Wednesday 30 September 2015

A SERBIAN FILM soundtrack




Love it or loath it, you can't deny the impact of Srdjan Spasojevic's notorious atrocity exhibition. One of A Serbian Film's stronger elements is Wikluh Sky's menacing score, the perfect complement for the film's slick display of onscreen depravity. As far as I know it's never had an official release of any kind, and I'd long ago given up on trying to find it. Then out of the blue the other day, I stumbled on this youtube stream of the full OST.

The surefire hit is obviously "Balkan Sex God". With a sinister and monotonous dubstep plod, it plays like the soundtrack to every skeezy strip club and fluoro-lit nightclub toilet in Eastern Europe. It's the banality of evil set to music. A good track to be sure, but the real winner for me is "Decollection", a haunting pizzicato rendition of the film's theme, accompanied by malevolent synth and the tormented howls of poor Milos' damned soul.


0:00 - The End
3:18 - Tone Deaf
8:23 - Decollection
11:18 - Rigor Mortis
14:25 - Radio Rave
20:28 - Serbia
24:40 - Unsee It
26:56 - Le Club Filth
31:22 - W.F.S.
38:30 - Balkan Sex God




Sunday 27 September 2015

BLACKGLOVEKILLER


With the news currently circulating that Bauhaus vocalist Peter Murphy has joined the cast of Chris Alexander's upcoming giallo BlackGloveKiller, this seems like an appropriate time to take a look at the poster art for the retro director's films.

For the uninitiated, Alexander is a renowned horror journalist and editor, now a veteran of Fangoria, Gorezone, Rue Morgue and Delirium. His passion for classic Euro-horror has recently seen him switch roles from commentator to creator, as the writer/director and composer of several shoestring-budget arthouse horror flicks. His approach is thoroughly old school, favouring style and mood over action and narrative, which can be frustrating for adrenaline junkies, but rewarding for the patient. The only one I've seen, Blood for Irina, is an ardent love letter to the films of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco, saturated with the same visual and auditory atmosphere that the two auteurs traded in. If that's your thing, it's well worth seeking out. As well as his upcoming giallo (which is in early development I believe), Chris has an LP of original music and soundtrack cues coming out next month. It's on the excellent Giallo Disco label and is titled Music for Murder, natch. 




The Blood for Irina poster seems like a nod to the naive staginess of some of the original Redemption Films video covers.




This first Queen of Blood artwork takes a "novel" approach to throwback graphics, emulating the look of old paperbacks (complete with edgewear and fading) as opposed to the usual folded one-sheet. Nice.





This poster wears its influences so unabashedly that the typography for "werewolf" is identical to that of the original UK posters for Rino Di Silvestro's Werewolf Woman. Don't believe me? Take a look.





The style of this first BlackGloveKiller artwork is reminiscent of Enzo Sciotti and similar artists. Love it.




Friday 25 September 2015

The Colour Out of Space




Great news today as SpectreVision has announced its plans to back Richard Stanley's adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story The Colour Out of Space. Stanley, whose Hardware is a certifiable DIY sci-fi classic, is just the kind of maverick director to tackle Lovecraft (see also Stuart Gordon). I'm far more interested in seeing his vision of HPL's universe than someone like del Toro (especially after learning of his plans for At the Mountains of Madness).

SpectreVision is the baby of Elijah "Maniac" Wood (a self professed horror freak) and Josh Waller (director of the Zoe Bell actioners Raze and the upcoming Camino), who envisioned it as a production company and distributor that specialises in quality indie horror/genre films. So far they've distributed some great flicks, including Ana Lily Amirpour's highly acclaimed A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and have some cool looking movies in development (The Greasy Strangler). They're the perfect backers for a Stanley joint.

The word is that Stanley's screenplay is excellent. In his own words:

"There needs to be a scary Lovecraft movie. I want to make a bad trip film, and The Colour Out of Space definitely has what it takes to be a very, very bad trip indeed."

The story (said to be Lovecraft's personal favourite) is about a farm that is blighted by a mysterious meteorite, poisoning and mutating the surrounding countryside before sending the farm's residents insane... and worse. It's almost certainly the precursor of any number of similar sci-fi/horror stories, from The Blob and The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill to Night of the Creeps and Slither. It was adapted in 2010 (on a shoestring) by German filmmaker Huan Vu under the title Die Farbe.

Let's hope this one comes to fruition...





Thursday 24 September 2015

DAWN OF HUMANS




NYC's three most controversial and divisive bands are headed down under, just in time for Halloween. If Hank Wood, Crazy Spirit and Dawn of Humans manage to sneak past our notoriously cockblocking border security, it'll be interesting to see how they're received by the more PC elements of the Aussie punk scene. Earlier this year Dickies front man Leonard Graves Phillips landed himself in hot water when he punched and verbally abused an obnoxiously drunk female punter at their Brisbane show. The news spread, and at the Sydney show the next night a lot of people were pissed off, and I know of quite a few who stayed home too. It would appear that idealism and ethics aren't quite dead around here yet (as far as my position: the Sydney show was great, but yeah, he was clearly in the wrong).

Anyway, I'm cynical and flexible enough to not give much of a fuck about my moral imperfections. There's so much hype surrounding this pack of weird NY mutants that I have to see what all the fuss is about for myself. To be honest, The Hammerheads I can take or leave, too Crampsy and swampy for me. Crazy Spirit and Dawn of Humans on the other hand are something else. Demented hardcore, made by freaks for freaks, and buried within the galloping beats and always-threatening-to-spin-out-of-control looseness of both bands are some of the sickest hooks around.


Dawn of Humans are the real standout of the three. Rudimentary Peni get blind drunk and try to play covers by Die Kreuzen, Winnipeg's Kittens and Vancouver's Gus while fronted by a raving lunatic. Or something, I don't know, comparisons are stupid. And their shows look highly entertaining. If you're one of the few who hasn't already had their head bashed in by this year's scorching Slurping at the Cosmos Spine, you'd better get on board the crazy bus. Favourite tracks: "Painful Mountain", "Horse Blind" and "Fog Sclope". Great to see some NY punk headed our way, now where's my AJAX tour??




Sunday 20 September 2015

Suspiriorum Aeternae!




I'm no longer dead against the current trend of remaking the horror classics of the '70s and '80s. I used to bitch about it endlessly, but I've made my peace with it. The fact is that we now live in a world where classics like Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes and Maniac have all been superbly remade. If anything, the good remakes enhance the legacy of the originals, while the poor ones are simply swept under the rug and forgotten.


So what is the trick to crafting a good horror remake? I doubt it's anything more than exactly the same factors that make any successful movie work. Good filmmaking seems to be the result of lightning in a bottle - a fluky convergence of talented, like-minded people who happen to be in the right place at the right time. To suggest that a film is the visionary creation of any single person (i.e. the director) is a falsehood. It's become a kind of shorthand when discussing movies, but it's an over-simplification of a very complicated process. Good movies - remakes or otherwise - spring from the successful collaboration of scores of artists, craftspeople and technicians. Zack Snyder isn't a director that I'm particularly fond of, but his Dawn of the Dead works like gangbusters because his strengths as a visual stylist and skillful action director fused perfectly with James Gunn's excellent screenplay and a killer cast led by Sarah Polley. Remove any one of those elements and it might have been a failure.


You can also apply that same logic to answer a question that's burned people up for decades: why was there such a sudden and drastic change in the aesthetics and quality of Argento's movies after Opera (or Trauma or The Stendhal Syndrome if that's your preference)? You have to look at the players who worked alongside him throughout his golden years (Deep Red - Opera in my opinion), and are then conspicuously absent afterwards. Producer (and father) Salvatore Argento; production designer/art director Giuseppe Bassan; editor Franco Fraticelli; cinematographers Luciano Tovoli and Romano Albani; Argento's then partner and muse Daria Nicolodi; and of course, Goblin. During this period he was most definitely not working in a creative vacuum*.


All this rambling about remakes and Argento brings me to the latest sacred cow to be sacrificed to the remake gods: Suspiria. After slipping through David Gordon Green's fingers, the project has fallen into the hands of an interesting Italian director who seems a good fit for the material. Luca Guadagnino is the director of 2009's acclaimed I Am Love (Io sono l'amore), a film that features a visual style that is noticeably reminiscent of Argento's heyday. The cinematographer on I Am Love was one Yorick Le Saux, and the way his Steadicam prowls and weaves through the film's interiors strongly recalls the camera acrobatics and architectural cinematography of Suspiria and Tenebre**. Guadagnino and Le Saux have worked together frequently, so going back to that idea of prolonged, successful collaborations, we can only hope that the two are reteaming for the Suspiria redux***.


Honestly, the thing that has me most jazzed about all this is that Suspiria has been given to an Italian director, one with classical European sensibilities who is not a horror auteur. The possibilities that arise from this are more interesting than if the film had been handed to someone obvious like Aja or Bustillo & Maury. As visionary as they may be, directors like that can be creatively hemmed in, simply by being too close to their influences. Argento's 1977 masterpiece has had such an enduring impact because it's more than just a horror movie. It's a crazed, fever-dream of art and imagination, birthed from a group of incendiary minds at the peak of their creativity, and during a period of radical cinematic experimentation. The remake should be given the artistic freedom to once again break the horror mold to become something new and hopefully dangerous. You can read some interesting quotes from Guadagnino on the direction he wants to take the remake in here.




*There are exceptions to this hypothesis of course. Ronnie Taylor, cinematographer on the gorgeously shot Opera, would return for Phantom of the Opera and Sleepless, and although those films do recall some of the visual flair of Argento's early films, Taylor's work there is but a pale imitation. Goblin's score for Sleepless and Claudio Simonetti's ongoing work on The Card Player and Mother of Tears proved that they too were not immune to late career mediocrity. Most confoundingly (and depressingly), Suspiria and Tenebre's Luciano Tovoli would return to shoot the truly shitty looking Dracula 3D.

**Le Saux also shot Jim Jarmusch's beautiful Only Lovers Left Alive, so he's shown that he can do gothic atmosphere with the best of them.

***Guadagnino is a director who obviously values continued partnerships, having worked with the brilliant Tilda Swinton constantly throughout his career. He's gone on record as saying that he hopes to bring her on board for Suspiria, along with the rest of the cast of his most recent film, A Bigger Splash (including the consistently excellent Ralph Fiennes).

artwork by John Salinero and Malleus




Tuesday 15 September 2015

Wipe that Shit​-​Eating Grin off your Punchable Face!







Wednesday 9 September 2015

ZOMBI




Over the last year Steve Moore's name has cropped up a couple of times here at the EYE, as his killer retro synth scores are a standout feature of both Adam Wingard's The Guest and recent Belgian slasher Cub. The man who wrote his first scores for low budget gorefests The Redsin Tower and Gutterballs is now making a real name for himself as an electronic composer of the highest order. I'm dying to hear what he has in store for Joe Begos' upcoming Scanners homage, The Mind's Eye, as Moore is a perfect fit for the material). A choice cut from The Guest...



...and here's a beauty from Cub. The intro part of this track is reminiscent of Ennio Morricone's score for The Thing, after which it morphs into the more typical Carpenter sound that's a mainstay of Moore's work:



As everyone reading this is doubtless already aware, Moore is also the keyboard and bass half of ZOMBI, his longtime band with drummer Anthony Paterra. Over the years the duo (who hail from the same town where Romero shot Night, Dawn and Day) have surpassed their reputation as mere Goblin and Carpenter acolytes, and are now the reigning kings of the horror/sci-fi related prog/space rock and synthwave scene. As with bands like Goblin and Trans Am, the inclusion of live drumming and bass kicks things into overdrive, making their music noticeably more visceral and heavy than many of their synthwave brethren.

My favourite ZOMBI jam to date is the title track from 2009's Spirit Animal LP. Their music is very cinematic (obviously), but this 14 minute epic is so evocative that I can't listen to it without daydreaming about the images that might accompany it on screen. Split into three parts, "Spirit Animal" seems to be telling a story. As the track's anthemic opening segues into a beautiful giallo-esque melody, and finally into a transcendent crescendo, it's easy to imagine it as a powerful accompaniment to an extended sequence filmed as a dialogue-free visual narrative. Have a listen for yourself, you'll see what I mean:


After a four year hiatus, following 2011's pulse pounding Escape Velocity, ZOMBI are back next month with a new nine track LP called Shape Shift. If these new tracks - "Pillars of the Dawn" (which could be a lost track from Goblin's DOTD score) and "Mission Creep" (fuck Moore knows his way around a bass) - are any indication, we could be in for their best stuff yet.




Friday 4 September 2015

Gary Pullin




The laptop screen is the retina of the mind's eye, and judging by the look of your bloodshot orbs you've been staring at yours for far too long. Take a break from squinting at all that tiny type, and sooth those sore peepers with some of Ghoulish Gary's E.C. Comics infused insanity. Horror graphics at their very best, because your eyeballs deserve only the finest.