Jonathan McCalmont

Back in the 1970s, the makers of European exploitation films often tried to increase their profits by releasing multiple cuts of the same film.

Given the weird combination of industrialised torture and distasteful nostalgia that plagues contemporary horror, it is easy to forget that the roots of the genre lie not in grimy power tools and

Many contemporary Hollywood actors talk about the need to do one film ‘for us’ and one film for ‘the them’ in order to strike a balance between artistic credibility and economic prosperity.

Director Réné Clément attempts to replicate the style of a Hitchcock thriller with English language French psychological spy film, The Deadly Trap but unfortunately never quite achieves this high ambition.