Christopher Symonds

Time was when the mention of a double act with Eddie Murphy and Ben Stiller would have had this reviewer racing for the nearest cinema. They are two of the most indelible and successful comedians the...
John le Carré has one of the most critically lauded spy writers in the world for many decades, and, now in his eighties, continues a regular and popular output of novels for the world to devour. The r...
When this reviewer was a small boy, another young boy said something nasty after only just meeting him, and it stuck in his memory for the rest of his life. Why this boy stuck in my memory is because...
Twenty years after the days of Captain Kirk, Bones, and Mr Spock, Gene Roddenberry was invited by Paramount to create a new Star Trek show; something to which he had little interest in doing. His orig...
Take an ‘it’ director, hot off the heels of a major franchise success, and high concept idea with a punchy title (Cowboys Versus Aliens! Magic!) that promises a new hybrid of a film, an epic cast with...
Supposedly, this remake was targeted as a fun film for a horny 17 year old boy to kick back and enjoy; a down and dirty exploitation horror flick that unabashedly panders to the wants of that particul...
As a ravenous consumer of all things horror, I have seen the frightening, I have seen the exhilarating, I have seen the okay, the passable, and even the so bad its good; and every now and then I have...
In the sea of remakes, reboots, sequels that have been lathered heavily upon us in recent years, it is hard for one to remember many that have you leaving the theatre thinking it was a worthwhile ende...
A fan of the pulp era, wonderfully lurid tales told briskly and cheaply from the Depression into the 1950s, this reviewer, like many, latched onto a certain reoccurring character written by an unassum...
With the current crop of technology pretty much unshackling anyone with a half decent imagination to realize whatever they can dream up, it’s easy to forget that, not so long ago, it wasn’t always the...
There are few genre fans in the world that don’t know the name Guillermo del Toro, but in 1997 he was still a relatively unknown entity to the western world. The Spanish director was hired by the Wein...
One of the most highly regarded science fiction films of the 1950s; this Gordon Douglass directed cautionary tale about a small township under siege by irradiated mutant ants has influenced countless...
It’s hard to reconcile fifteen years has already gone by since Wes Craven struck gold twice with a new horror franchise. It’s equally hard to reconcile that this style of self-referential and self-awa...
News broke that the Weinsteins were bringing Scream back to the masses, ten years after the last one. It actually got a lot of folk excited. I had forgotten what a good film Scream was and just filed...
Bigger than Ben-Hur’ has been in the world’s vernacular for generations, and having just seen the film for the first time in 30 years, William Wyler’s epic quickly reminded this reviewer why. For a fi...