Ride the Snake review – low-budget home-invasion horror offers transgressive free-for-all

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After a car accident kills her husband, Harper and her daughter kidnap the driver responsible to serve their own kind of justice – but he may not be everything he first seems Quoting the classics can be a dangerous game for a film – one liable to highlight your shortcomings. When two Gypsies-cum-demons chant Leaning on the Everlasting Arms , Robert Mitchum’s ditty from Night of the Hunter, not to mention bearing love-hate tattoos on their knuckles, it indicates that this low-budget British home-invasion horror is missing the same fairytale concision. Which is a shame, as this messy but entrancing, faintly surrealist feature by Shani Grewal has entirely different qualities of its own. Blinded in a car accident that killed her husband, Harper (Suzanna Hamilton) has lived alone for several years; until recently that is, as stepson Taran (Viraj Juneja) returns home to find that his mother and sister Megan (Francesca Baker) have kidnapped the drunk driver responsible and shackled him in a...
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Pink smoke, pigs and Pixar: a dozen movie Easter eggs to feast on

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Hidden references and in-jokes in cinema can be an acquired taste, but here’s a festive selection of the best arch nods for aficionados to enjoy

One of Hollywood’s most durable Easter eggs debuted in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940) when Cary Grant’s character says: “The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat!” And in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) his character sits pensively in a cemetery where Archie Leach’s gravestone is to be seen. In Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese’s character is called Archie Leach. Leach is, of course, the real name of Cary Grant – a very goofy and unglamorous sounding name compared with the sonorous “Cary Grant” – and a rare example of Hollywood alluding to the open secret of rebranding its stars and effacing the bland ordinariness of their origins. Peter Bradshaw

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