miraculous of phenomena; a screen adaptation of a beloved book in which EVERY element feels ineffably right; every set, every shot, every member of the cast...looking as though the creators bored open my skull and lowered the cameras in to film the projections on its interior) it was with more than a little trepidation that I sat down to watch the first episode.
 
Tone. Tone was always going to be the fulcrum; the deciding factor. The book is...bizarre, even by Gaiman's standards; at once so grim and grimey you can taste the blood and dust in your mouth, yet so mythic and ascended you could easily start painting or singing your own miracles from nothing at all, it's a difficult and chimerical beasty to pin down. The show could have so easily failed by favouring one element over the other, or not marrying them fluidly enough, resulting in something Frankensteinian, schizophrenic.
 
The result is a genuine labour of love; one that embraces the ostensibly incongruous elements of the book (the first episode alone features scenes of ancient Nords engaging in ritual sacrifice to summon their patron, scenes of prison-yard politics, a man in mourning for his lost wife and the life he dreamed, bar brawls, vistas of US landscape that seem more unlikely and miraculous than the magic on display, cons and tricks and traps, a bellicose leprechaun, shamanistic visions, scenes of death and resurrection, beatings, maulings; a goddess that vignally devours her devotees...) and marries them to a tone of simultaneous weight and irreverence; there is humour here, amidst the blood and the misery, the despair and breaking bones, but humour that exists as an undercurrent, of a similar kind that is found in the likes of Fight Club or Robocop; not overt, not sign-posted by idiot musical cues or characters more or less winking at the camera; this is gallows humour of the most bone-yard species, the kind of yucks that Christ might have had upon the cross, contemplating the absurdity of his situation (or the Devil might have had at his expense). 

​The filming and construction of the episode nears David Lynch levels of artistry. Every scene, every moment, is framed with a painter's eye, even the violence, gore and grotesquery (which is obscenely and delightfully plentiful) rendered with precision and deliberation, every spray and splatter intended to create particular compositions on the screen (a notable moment of carnage sees some arcs and jets of claret trespassing into the blackness bounding the screen).
 
Even so, this is brutality; the episode makes no bones about its violence, not diluting or diminishing it in the manner of a standard fantasy; here, wounds weep and leave scars, bones splinter and leave sceptic shards in the surrounding meat. The notion of blood sacrifice as the ultimate pleasure of ancient deities is consistent throughout, pain and death the sweetmeats of expression and faith on which they feed. And humanity, being dutifully lamb-like, is more than happy to butcher itself for them.
 
Notable moments include the gratuitous carnage of the aforementioned Nords, who, having found themselves stranded on some anonymous and wretched beach of the “new world” that will eventually become the USA, turn on themselves and one another in grizzly rituals of mutilation and combat in order to draw the singular eye of their patron and summon the winds that will bear them back home, an incident towards the end of the episode in which Shadow encounters one of the new “gods” fast  attaining dominance in humanity's collective imagination and is beaten almost to death by its faceless vassals (vassals which are themselves graphically torn to shreds by forces unknown) and arguably the most distressing scene in the entire show, which involves the seduction of a lonely and horny old man, the woman he regards as the very embodiment of fortune and beauty demanding to be worshiped as they couple, names and words of reverence falling from his lips that he can't possible know as she swells to consume his body, drawing him deeper and deeper into her as a snake devours its victims, her supplicant giving himself willingly, ecstatically, to this communion, though it is clearly agonising.
 
In an era of high deviance and invention when it comes to US network TV, American Gods has already distinguished itself as a beast apart; it is very, very difficult indeed to compare or contrast it to anything...it sits within no particular genre, will appeal to no particular audience, but exercises so many layers and depths and elements, suspending them with the grace of a master plate-spinner, it is certain to entrance as many as it will repel. 

​Absurd, deviant, transgressive and mesmerisingly beautiful, this is everything I ask for and demand from media: to not patronise or condescend, but to unsettle and disturb; to arouse and move and inspire.
 
My only prayer now is that the rest of the series collects on this most divine promise.