As Dead by Dawn director Adele Banks said in her introduction, it is unusual to see documentary entries in a horror festival, but this is a very unusual documentary, an extended interview with Daniel Lutz, son of Kathy Lutz and stepson of George Lutz, who on December 19th 1975 moved with his parents and two siblings to 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island, where they would remain only until January 14th 1976. The alleged events of that short span were the basis for the bestselling book The Amityville Horror, published by Jay Anson in September 1977 and filmed in 1979, spawning a long line of sequels and remakes.
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Is there anything as frustrating as the missed opportunity of a vision compromised? Screening at the Dead by Dawn festival, writer/director David Cholewa’s Dead Shadows is a jigsaw puzzle where the audience are unfortunately missing several key pieces, leaving them with an incomplete picture whilst revealing enough to indicate that were the full work to be revealed it would certainly be a more promising and ambitious debut than that of many established directors, made all the more of an achievement by the fact that this is an independent picture.
The backwoods trailer trash family has been a staple of horror through inbred decades, with variations told in Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes and Wrong Turn among many others, but all are seen from the outside looking in, the relatively sophisticated city folk who stumble in and are laid low by their country cousins. Not so with the directorial debut of Chad Crawford Kinkle, where the leafy dirt roads and dilapidated shacks are most definitely home.
There is a hunter on the prowl, and his name is Charles Talent Manx, an appropriate appellation for indeed he does have a talent, for slipping between the walls of reality in his black Rolls Royce Wraith, snatching children from their lives in the real world and taking them back to his imagined realm of Christmasland, where snow always falls, the music is enduringly festive, there are presents to open every morning, and the favourite game is scissors for the drifter.
While a police procedural may seem a bit of a departure for Geek Chocolate, our writers have diverse tastes, and this is no typical show in the standard forensic template, developed by Bryan Fuller, who worked on Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager and Heroes also created Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies and Mockingbird Lane. Based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, filmed previously by Michael Mann and Brett Ratner, the new series stars Hugh Dancy as criminal profiler Will Graham and Mads Mikkelsen as Doctor Hannibal Lecter alongside many of Fuller's frequent troupe of actors, Owen Williams tells us why we should be paying attention.
It is March 2077, fifty year after the Earth was attacked, and though the invaders have been defeated, the cost was terrible, the Moon split in two, the population wiped out, the surface of the planet practically unable to support life, with formerly great cities buried under silt. With the survivors gathered in a vast orbiting space station before they prepare to leave for Titan, the last operatives tend the fusion reactors that gather and convert seawater into energy for the trip before the planet is abandoned altogether. 
When District 9 hit cinemas in 2009, it was a shock to a system accustomed to vacuous blockbusters of no greater purpose than product placement; it was science fiction, it had explosions, but it was also about race relations, exploitation and segregation of the working underclass, even slaves, into ghettos. Writer/director Neill Blompkamp's new film, Elysium, has four times the budget, and with it commensurately larger expectations, though stylistically and thematically it seems cut from the same cloth, despite the presence of the major Hollywood talent involved. Here, the Geek Chocolate writers offer their first opinions of the trailer.
As the clocks approached midnight on Thursday 25th April with a full moon hanging over the chill streets outside, Adele Banks, organiser of the Dead by Dawn horror festival, opened her twentieth season by telling the audience at the Edinburgh Filmhouse that they were in for “such a treat,” and that the four debut features to be screened over the weekend could herald new voices in the genre, and as she unveiled Rodrigo Gudiño’s The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh, she made good on her word.
It doesn't feel like two years since the release of Thor, though that is no doubt because last summer's box office was dominated by the Norse warrior's second face off with his adopted brother Loki in the company of 
The opening frames of this film quote the profound wisdom of an acknowledged grand master of science fiction, 
Eponymous is one of those comic books that immediately punches you in the face with its stunning artwork. Beautifully rendered by Martin Simmonds, the pages ooze detail and texture with every scene. Every panel is cinematic in style, and the artist has complete control over light and shade, utilising it perfectly to express the action and emotion of the story, which is equally mastered by the writing skills of Mike Garley. 
Out this Wednesday via MonkeyBrain Comics from writer Curt Pires and artist Dalton Rose comes Theremin. Both have previously worked on high-concept independent projects of some renown in the shape of the brutal-yet-cerebral tale LP (Pires) and the epilepsy-induced Mayan war epic Sacrifice (Rose). Here they combine their talents to take on the somewhat fictionalised life, times and adventures of the very real Russian inventor, possible one-time attempted defector and gulag survivor Leo Theremin.
