UNFLINCHING EYE

Looking Ahead

2012-01-30T23:36:00.004+11:00

As we move into the second month of 2012, and the release schedule begins to gain momentum again, I thought I'd take a look at some of the flicks that are at the top of my "most anticipated" pile for the coming year. These are by no means the only films I'm looking forward to, but having given this some thought (and a fair bit of research), it's safe to say this represents the cream of the crop for me.

There's a few titles here that are listed on IMDb as being released in 2011, but I doubt they've been seen by many outside of festival screenings.

I'd like to acknowledge the tireless work of Garth Franklin at Dark Horizons whose "Notable Films of 2012" feature made my research for this a lot easier. He puts a huge amount of effort into compiling these exhaustive lists at the beginning of each year, and I'm glad he does because they're an invaluable resource.

So, in no particular order, here's 20 movies to get excited for over the coming months:

JOHN DIES AT THE END
Dir: Don Coscarelli

The return of Coscarelli! Based on a cult novel by David Wong, this promises to be a psychedelic, multidimensional mindfuck of a movie - druggy, tripped-out and featuring a slew of practical monster and gore FX. After the hugely enjoyable Bubba Ho-Tep, Coscarelli seems to be in his creative prime at the moment, and arguably far more relevant now than many of his contemporaries such as Carpenter and Romero. It's getting good reviews out of Sundance, and I can't wait to see this. So much so that I ordered the novel yesterday. And Paul Giamatti is in it!

COSMOPOLIS
Dir: David Cronenberg

Hey Cronenberg fans, are you feeling spoilt? You should be, because we're getting not one, but two movies from the master this year (I finally saw A Dangerous Method earlier tonight!). This is another book adaptation (this time from a novel by Don Delillo), starring Robert "sparkly" Pattinson, and I'm actually intrigued to see what sort of performance Cronenberg pulls out of him. Cosmopolis' simple synopsis of "a multimillionaire on a 24-hour odyssey across Manhattan", coupled with reports that much of the action takes place within a single car, makes it sound like a very minimal affair. However, with an estimated budget of 20 million, who knows? I could be completely wrong here, but I'm wondering if this is going to be in a similar vein to Martin Scorsese's wonderful After Hours. More Giamatti here too!

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
Dir: Drew Goddard

I've never really been into Joss Whedon, but he is an undeniably talented genre writer, and this long-shelved horror (SF?) movie has got me psyched. I know very little about this, and will keep steering clear of all reviews and trailers to stay as ignorant as possible. I'm hoping for something different and surprising here.

PROMETHEUS
Dir: Ridley Scott

What can I say about this? I'm one of those people who believe without reservation that Scott is responsible for the two greatest SF movies ever made, so his return to the genre is very welcome indeed (he also recently secured the rights to my most beloved SF novel, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War). Any doubts I had about this were immediately dispelled by the incredible first trailer, which teases an epic, beautiful, hard SF film. The cast is fantastic, the design & FX look spectacular, and I for one am glad that we probably won't be seeing the now quite redundant xenomorph. This looks like science fiction on a truly grand scale, the likes of which we don't often see anymore in this age of green screen sound stages*, overused CGI and recycled ideas. It could also be a huge disaster of self indulgent wankery. Either way, this is my most anticipated film of the year.

*Much of the film was shot on location in Iceland, the Scottish Highlands, the Jordanian desert and on enormous sets constructed at Pinewood Studios in England.

THE GREY
Dir: Joe Carnahan

Carnahan is a director that I haven't taken much notice of until now (Narc was watchable, but The A-Team can just go fuck themselves), however The Grey looks to be the kind of grim, realistic, man-against-nature survival thriller that really gets my blood pumping. See also Frozen and The Reef. I also really dig Liam Neeson. And wolves. This opens here in a couple of weeks, and I plan on being there opening day.

JUAN OF THE DEAD (Juan de los Muertos)
Dir: Alejandro Brugués

Cuba's first zombie flick is the sophomore effort for director Alejandro Brugués, and if the word coming out of various festivals is to be trusted, it may just be the best zombie film we've seen in a while. As with most great living dead films, the zombies here apparently take a back seat to an endearing and interesting cast of living characters. I've heard that it features some pretty tasty gore too. Brugués has stated that Juan was not intended as a satire of life in Havana under Castro... and I'll reserve judgement on that until I see it.

DJANGO UNCHAINED
Dir: Quentin Tarantino

Really interested to see how Quentin follows up his masterpiece (and career highpoint) Inglourious Basterds. I personally think the man was born to make westerns, so my expectations are set very high for this. As usual he's hand picked an amazing cast, and I'm looking forward to seeing DiCaprio's Calvin Candie, but the big reason to get excited about Django is the casting of KURT MOTHERFUCKING RUSSELL.

THE RAID (Serbuan Maut)
Dir: Gareth Evans

Is The Raid the Assault On Precinct 13 of martial arts movies? This Indonesian/American co-production promises to be a wall-to-wall barrage of mayhem, ultra violence and hyper cool... all smashing into your cerebral cortex via the Indonesian martial art of silat. Apparently the hand-to-hand combat and firefights in The Raid are some of the wildest and most impressively choreographed in the history of the genre. Everything about this movie just screams badass. Really looking forward to this one.

GRAVITY
Dir: Alfonso Cuarón

With Children Of Men, Cuarón gave us a modern science fiction masterpiece. A film as remarkable for its astounding technical and artistic achievements, as for its seemingly prescient vision of the most terrifying future dystopia since Blade Runner. As with Ridley Scott, Cuarón is a perfectionist, obsessed with detail, and therefore perfectly suited to creating supremely convincing SF worlds. I'm very excited to see what these talents and sensibilities bring to the space genre. So much so that I'll tolerate an entire movie of nothing but Sandra Bullock.

THE ABCS OF DEATH
Dir: Everyone

The horror anthology is back in vogue in a big way, but I doubt we've ever seen anything like this. Angela Bettis, Bruno Forzani, Hélène Cattet, Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, Jason Eisener, Adrián García Bogliano, Xavier Gens, Noboru Iguchi, Jorge Michel Grau, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Simon Rumley, Marcel Sarmiento, Srdjan Spasojevic, Timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, Ben Wheatley, Adam Wingard... and that's just the directors that I like! There's six more - 26 horror auteurs in all. This will be insane.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES
Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn

I love Refn. I can barely fault him for a single frame of his work, but his arthouse crime films - Pusher I-III, Bronson, Drive - are cinematic perfection and pure celluloid dynamite. Only God Forgives sees Refn reuniting with Ryan Gosling, but this time the beauty and carnage (and beautiful carnage) will explode not in the city of angels, but on the sweaty streets of the Bangkok underworld. Bring it on.

[REC]³ Génesis
Dir: Paco Plaza

Director Paco Plaza returns for the third entry in this unstoppable Spanish zombie series. Having been thoroughly creeped out by the first two movies, I'm definitely up for another serving. Believe me, I'm suffering from zombie-fatigue as much as you are, I'm fucking sick of the genre right now, but these films have cleverly skewed the old tropes in surprising and demonic directions. This time around we're getting a prequel, and I think I read somewhere that they've dropped the found footage gimmick in favour of traditional cinematography. The thing that will make or break this movie: they need to keep playing it dead straight. No winking at the camera, no satire. Just pure horror.

THE SQUAD (El Páramo)
Dir: Jaime Osorio Marquez

I don't know much about this Colombian horror film from first time director Jaime Osorio Marquez, but I'm champing at the bit to check it out. I don't think I've ever seen a horror film from Colombia (unless you count Cannibal Holocaust which was shot in the Colombian Amazon), and I wonder if this is maybe the country's first? The Squad is a military horror flick, an odd little sub-genre that I've always felt is ripe with possibility, yet rarely yields good results. According to reviews the film features loads of beautiful, misty, jungle atmosphere, also utilising a slowly mounting sense of dread and paranoia to good effect (think The Thing). I love atmospheric horror with an emphasis on chills over action, so I'm already there.

MORITURIS
Dir: Raffaele Picchio

Who said Italian horror is dead? A couple of years ago I really enjoyed Federico Zampaglione's Shadow, and now I'm dying to be assaulted and traumatised by Raffaele Picchio's debut feature - Morituris. The plot of this little shocker seems to involve Roman gladiators coming back from the dead to rape, torture, mutilate and murder a group of unfortunate amateur actors. I truly hope that's all it is, because it sounds perfect. Morituris piqued my interest last year when I read that it pissed off some horror fans at a festival screening, because it took the whole rape/torture thing too far. Bloody Disgusting gave this movie "negative 100 million out of 5 Skulls". All milquetoasts apparently. Grue courtesy of Sergio Stivaletti.

IRON SKY
Dir: Timo Vuorensola

It would seem that the world got really tired of waiting for Richard Raaphorst to get his shit together and make Worst Case Scenario and Army Of Frankenstein, so now we have this movie from Finland instead. I'm a real sucker for this kind of gonzo Nazi weirdness, and I really want this to be good, but... let's just say this could go either way. An over abundance of CG in the trailers is a bit of a worry. But regardless of the quality of the FX, this movie will sink or float on the standard of the writing and comedy. I think the choice of Laibach to score the film was a good one, I'd never heard them before, but the music works perfectly over the trailer. Sort of Wagnerian symphonic industrial or something. According to IMDb, Timo, Iron Sky's director, is in a Finnish black metal industrial noise band called Älymystö. Anyway, Udo Kier is in this, so even if it's terrible I'll probably still watch it.

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
Dir: Panos Cosmatos

This Canadian SF film (another directorial debut) is actually two years old, and is finally getting a DVD release from Magnet this year. Comparisons to Tarkovsky and Kubrick have me excited, as do reports that the film is visually stunning - described as a psychedelic experience - with a powerful, immersive sound design. The plot revolves around a captive girl being used as a test subject for a series of nightmarish drug experiments in a secret research facility. Beyond that the story and characters are supposed to be quite ambiguous, with a minimum of explanation for why this is all happening. I love genre movies that are almost more of a sensory experience than a narrative, and I'm anticipating that this will be along those lines. Beyond The Black Rainbow has cult science fiction movie written all over it.

KOTOKO
Dir: Shinya Tsukamoto

After the disappointment of Tetsuo III, I'm looking forward to a return to form for Tsukamoto. The word is that this is a hallucinatory psychological horror film dealing with post-partum depression, and featuring an impressive performance from Japanese singer Cocco. I'm thinking that this film will deliver jarring contrasts of beauty and brutality.

YOU'RE NEXT
Dir: Adam Wingard

This film has been getting raves out of festivals for months now, and it looks like Adam Wingard is on the rise as horror's next big thing. You're Next is reportedly a home invasion thriller that twists genre conventions in unexpected ways, serving it up with a healthy dose of very black humour. This is another movie that I've avoided trailers for, because I want to be surprised. And hey, Barbara Crampton is in this!

WRONG
Dir: Quentin Dupieux

The followup to the dadaist horror insanity of Rubber! I'm really fascinated to see where Dupieux goes after that trip. Rubber was a love it or loath it affair, and I definitely fall into the former camp, so I'm salivating for this. This tale of a man searching for his lost dog looks to be another surrealist film that will continue to subvert the cinematic rulebook in weird and wonderful ways. Even the poster reminds me of a Magritte painting.

V/H/S
Dir: David Bruckner, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, Joe Swanberg, Ti West, Adam Wingard

Another horror anthology, this time breathing new life into the tired found footage genre, and it's getting killer reviews out of Sundance right now. Some really interesting directors here. David Bruckner was one of the fellows behind the underrated The Signal, Glenn McQuaid directed the enjoyable Burke & Hare comedy I Sell The Dead, and Ti West and Adam Wingard should require no further introduction. I've read that this actually has some genuinely frightening moments. We'll see about that!

What movies are you guys looking forward to this year?

I'm All Out Of Bubblegum

2012-01-20T19:17:00.004+11:00

As I'm sure you've already heard, Megaupload has been permanently shut down. Gone with it are almost all of the files that I've shared with my readers through this blog. It would appear that these halcyon days of true freedom on the Internet may be rapidly coming to an end.

I find myself in a quandary over this. The majority of my posts don't involve downloads, and file sharing was never my first priority for this blog... but I do enjoy doing it from time to time. There's something truly wonderful about being able to share something you're passionate about with like-minded people on the other side of the planet.

My dilemma: do I continue to share music etc (via other sites like Mediafire), and run the risk of waking up one day to find my blog deleted, or do I stop doing it entirely and concentrate purely on writing? Am I just being a bit hysterical about all this? I honestly don't know.

I know it's my decision to make, but I would really appreciate some wisdom or feedback from my readers and fellow bloggers as to the direction they would like to see the EYE take.

In the meantime, if anyone would like something re-upped, please leave a request in the comments or email me and I'll see what I can do.

Tutti il Colori del Buio

2012-01-12T18:26:00.004+11:00

This here is some vile, horror-infused crust, served up with a tasty garnish of neanderthal death and doom metal, likely to please fans of Entombed, Asphyx, Bolt Thrower etc.

Washington D.C.'s Ilsa are a relatively new band (formed in '07 I think) who are a good fit for the EYE, not just for their punishing punk & metal assault, but also due to their obsession with quality cinema. Having taken their latest album title from Sergio Martino's stylish psychedelic nightmare Tutti i Colori del Buio (although they misspelt it, bless 'em), and with song titles like "120 Days", I'd say it's fair to assume that their favourite section of the video store isn't Disney classics. Not to mention that their name is borrowed from everyone's favourite sadistic S.S. bitch - yes, right down to the font.

To be honest their slower stuff leaves me a bit cold, but when they speed things up on tracks like "120 Days", "Butcher's Castle" and "Frostthrower", they unleash a vicious ferocity that puts a big shit-eating grin on my face. Drummer Josh is a particular stand-out for me, pounding out some relentless and infectious D-beat rhythms that have kept me wanting more. I believe he's also responsible for all their artwork which is none too shabby either.

They also have a split out with another degenerate band that's sullied the pages of this blog before, Finland's Hooded Menace.

Buy Ilsa stuff HERE, and have a listen to Tutti il Colori del Buio by clicking the cover art below...

A Dangerous Method

2012-01-12T00:46:00.000+11:00

Here's one for the locals. Popcorn Taxi is starting off the year in style with a screening of David Cronenberg's latest, his take on psychoanalysis and sex in pre-World War I Vienna - A Dangerous Method. The film marks his third consecutive collaboration with Viggo Mortensen, his second with Vincent Cassel and his first with Michael Fassbender (so incredibly good in Steve McQueen's Hunger).

As with all of Cronenberg's recent films, it may seem like a radical departure from his early body of work, but a closer examination reveals that it's very much in line with his ongoing thematic concerns.

The screening features a Q&A with producer Jeremy Thomas, who previously worked with Cronenberg on Naked Lunch and Crash, as well as producing a number of other films that I'm very fond of, among them Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky & The Dreamers as well as Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins.

The screening is on January 30 at the usual Bondi Junction venue. Tickets and further info HERE.

KILL LIST

2012-01-08T23:29:00.006+11:00

When I saw Ben Wheatley's Kill List at last year's Sydney Film Fest, I thought that it made the other horror films I'd seen there (Stake Land and Hobo With A Shotgun) look pedestrian by comparison. It seemed to me as I watched Kill List, with the memories of those other two films fresh in mind, that where they were treading some very familiar ground, this little English flick playing out in front of me was something original and exciting.

It was one of those rare times watching a movie when that little alarm goes off in your head... your eyes widen, and pulse quickening you sit up a bit straighter in your seat and think "wait a minute, I've never seen anything quite like this before". By the end of the fest it was not only my favourite horror entry, but favourite regardless of genre, beating out some other exceptionally good films such as Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins, Terrence Malick's Tree Of Life and José Padilha's Elite Squad: The Enemy Within.

That was back in June, and I wondered then if maybe I'd already watched the best movie I'd see that year. Six months later and Kill List has in fact turned out to be my favourite of 2011, and having seen it again recently I found it to be no less transfixing and haunting.

They say there's nothing really new under the sun, even in the realm of pure fantasy, where the sky's the limit and ideas should only be constrained by the extent of one's imagination (and in the case of cinema, the fatness of one's wallet). Where movies are concerned I think it's true to a certain extent, and there seems to be plenty of evidence around these days to support that claim, in the form of all the remakes, adaptations and sequels that are being foisted on us. In recent years, one method (or gimmick?) employed by a number of filmmakers seeking to inject some freshness into an original, but familiar story is the genre mashup, blend, crossover or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes it works, but often it feels too ham-fisted and ill-conceived to be really effective. Just because you clumsily shoehorn zombies and kung fu into your western doesn't mean it's going to be more exciting. To me the result is often that the whole is reduced to less than the sum of it's parts. Sometimes I'd rather just watch a good western... without the zombies. Or the kung fu.

And that's part of what makes Kill List so successful for me. I can't remember when I've seen a film combine disparate genres so seamlessly and with such a feeling of effortless fluidity. Especially given the nature of the film's structure - the different genres don't run parallel to each other so much as they are episodic, one following the other, almost neatly compartmentalised within each act of the film.

The first act is a classic example of British social realism, reminiscent of the "kitchen sink realism" of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. I quickly found myself so engaged by the seemingly mundane trials and tribulations of the main characters, that I honestly would have been more than happy for the film to continue in this direction, without veering into more fantastic territory:

Suburban couple Jay and Shel love each other, but in spite of that their marriage is rapidly falling apart. Shel is accustomed to a standard of living that they can no longer afford, because Jay hasn't been working. There's a sense that Jay is lost at sea and frustrated, despite the outward appearance of a stable, middle class home and family life. When the strain becomes too much, and comes to a very ugly head at a dinner party with Jay's old friend Gal and his new girlfriend Fiona, Jay is forced to reconsider his situation and take on a job that Gal is offering him.

This set up, which sounds mundane, is anything but. You see Jay and Gal aren't just old mates, they're professional hitmen, with a shady past that may include some very morally dubious mercenary work in other parts of the world. The two men prepare for their new assignment... but are unaware that Fiona may not be as naive and innocent as she appears.

From here the film shifts gears, turning into a gritty, deliberately paced hitman thriller, but the change isn't jarring at all, and in fact feels perfectly natural. It continues to feel fluid and natural even as events get more and more weird - eventually steering the film into it's third genre - outright horror. I'll give nothing else away, as I think it best to go into Kill List knowing as little as possible about the second and third acts.

I can find very little to complain about in Wheatley's second feature (I need to track down his first, Down Terrace). The performances are all virtually flawless, the whole cast of talented actors are obviously having fun, and really immersing themselves in their roles. Unsurprising, because as written by Wheatley and Amy Jump, the main characters are multi-layered, complex and endearing. The cinematography is right up my alley - carefully composed and framed shots imbued with plenty of stillness, giving the film room to breath and allowing each shot to sink in deeply.

Kill List isn't exactly bursting at the seams with action (again, think of my comparison to social realist cinema), but when the violence comes, you probably won't be ready for it, and it's likely to shock you. It's sudden, realistic and very, very nasty. It got under my skin and made me feel bad. Just the way it should.

If there's one complaint that I can level at this movie it's that I slightly preferred the tone of the first two acts to the overtly horrific climax, which is surprising considering my predilection towards horror. That said I still found the conclusion to be solid and memorable, so it's a minor quibble really, and didn't effect my overall enjoyment of the film.

With Kill List, Ben Wheatley has delivered a new and exciting cult classic. If you think so too, and if you ever meet Ben, maybe you'd like to say to him:

"THANK YOU"

Some of the runners up for my top film of 2011 include Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, Miguel Ángel Vivas' Kidnapped, Jee-woon Kim's I Saw The Devil, Lucky McKee's The Woman, Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins and Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Monsters For Perverts

2012-01-04T00:49:00.003+11:00

My love for Vincenzo Natali and his wonderful Splice is already well documented on this blog. As such I was delighted to see today that Sideshow Collectibles is planning to release a 1:1 scale replica of the nascent Dren creature. That's a pic of their sculpt at right, though at this stage it appears to be just an unpainted maquette. The detail looks good and Natali himself had this to say about it in the press release:

"Sideshow has sculpted Baby Dren with all the love and passion that a proud parent could ever bestow on a child. Every muscle, bone and tendon is perfectly recreated. No geneticist no matter how brilliant could hope to compete with this exquisite work."

Perhaps, if little Dren sells, we'll see a maquette of the fantastic mature creature at some point:

Also coming from Sideshow this year is what may well prove to be the ultimate scaled replica of Giger's 1979 creature from Alien (right). In the last decade there's been a glut of Alien toys, statues and busts, many of them beautifully designed and lovingly produced, but I doubt any of them will hold a candle to this 28" tall (star)beast. At $799 it ain't cheap, but I suppose it's all relative because I once paid about a hundred more than that for a 1979 18" Kenner mint-in-box. The Kenner will always be the holy grail for collectors, and rightly so because it's a primo piece of genuine historical ephemera, but truth-be-told if you've ever seen one the sculpt is very rudimentary (it was just a child's toy after all). So from that perspective I guess the realism and quality of this new Sideshow piece makes it a bargain? Or maybe not. Regardless, get all the details on it at Twitch here.

For the record, I actually quit collecting toys about eight years ago when I ebayed a pretty extensive collection of horror toys, models and other ephemera (mostly Alien, Dawn Of The Dead, 70's & 80's horror and Universal Monsters) to score some quick cash. Occasionally when I see some tasty items like these I consider jumping off the wagon, but honestly I'm glad I quit because I just don't have the money to blow on this stuff anymore. Toy collecting is an expensive and very addictive habit. Not to mention what a pain in the ass it was to keep it all dusted!

Of course the big joke here is that we're talking about "toys" based on two of the most overtly sexualised creatures in the history of monster movies. As Devin at Badass Digest already pointed out today, baby Dren's head is essentially the head of a cock, complete with a slit-like urethral opening for a mouth. And of course Giger's stalking nightmare is everyone's favourite hybrid of big, scary phallus and vagina dentata, dripping with K-Y® Jelly (they actually used K-Y in the movie).

To illustrate that point further, I used to have a 1:1 scale chestburster and facehugger, both made by a Japanese company called Tsukuda Hobby (at the time Japan dominated the Alien toy market, with virtually nothing being produced in the US). They were flesh coloured, and made of this soft vinyl that was disturbingly reminiscent of the weird plastics they use to make sex toys. Couple those attributes with the fact that there was a life sized pussy on the belly of the facehugger and the chestburster looked like a rearing schlong with teeth, and it's hardly surprising that every single one of my friends who picked them up commented on how blatantly erotic they were.

Seeing all these creatures on screen, in the context of the films is one thing, but holding them in your hands really drives home the extent of their sexual nature.

I'd like to point out that unlike some people I don't subscribe to the view that Alien is just one big Freudian metaphor for anal rape. For me the sexuality more or less begins and ends with the creature designs and the architecture of the derelict spacecraft.

So, in the spirit of looking back fondly at Ridley Scott's now 33-year-old masterpiece... and looking forward to a new year that will see him return to LV-426 aboard the Prometheus, here's the face-meltingly awesome teaser for that film in glorious 1080p. Handy if, like me, you want to drool over it 20 times in a row.

PROMETHEUS

Ken Russell

2011-11-30T20:05:00.006+11:00

Farewell to a brave, wild and visionary director. Quite simply, there will never be another like him.

He made films that ranged from the truly sublime to the frankly terrible, but all of his work was astonishing, surprising and undeniably his own.

Chief among my personal favourites are The Devils and Crimes Of Passion, but I've always been most fond of Altered States. I'm sure others of my generation will remember all the hullabaloo at the time of its release (in mags like Starlog and Cinefantastique), with writers hailing the film as visually transcendent and technologically cutting edge, the final sequence in particular. The film also contains FX sequences that are textbook examples of the amazing results that can be achieved using only practical, in-camera FX. It's a flawed but fantastic film, and I still can't understand why Paddy Chayefsky detested it so much.

The legacy of Ken Russell is garish, psychedelic, lurid, shocking, silly... and ultimately very beautiful...

I'd like to think that somewhere he's having a few stiff whiskies with Oliver Reed right now.

Ass 2 Mouth

2011-11-16T17:37:00.002+11:00

I actually think "Ass 2 Mouth" would've made a pretty classy tagline for this sequel, but I digress.

The premise behind Tom Six's Human Centipede series, shallow as it may be, is obviously quite seductive to me. Having been sucked into the vortex of hype surrounding the first film, only to be left disappointed and wondering what all the fuss was about, I've still got enough interest in this revolting spectacle to subject myself to it's sequel. Although the first film didn't deliver on it's promise, I didn't completely dislike it. It was an attractive film, pretty easy on the eyes really, and the central performance from Dieter Laser as the mad Dr. Heiter was amusing and entertaining enough.

Both films have raised the ire of many horror fans who feel that Six is just an egomaniac having a laugh at our expense, and continuing to guffaw all the way to the bank. I have no doubt that he's doing just that, but personally I don't always need to be pandered to and treated like a valued customer. I don't mind being fucked with a bit, and after all, horror filmmakers have been doing it for decades. It's called exploitation cinema for a reason.

At least Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) looks like it truly delivers on the disgusting goods.

If you're an inquisitive sucker like me you can find out for yourself this weekend, as Sydney's Mu-Meson Archives are hosting three screenings of the film completely uncut. Each screening will feature an appearance by Martin himself, Laurence R. Harvey (right). Details follow:

Limited seats, limited screenings, Monster Pictures presents in conjunction with the Mu-Meson Archives the Sydney premier and preview screenings of Human Centipede 2. Each screening will have a special live appearance by lead actor Laurence R. Harvey (Martin).

Friday 18th November late night preview screening, doors 10pm for 10.30 start, tickets concession $15/$20 (limited to 60 seats).

Saturday 19th November official Sydney premier screening with discussion panel and Q&A with film critics including lead actor Laurence R. Harvey (Martin).

Panel:

Coffin Ed - freelance writer. Coffin has been involved in the Sydney music scene for the past thirty years and was also co-founder of the Mandolin Cinema during the 1980s. He currently writes for Drum and City Hub and was a former FBi Radio presenter with the Naked City program.

Jack Sargeant - underground culture and film historian, author of Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression, Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, Suture, Cinema Contra Cinema. Film festival programmer. Sometime art curator.

Dean Bertram (PhD) - freelance writer, filmmaker, and film festival director based in Sydney. He is the co-founder of A Night of Horror International Film Festival.

Richard Kuipers - film critic for the international trade paper Variety. He also contributes movie reviews and commentary on ABC Radio National and the webzine Urban Cinefile. Richard has produced and directed several documentaries including Stone Forever (1999), a look at one of Australia's most famous cult films. He produced the national television program The Movie Show on SBS Television from 1992-2000.

Jay Katz - moderator.

Doors 7.30pm for 8pm start, tickets concession $20/$25 (limited to 80 seats).

Saturday 19th November late night preview screening, doors 10pm for 10.30pm start, tickets concession $15/$20.

Tickets available at door for preview screenings.

Premier screening tickets can be purchased beforehand during other screenings @ Mu-Meson Archives, please check website for other screening times.

Mu-Meson Archives at Crn Parramatta Rd & Trafalgar St Annandale at the end of King Furniture building up the steel staircase. Phone 9517-2010

Mondo Zombie

2011-11-09T18:46:00.002+11:00

This poster by Jeff Proctor for Mondo Tees recent Mondo Mystery movie screening of Dawn Of The Dead is incredible.

Jeff always does outstanding work (I love his poster for Hobo With A Shotgun), but he's truly outdone himself here, creating the coolest piece of alternative artwork for the movie I've ever seen (I've still got a nostalgic fondness for the poster book artwork too, at right). He must have spent hours pouring over reference material in an effort to get every zombie in the movie on there, and I think he's just about done it.

It's sort of like a Where's Wally of the walking dead.

Some of the more prominent ghouls on the poster: the plaid shirted poster zombie, Stephen, hare krishna, the zombie who's cranium Stephen ventilates in the elevator, machete zombie, the blonde girl who attacks Roger in the truck, Roy Frumkes getting a pie to the face, the African woman who gets her jewelry so rudely snatched by the bikers, helicopter zombie, the fat zombie who falls into the fountain, sweater/escalator zombie, nurse, M-16 zombie, Miguel (who takes those meaty bites out of his wife in the tenement) and the nun (love that undead tableau on top of the truck).

That's only about half of the festering blue rotters. Who have I left out?

But the attention to detail doesn't stop there! Jeff has even included vehicles from the film as if they are characters in their own right. The WGON helicopter hovers in the sky, as the two trucks driven by Peter and Roger sit in the stinking, seething car park below. Interestingly, the grill and light of the car visible between the trucks isn't the 1978 Volkswagen Scirocco driven through the mall by our heroes, but a 1977 Ford Pinto seen elsewhere in the movie.

Please enlarge the poster to study it really closely for a long time and become completely obsessed with it as I did.

Attack

2011-11-09T01:34:00.006+11:00

A quick heads up to my fellow Sydneysiders to start watching the skies. Chris Murray and the other fine folks at Popcorn Taxi have put together a Q&A screening of Joe Cornish's SF debut Attack The Block a few weeks ahead of it's local theatrical run.

The film has enjoyed wild popularity this year with North American audiences at festivals and screenings there. The resultant hype preceding it now seems pretty over the top, and I'm not sure that audiences in it's native UK ate it up as readily. Perhaps people over there would rather see obnoxious little hoodies get destroyed by Michael Caine instead of portrayed as charming anti-heroes. Having seen the movie, my advice to others would be to temper your expectations. It's a rewarding little slice of SF horror, perhaps even a minor genre classic, but the second coming it most certainly isn't.

However I'm just grumbling, and Attack The Block really is worthy of your time and attention. Monster freaks will love the original and very effective creature design and FX, and for fans of Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and Don't it's cool to see the emergence of yet another talent from the same camp as Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

The screening and Q&A with director Joe Cornish is on November 21. Details and tickets HERE. Seeya there!

100th Post

2011-10-20T18:23:00.002+11:00

The above image is appropriate as today the EYE finally crawls past the 100 post mark.

It's taken me two long years to get here, but it's been a fun and interesting ride. When I started Unflinching Eye, I doubted that I'd get reader one... it was good enough just to have a free, creative forum to rant about my celluloid obsession. Now, over 500 comments later I'm proud to feel like a small part of a large, vital community of global film freaks. That my humble little blog could carve out it's own tiny niche amongst so many other far better blogs and sites still surprises me, and is surely a testament to the enthusiasm and open-mindedness of my readers. Thank you all.

One thing that I've noticed in the horror/genre/whatever blogging community is that there's almost none of the negative bullshit which seems to permeate some other quarters of the online movie community. I don't think I've had a single trolling comment in all this time (and I rarely see them on other blogs), which would seem to indicate that we bloggers/readers are generally a friendly, tolerant bunch who value other people's opinions as much as our own.

Of course the ultimate proof of that is in the many awesome folks I've "met" through the EYE. In the last two years I've shot-the-shit with a dizzying array of fascinating and learned people coming from as far afield as Croatia, Ireland, Sweden, Italy, Russia, Northern California, Kansas, New York and Northeast Tennessee... to name just a few. Once again, thanks to ALL my readers and fellow bloggers for your insightful comments and kick-ass blogs. Y'all rock!

So what has the EYE wrought in it's first 100 posts? If it's soundtracks you're after you could do a lot worse than spending a stormy night with Seppuku Paradigm's score for Martyrs or François-Eudes Chanfrault's OST for À l'intérieur. If Japanese horror scores are more your thing, why not spend a few minutes with Tomohiko Kira's soundtrack for Evil Dead Trap (directed by the late Toshiharu Ikeda, R.I.P. 1951–2010).

Are you a Cronenberg fan? Then take a look at the Interzone Dispatches (Report #3 coming soon) for a look at the far reaching influence of the body horror master, as well as a great recent short. Not a Cronenberg fan? Maybe you'd prefer to read about Linda Blair or Yaphet Kotto.

Dig comics? Check out the "sequel" to Carpenter's The Thing (it's better than the prequel!), or if that's too mainstream for your tastes why not gross yourself out with Hideshi Hino's Skin And Bone?

Like your music heavy? You might enjoy Akimbo, Annihilation Time, Rudimentary Peni or Sacrilege.

Or if art and design is your thing, feast your eyes on the lurid paintings of Andrei Bouzikov and the beautiful poster art of Silver Ferox.

Whatever your tastes, I hope you can find something to enjoy here... and keep finding things to enjoy... because this EYE isn't closing just yet!

The Road Leads To Nowhere...

2011-10-17T21:24:00.004+11:00

Earlier this month we lost David Hess. He was 69 years old.

In Wes Craven's Last House On The Left and Ruggero Deodato's The House On The Edge Of The Park, Hess gave us two of horror's most unforgettably unpleasant villains in Krug Stillo and Alex.

The sleazy, deadly charisma with which Hess imbued these two iconic sociopaths made them perfect cinematic reflections of Charles Manson - albeit a more muscular, macho interpretation of the man - complete with devoted followers in tow, ready to do anything to please their murderous leader (most memorably Giovanni Lombardo Radice in Park).

Of course Hess was also a gifted musician, and his oddly inappropriate score for Last House really helps to accentuate the film's nasty vibe of bad acid and the Summer of Love gone very wrong. Sweet, folksy numbers like "Wait For The Rain" and the opening credits track (reprised in "Blow Your Brains Out") are just dripping with a kind of haunting, saccharine melancholy that gives the depravity and carnage on screen an extra dose of hallucinatory menace. Whatever the relative merits of the Last House soundtrack, it certainly still rates a mention just for being one of the strangest horror scores around.

However, removed from the disturbing context of pants-pissing and chest-carving, these sad songs are appropriate for spending a few minutes contemplating the life and achievements of one of horror's most undersung participants.

R.I.P. David Hess. Please click the cover below...

Delirium

2011-09-09T16:37:00.005+10:00

Something smells a bit stale around here. Has it really been five weeks since my last post? I guess time flies when you move house and your life gets thrown into total disarray. After 12 years in the inner city I'm now in a sleepier, more suburban locale and I'm starting to like it (it was a bit too quiet at first). Also, we still aren't connected to the matrix, but I'm on the Case (yeah, that was a bad Neuromancer joke).

I haven't seen much in the way of movies recently (although "Why Cookie Rocket" was surprisingly solid), but I've had a lot of fun plowing through the first season of Game Of Thrones which is enjoyably violent, sexy, atmospheric and legitimately disturbing at times. I found much to hold my attention in season one: Sean Bean, Peter Dinklage (after his hilarious turn in In Bruges I'm quite the fan now) and multiple layers of twisted political intrigue... all punctuated by some truly shocking and unsettling grue. In a literary genre that seems to value conservative nostalgia and convention over ideas and originality (endless, vastly inferior rehashings of The Lord Of The Rings, not to mention that the premise for Harry Potter was lifted wholesale from Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books), writers like George R.R. Martin should be commended for coming up with stories that feel fresh, adult and unpredictable. Good stuff.

Actually, most of my recent filmic satisfaction has been found not on a screen, but in the pages of a book. I've been a faithful reader of Nathaniel Thompson's excellent Mondo Digital site for over a decade now, and when his DVD Delirium Vol. 1 was first released by Fab Press I jumped on it, initially devouring it cover to cover, only to return to it countless times over the years. I've been trawling local bookshops for the follow-up volumes for years, but recently I bit the bullet and ordered Vol. 4 direct from Fab.

Whereas in previous volumes Nathaniel shared writing duties with some esteemed colleagues, this time out he's gone solo, and I appreciate the consistency that approach has brought to the reviews. For me, the real value in these books isn't in the technical specs on specific DVD releases (though that's great too), but in the sheer breadth and depth of information that they provide on some of the world's most obscure, hard to find and flat-out weird films. The only other reference books I can compare them to in terms of obscure cinematic knowledge are Pete Tombs' excellent Mondo Macabro and Immoral Tales (the latter written with Cathal Tohill).

Honestly, I'm only half way through the "D" section and I can't believe how many new "discoveries" I've already made.

Who knew that Mark Gatiss - who portrayed my favourite character, Glen Bulb, on the brilliant BBC black comedy Nighty Night - was also a gifted genre writer who's penned episodes of Doctor Who and a creepy made for TV ghost anthology (called Crooked House), inspired by the classic Amicus anthologies? Probably loads of people, but not me! Had you heard that Dawn Of The Dead's David Emge appears in a 70's sexploitation romp called The Booby Hatch that was written and co-directed by Night Of The Living Dead's John Russo? I was ignorant again! Did you know that 70's Time Lord Tom Baker does "a nude scene no sane person ever asked for" in Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales (I actually knew that one)? Have you ever heard of Altin Cocuk, Anti-Clock, The Bed Sitting Room or Codex Atanicus? Me neither, but I wanna see 'em all NOW!

The real beauty in these books is in the concise brevity of each review - in just a few paragraphs you often get plot, cast and crew backgrounds, anecdotes, production history, home video history, personal insights and some tantalising (and spoiler free) teases of what to expect from the film in question. If you haven't discovered these indispensable books yet, they come very highly recommended from your's truly.

The Woman

2011-08-02T17:44:00.003+10:00

This month Lucky McKee and brave actress Pollyanna McIntosh will be at Melbourne's Cinema Nova and Sydney's Chauvel to do Q&A's for their new shocker The Woman. The dates are August 9th and 10th respectively.

I was dying to see The Woman earlier this year, so I caved in to temptation a while ago and watched the screener rip that's been kicking around... but now I'm freshly psyched to be seeing it again in a theatre (and hopefully with an appreciative audience). The Woman is a small film, but the striking sound design and beautifully lensed rural locations and interiors should make for an atmospheric theatre experience. It's quite a unique little horror trip, radically at odds with my expectations for it (partially fueled by the hilarious reaction of that jackass at Sundance). What appeared to me at first to be a riff on Martyrs is actually a very different animal indeed, and I have a hard time thinking of another movie to compare it to.

I'm a fan of McKee's, having enjoyed everything he's done so far, including the much maligned The Woods and his unfairly criticised Masters Of Horror episode Sick Girl. May remains a riveting horror character study, and Red is an excellent Jack Ketchum adaptation (although I'm still unsure how much of McKee's work made it to the final cut there). I actually consider the man to be one of the most consistently original voices in contemporary American horror.

On another note, I imagine Ketchum must be fairly pleased with the progress of his cinematic career thus far. Chris Sivertson's The Lost was excellent (thanks in part to Marc Senter's show-stopping portrayal of height-challenged sociopath Ray Pye); Red is an effective slow-burn revenger that again benefits from a killer performance by Brian Cox; and I've yet to see (or read) The Girl Next Door, but there seems to be plenty of good will towards it amongst horror fans online. The general consensus seems to be that the last Ketchum adaptation - Offspring - was a bad misfire (can't comment)... but four out of five ain't bad! I should point out that Pollyanna McIntosh's impressive performance in The Woman is a reprisal of her portrayal of the same character in Offspring, both films having their origins in Ketchum's nauseatingly boundary-pushing splatterpunk novel Off Season.

I'll be at the screening at the Chauvel on the 10th, and I hope you can make it too. In case you haven't seen it yet, I'll leave you with this priceless gem taken from the film's inaugural screening at this year's Sundance film fest. In it you will see an apparently grown man (who seems to have stepped right out of the South Park Sundance episode) lose his shit and freak the fuck out about some sexualised violence in a fictional movie. I'd love to see his reaction to A Serbian Film!

SEE Jed As A Puppy!

2011-07-15T21:12:00.001+10:00

"Se til helvete og kom dere vekk. Det er ikke en bikkje, det er en slags ting! Det imiterer en bikkje, det er ikke virkelig! Kom dere vekk, idioter!"

So, here it is, the trailer for this year's prequel to The Thing. I don't mind that the film appears to be an obvious hybrid of remake and prequel, as I anticipated that from the outset. My main problem with this trailer is that everything feels a bit "flat". The Thing is essentially an intimate little story about an alien and a small group of humans, and as such it demands amazing creature FX and a strong, charismatic ensemble cast. At this stage I have grave doubts about both. I will say without reservation that Mary Elizabeth Winstead definitely looks like the warmest place to hide. Ahem.

Not Human

2011-07-12T17:56:00.006+10:00

A mere three months (almost to the day) before The Thing 2011 hits theatres, and Universal has finally seen fit to release the film's first promotional material. I like the logo's simplicity, and that it's so similar to the '82 poster logo. It's also interesting to note that they've opted for a painted image, obviously reminiscent of Drew Struzan's iconic artwork for Carpenter's film (right). The image also recalls the transformation and demise of poor Bennings (below).

That's right, I'm still actually holding out hope for this...

Mortician, Heal Thyself

2011-07-05T21:13:00.002+10:00

cadaver's eyes... dead inside

Discerning gorehounds should require no introduction to Nacho Cerda, or the film that I'm offering for your downloading pleasure today - his half hour mini-masterpiece Aftermath. The infamous little film was once considered to be somewhat of a holy grail for connoisseurs of grue, a bona fide underground phenomenon to be sought out and experienced on bootleg VHS. That was until a few years ago, when risk-taking DVD company Unearthed Films bequeathed it to the masses on a feature packed disc that collects the film with it's two sibling works - The Awakening and Genesis.

To paraphrase something I wrote last year, I think Aftermath dwells in the same rarefied cinematic netherworld as Hideshi Hino's two Guinea Pig entries - Flowers Of Flesh And Blood and Mermaid In A Manhole (both also available on DVD from Unearthed). It's a shadowy limbo where the rules that govern the divisions between "culture" and "trash" are upset, allowing (among other anomalies) art and gore to coexist - comfortably and without a hint of pretense, irony or "artistic slumming".

Of course I'm not saying that horror cinema and "highbrow" art are mutually exclusive. One needs only peruse the works of Ken Russell, David Lynch, Kei Fujiwara, Lars von Trier, Shinya Tsukamoto, David Cronenberg, Jörg Buttgereit and many others to see that, if anything, the opposite is true. My point is that Aftermath and Hino's Guinea Pig films belong to a very small subset of films that seem to draw their inspiration from the least accessible reaches of each sphere - extreme gore (eg non-narrative, faux-snuff) and performance art.

What might appear to be an unlikely marriage at first glance suddenly makes more sense when you consider the shock tactics employed by some of the more extreme performance artists of the 60's, 70's and 80's. Take for example the excesses of the Viennese Aktionismus collective - the ritualistic disembowelment of animals favoured by Hermann Nitsch or the simulated penile dismemberment of Rudolf Schwarzkogler. There are undeniable commonalities shared by the extremes of horror fiction and art: unfettered imagination; a desire to push cultural boundaries and explore taboos; a distaste for the banal, the mainstream and the commercial.

all in a day's work...

Cerda's Aftermath certainly ticks all these boxes - it's highly imaginative, taboo smashing and about as non-commercial as you can get. Not to say that Cerda didn't have commercial ambitions for Aftermath, indeed he originally conceived of it as a show reel to sell his talents as a director(!). However, unlike many show reels, this film isn't a shallow, technical exercise but a deeply personal project in it's own right. Amongst the gruesome proceedings, one can clearly see evidence of Cerda's fascination with Catholic iconography. It seems to me that the mortician here is a priest, garbed in his sacred vestments, and going through the motions of his familiar ritual. The morgue is his chapel... the autopsy table his altar. But all is not well in this death church, for the sense of elitist power that comes with the responsibility of presiding over the dead has overwhelmed the priest, festering into corruption and perversion.

The mortician's eyes, above his surgical mask, reveal a great deal of the turmoil that rages within. Self loathing, desire, pain, cunning, addiction, shame, and an exhaustion that will never be cured by sleep. His carnal desires have consumed him to the point that he has become an automaton, and although those eyes reveal much, they are also the dead eyes of a reptile. As dead as the corpses upon which the mortician works... and preys. Indeed the highly realistic cadavers laid out on the morgue's tables appear to have more life than he.

Speaking of convincing realism, Cerda did extensive research for Aftermath, interviewing a forensic surgeon and even attending a triple autopsy. The film was shot in a real, functioning morgue in Barcelona, and the corpses seen therein are a combination of exceptional prosthetic work and one amazing performance by a live actor. The outcome of all this research and attention to detail is a very unsettling vérité experience indeed. The late Chas. Balun even claimed that Nacho had gone too far, when he famously labeled the film as pornographic.

Add to the above attributes some beautiful cinematography, graceful editing and powerful sound design, and you've got yourself a pretty special little slice of sickness. Buy it directly from Unearthed Films HERE, but for now enjoy this nicely ripped AVI. Click on the Necrophiliac Mortician...

Fuck The OFLC

2011-06-19T18:20:00.007+10:00

Our forceful guardians of dubious morality, the OFLC, have been quite busy in the last couple of years. Oh yes.

Last year they banned Bruce LaBruce's L.A. Zombie outright. The scissor-happy sadists then refused to grant it a festival exemption, which would have allowed it to play at the Melbourne International Film Festival where it was already scheduled to do so. The MIFF organisers got cold feet and cancelled the screening.

Shortly after that, Richard Wolstencroft (director of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival) organised for a screening of the film to be held at MUFF, in protest of the OFLC's actions. The screening went ahead, but not long after Richard was rewarded for his troubles by having his house raided by police and charges laid against him. That debacle is still being played out in the courts.

Then last December the OFLC flew into another fit of tooth-grinding moral outrage while enduring a viewing of Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film. Of course their reaction to it was to freak out and ban the fuck out of it. Later, after the film's Australian distributor trimmed two minutes of carnage and resubmitted it... they banned that cut too! On the third submission (with three minutes excised) they finally relented and granted it an R18+, but the fully uncut film remains contraband in this country.

The silver lining to all this is that, with impeccable timing, Shawn Lewis and the other degenerates at Rotten Cotton have recently unleashed a line of t-shirts to celebrate the transgressive boundary destruction that is A Serbian Film. It couldn't be a better time to show your support for freedom of artistic expression and your distaste for the censor's shears. There's three designs to choose from (I'm partial to "MILOS" myself), and you can order right HERE.

More info on censorship in Australia HERE.

UPDATE: Well, I just learned that I'm a bit out of touch... according to their website the OFLC (The Office of Film and Literature Classification) ceased to exist back in 2006, and to quote their FAQ: "its responsibilities were transferred to the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board and the Attorney-General's Department." Anyway, it's just the same bunch of puritanical bureaucrats operating under a different name.

So it's just the "Classification Board" now is it? How much more Orwellian sounding can you get?

Keep Watching The Skies!

2011-06-06T15:15:00.002+10:00

Just a few short months before the third adaptation of John W. Campbell's seminal SF horror story hits theatres, let's take a moment to acknowledge the passing of the man who first donned that monster makeup, back in 1951's The Thing From Another World. At an imposing 6' 6" James Arness was an obvious choice for the role of rampaging extraterrestrial, although unlike some of his Famous Monster brethren, he apparently wasn't very fond of the character. Genre fans will also remember him for his role in another iconic creature feature, 1954's atomic cautionary tale Them (right).

Insect Politics

2011-06-03T15:27:00.002+10:00

Before deserting your grey, battery-hen cubicle for the promise of another hazy weekend, I'd like to show you something genuinely mesmerising and beautiful. It's a short film called Loom, and it's the latest work from a German creative firm known as Polynoid. From a cursory glance around their website, they seem to specialise in high-end CG animation for advertising, however this particular film is a purely creative effort, presumably to draw attention to their talents.

Directed by Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck and Csaba Letay, this five minute short took a staggering entire year to complete. To put that into perspective, many bloated FX blockbusters complete a full feature's worth of CG in well under that time, resulting in the subpar "spectacles" that so often sully the screens at the local multiplex. Conversely, the love and attention to detail in Loom is evident in every frame of it's scant running time.

Enjoy, and have a good weekend.

Sydney Film Festival 2011

2011-05-25T18:38:00.004+10:00

Rejoice! This year's Sydney Film Festival (running 8-19 June) is the most genre friendly in years. They're offering up a varied platter of cinematic goodness ranging from exploitation gorefests to metaphysical mindfucks and everything in between. Samurais, vampires, hitmen, trolls, hillbillies, mutants, paranoid survivalists and a shotgun toting Rutger Hauer... they're all here! Below you can find my selection of the best of the fest. I'll be lurking at 13 Assassins, Kill List, Take Shelter, Elite Squad, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Tree Of Life, Stake Land and Hobo With A Shotgun, so if you spot a guy with a very bald head and a horror, punk or metal t-shirt, come over and say hi!

Get all your info and tix at the SFF site right here, and BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!

13 ASSASSINS

Prolific Japanese movie maverick Miike Takashi shifts gears from his usual hyper-violent style with this classy remake of Eiichi Kudo's 1963 film, set in the twilight of Japan's feudal era. The sadistic brother of the Shogun, Lord Naritsugu, satisfies his bloodlust by brutally terrorising the people and gets away with it because of his political connections. Master samurai Shinzaemon Shimada (Kôji Yakusho of Tokyo Sonata, SFF 2008) is summoned to assassinate him and is pitted against his old friend and sparring partner Hanbei, who now leads the evil Nartisugu's personal army and must rigidly observe the samurai code regardless of his own principles. Shinzaemon bands together a motley crew of 12 men and begins to plan a complicated ambush. The meticulously designed slow-burn set up ultimately leads to a breathtaking 45-minute battle sequence that combines the mastery of Akira Kurosawa with the in-your-face excesses of Quentin Tarantino - and yes, the blood does flow!

KILL LIST

Jay's got problems. His marriage to Shel has descended into a screaming match, his £40,000 stash has disappeared and he hasn't worked in eight months. A former soldier who hasn't recovered from a 'stormy' mission in Kosovo, Jay's a hit man and he's hit rock bottom. Opening as a confronting domestic drama, director Ben Wheatley's stunning second feature spins off in strange, unpredictable and entirely pulse-pounding directions once Jay and best mate/army buddy Gal start working for a particularly sinister client. Pulling the tired old 'troubled hitman' formula by the scruff of the neck and propelling Gal and the increasingly unhinged Jay into a nightmare you won't soon forget, Kill List marks Wheatley as a talent to watch.

THE TREE OF LIFE

The elliptical narrative of Terrence Malick's rapturously beautiful, emotionally arresting film audaciously segues between the particular (the repressed desires and shimmering aspirations of the O'Briens, a middle-American family in the 1950s) and the universal (the continuous cycle of existence, from the age of the dinosaurs to the new world). "There are two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace," says the voice of Jack's mother in the opening moments, and while young Jack (Hunter McCracken) must choose a path - between father (Brad Pitt) and mother (Jessica Chastain), competition and allegiance, success and happiness - old Jack (Sean Penn) has lost his way and is searching for permanence in a gleaming, chaotic modern city. Dreams and memory collide in Jack's spiritual, emotional and intellectual journey as he seeks to reconcile with the past, to reclaim his relationship with his father and to properly mourn the loss of his brother. More densely labyrinthine than any of Malick's previous films (The New World, The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven, Badlands), the slippery editing is in absolute collusion with Alexandre Desplat's soaring music and Emmanuel Lubezki's glorious cinematography. The result is a commanding cinematic paean to life - its intimacy, messiness and grandeur.

STAKE LAND

With a script as sharp as the fangs on the vampire hordes it lets loose, Stake Land is one mighty meaty and exciting horror pic. Striking the perfect balance of bloody thrills and pungent social commentary, ace director and co-scripter Jim Mickle (remember that name) centres his tale on teenage orphan Martin and his tough-as-nails vampire-slaying guardian, 'Mister', surviving on the road after America is overrun by bloodthirsty beasts. What separates this film from the pack is the added threat posed by Jebediah, a fanatical Christian fundamentalist whose followers believe the monsters have been sent by the Almighty himself. At once a crunching gore-shocker and a potent critique of intolerance and extreme right-wing conservatism, Stake Land keeps the pupils popping from get-go to fade-out. And if that's not enough, Kelly McGillis makes a fabulous return to features after a decade's absence - as a nun!

CORMAN'S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL

Before CGI-laden monster movies, high-concept horror films and cautionary tales of teenagers gone bad, there was Roger Corman. Now in his sixth decade of producing low-budget genre quickies like Monster From the Ocean Floor, The Wild Angels and Rock 'n' Roll High School, Corman is also noteworthy for giving early breaks to aspiring filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. They join a substantial roster of the Corman faithful and beloved genre stalwarts - Dick Miller! Mary Woronov! Eli Roth? - in singing the praises of Corman and his utterly unique brand of soft-spoken pragmatism in this documentary tribute. Credit writer-director Alex Stapleton with pulling revelatory backstage stories from everyone (particularly Nicholson) and stuffing his film to the gills with astutely selected and remarkably well-preserved clips. For fans convinced true genre filmmaking died by killer shark and skywalking space operas, the King of the Bs welcomes your fealty.

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Having already received a directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Sean Durkin's stunning debut feature is one of few films in history to be subsequently included in the Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival. Elizabeth Olsen (the captivating younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley) plays Martha, a young woman who reunites with older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) after she mysteriously escapes from a bucolic commune. Lucy's materialistic husband (Hugh Dancy) and their nouveau riche estate prove suffocating and oppressive but Martha (whose identity slips between each of the titular names) stays, terrified that the enigmatic leader of the collective (John Hawkes) will track her down. Rippling with a permanent sense of threat (Michael Haneke's Funny Games provides more than tonal reference) Durkin's filmmaking and Jody Lee Lipes' exquisite cinematography are perfectly attuned to both beauty within the frame and the power of what to leave outside it.

SEPTIEN

If Ingmar Bergman had wandered into rural Tennessee and downed a few too many shots of moonshine he might have made something like this bizarre and compelling family drama. Mixing elements of Southern Gothic, sports drama, situation comedy and backwoods horror with biblical overtones, Septien takes us to the very strange farmhouse of the Rawlings brothers. Cornelius (played by writer-director Michael Tully), a Christlike figure and brilliant sportsman, has returned after an 18-year absence. Amos creates grotesque art in the barn, while Ezra dons a frock and does the housework. Then there's Wilbur Cunningham, who lives in a tyre in the backyard. When a plumbing problem needs fixing the you-know-what really hits the fan. A disturbing, fascinating and darkly comic portrait of family ties, obsession and redemption, Tully's movie is an American original that's not to be missed.

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN

Cult kingpin Rutger Hauer is baaaack! Starring in the sleaziest piece of gutter trash to hit the screen in years, the 67-year-old is dynamite as an unnamed Skid Row bum who arrives (on a freight train, natch) at the hellhole of Hope Town and doesn't like what he sees. Helped by hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Abby, the pissed-off pensioner swaps his walking stick for a shotgun and points it in the direction of the nastiest crime family you're ever likely to meet. The second spoof 'trailer' from Grindhouse to evolve into a feature film, Hobo is a stylishly assembled, extremely violent and grimly humorous throwback to the glory days of 70s exploitation cinema. Is this the ne plus ultra of vigilante movies? Gather your guts if you dare and decide for yourself.

TAKE SHELTER

Jeff Nichols' daring psychological thriller stars Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon (who also gave a knock-out performance in Nichols' debut film, Shotgun Stories, SFF 2007) as Curtis LaForche, a working man living in small-town Ohio with his beautiful wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and their young, hearing-impaired daughter. When Curtis's recurring dream of an ominous storm becomes increasingly vivid, he fears for both his sanity and the safety of his family. Internalising his anxieties, his outward behaviour becomes progressively stranger to his wife and fellow workers, and then the hallucinations start to invade his waking life with terrifying consequences. Is Curtis experiencing deranged visions or premonitions? David Wingo's broody, foreboding score and Nichol's exacting script allude to the possible origins of Curtis's psychic malady - impending ecological disaster, economic uncertainty and threatened masculinity - all the while, like Todd Hayne's Safe, maintaining a slippery and perfectly measured ambiguity. As dramatic metaphor, his disruptive behaviour holds a mirror to the fears and contradictions pervasive in contemporary life. With a performance reminiscent of James Mason's in Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, Shannon is totally transfixing as the unhinged everyman.

TROLL HUNTER

The legendary Scandinavian monster is the star of this scary and funny conspiracy chiller. Presented as surviving footage shot by a student documentary crew investigating the mysterious deaths of bears, André Øvredal's nail-biter goes deep into the woods to discover something at once scary and magical at play. The key to unlocking the activities of Norway's secretive Troll Security Service is Hans, a 'bear hunter' who reluctantly allows the ambitious filmmakers to chronicle his activities. The result is a captivating, frequently amusing and surprisingly touching series of encounters with monsters far more complex and formidable than the dim-witted creatures of Norse folklore. Exciting and hugely entertaining, The Troll Hunter is quite possibly the finest entry yet in the found-footage documentary cycle triggered by The Blair Witch Project.

ELITE SQUAD: THE ENEMY WITHIN

Now the highest-grossing Brazilian film of all time, José Padilha's (Bus 174, SFF 2003) high-octane follow-up to his controversial 2008 Berlin Film Festival-winner Elite Squad (SFF 2008) is also a nail-biting standalone thriller drawn straight from the headline news. More than a decade has passed and Nascimento (Wagner Moura) has been promoted from captain of BOPE - the rabid military police who shoot first and don't give a damn about questions - to Chief of Rio's intelligence bureau. His ex-wife is remarried to ambitious human rights advocate Fraga, and his relationship with his teenage son is faltering. In a narrative move that reflects the popular TV series The Wire, the professional and personal changes in the life of Nascimento broaden the perspective of the original film, shifting the focus from the drug wars in the favelas to police vice and political corruption, making for a film that is just as relentlessly paced as its predecessor and dramatically even richer.

TUCKER & DALE VS EVIL

In this rib-tickling reversal of horror movie conventions, Tucker and his best buddy Dale are sensitive, kind-hearted hillbillies. But try telling that to the college kids camping near the duo's shack deep in the Appalachians. Convinced they've stumbled into The Hills Have Eyes territory, fratboy Chad and his panicked pals decide attack is the best form of defense and launch a hilariously inept 'kill-them-before-they-kill-us' assault on their supposed enemies. A treat for dedicated gorehounds and serious film buffs alike, this terrifically topsy-turvy take on the 'spam-in-a-cabin' horror cycle of the 70s and 80s comes complete with the most eye-catching use of a wood chipping machine since Fargo. Winner of the Midnight Movie audience award at SXSW, this is splatstick of the funniest kind.

MUTANT GIRLS SQUAD

You've never seen a coming-of-age story like this before. On her sixteenth birthday, mousey schoolgirl Rin discovers she's part of a mutant clan at war with humans. Suddenly sprouting a Freddy Krueger-like hand and an attitude to match, Rin slips into a spangly silver jumpsuit and joins a fighting force of foxy mutant femmes in a blood-drenched battle for nothing less than the survival of her species. Produced by Sushi Typhoon, the geniuses behind Alien vs Ninja and Karate-Robo Zaborgar, this example of Extreme Asian entertainment proudly goes where X-Men dares not tread. Non-stop comic-book carnage doesn't get much better than this.

All film info courtesy of Sydney Film Festival

Un Altro Giallo

2011-05-24T15:33:00.005+10:00

Here's yet another upcoming European neo giallo that I forgot to include in the previous post! Masks is the second feature from German director Andreas Marschall, who previously helmed the reputedly quite gory occult horror flick Tears Of Kali. I'm attracted to directors who have a thematic concern that they revisit throughout their body of work, so it's interesting to note that both of Marschall's films so far revolve around violent cults. I always hope in such instances that we're seeing the emergence of a talented new auteur.

Masks is one of the new crop of retro-Italiana that's unashamedly flaunting it's influences - front and centre, and subtlety by damned. This looks very slick for a low budget effort, but if I have one criticism based on the trailer, it's that Marschall seems to be walking a very fine like between riffing off, and just plain ripping off, Suspiria (he also cites Sergio Martino's All The Colors Of The Dark as an influence). I'm fond of Lucky McKee's The Woods because I think he managed to craft a respectful homage to Suspiria, whilst injecting enough of his own ideas to give the film it's own life. With Masks, I'm not sure if Marschall is offering much more than Argento worship.

After watching the trailer, what say you? Am I being too harsh?

Giallo 2000!

2011-05-22T13:39:00.009+10:00

Although rehashing the past rarely makes for groundbreaking or progressive cinema, I'm personally quite pleased that the recent trend of revisiting the style and tropes of 70's and 80's gialli seems to be flourishing. The giallo was a wonderful, gorgeous, lurid and insane chapter of cinematic history - and until recently it looked like it was all behind us, the genre having petered out into such inferior entries as Al Festa's woeful Fatal Frames ('96) and Argento's exponentially worsening output (culminating in the absolute nadir of 2009's ironically titled Giallo). In my opinion, the last really worthwhile examples of the form were The Stendhal Syndrome and Deodato's under-appreciated The Washing Machine.

Around ten years ago I was so craving a revival of the genre that I eagerly handed over my cash to Trevor Barley/Roman Nowicki for the "pleasure" of watching the first entry in his notorious Fantom Kiler series. The enticing stills of what appeared to be the masked, fedora wearing killer from Mario Bava's Blood And Black Lace menacing naked women with a gleaming knife were impossible for me to resist. I actually watched it a few times, disliking it more with each viewing, until I finally had to admit to myself that I had been thoroughly duped. This wasn't the real thing... just an opportunistic appropriation of the fetishes of the genre, distilled into a sleazy and distastefully misogynistic fantasy. I'm no politically correct prude, and I'll happily admit to getting a few kicks and laughs out of it, but in the end I found Kiler to be little more than an unpleasant pile of shit, carefully dusted with a light coating of sugar.

Let's face it, it makes Giallo a Venezia look like a work of high art, and comparisons to other notorious films like House On The Edge Of The Park and The New York Ripper are an unforgivable insult to Fulci, Deodato and everyone else involved with those fine films. But enough about that.

One could argue that a revival of the giallo is impossible - that the form was entirely a product of it's time and cultural milieu and can't be anything but disingenuous now. If misfires like Chris Sivertson's I Know Who Killed Me (unfairly maligned, but a pretty poor flick nonetheless) were the norm, I'd probably agree with that assertion. However, it would seem that we're starting to see a number of European films emerge that aren't just aping the tropes of the Italian thriller, but building on it's conventions to further the genre in hopefully progressive ways. Let's take a look at some recently released and upcoming examples:

AMER

This French/Belgian co-production from 2009 is the only film on this list that I've seen, and it may well prove to be the best of the bunch. After helming a string of short films together, this is the feature debut of co-writers/directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, and it's an impressive first effort to be sure. Although unmistakeably a modern giallo, Amer is more suited to the arthouse than the grindhouse, and will no doubt frustrate some viewers who are expecting more of a traditional stalk and slash scenario, as suggested by it's poster (but what a poster that is!).

Nonetheless it is overflowing with recognisable elements, most notably it's use of otherworldly lighting gels; a fantastic score made up of classic tracks culled from the likes of Sergio Martino's Case Of The Scorpion's Tail and Paolo Cavara's Black Belly Of The Tarantula; and a scene involving a straight razor that you won't soon forget. Some reviewers have criticised Amer for being an exercise in style over substance, but I suspect that's likely due to it's rather obfuscating narrative style. The film is heavily reliant on arcane visual symbolism to tell it's story, and if misunderstood (or ignored) it's quite understandable that one would find find it all a bit bewildering. For an in depth analysis of the film's symbolic meaning and cinematic references see Cinezilla's fascinating review HERE.

JULIA'S EYES (LOS OJOS DE JULIA)

This Spanish film from last year, produced by the prolific Guillermo del Toro, reportedly plays as more of a traditional thriller than the previous Amer, perhaps making it more akin to some of De Palma's early films than the Italian directors who influenced him. Reactions have been mixed on this one, but most reviewers seem to agree that the lead performance by Belén Rueda - in a dual role, playing twin sisters - is excellent and worth the price of admission alone. A complaint common to many reviews is that the tension and dread built up in the initial hour is betrayed by a disappointingly incohesive finale. Quibbles like that won't keep me from checking this out however, as I've been reeled in by it's obvious style, atmosphere and creep factor. Coincidentally, this is screening in Sydney tonight as the closer for this year's Spanish Film Festival... get your tickets HERE!

OND TRO

From what I can gather, last year's Swedish thriller Ond Tro (Bad Faith) is less reliant on the more overt visual cliche's of the giallo than the other films on this list. Don't expect any garish colour gels here, rather a less superficial connection to the genre, embodied in a plot element familiar from movies such as Deep Red and Tenebrae - that of the witness to a murder becoming so immersed in solving the case, that they suddenly find themselves dangerously at the centre of it. I need no further enticement to get my ass in the seat for this than knowing that it was shot by one Hoyte van Hoytema, the brilliant cinematographer behind Let The Right One In.

LAST CARESS

Let's leave High Brow alone for now, and fix our lecherous gaze upon this sleazy and sadistic looking little flick. Upcoming French erotic shocker Last Caress doesn't seem to give a damn about the finer elements of the giallo, it just wants to exploit every gory, sexy fetish of the genre to maximum effect. Frankly, the trailers, stills and poster for this scream "Fantom Kiler with better production values", but I think I can live with that. To be fair, this does appear to be a lot classier than Kiler (not that that's much of a complement), but whether that makes me a complete sucker or not will depend on the quality of the final product. In the meantime, the trailers provide plenty of enjoyably carnal carnage, and if pillaging some of your favourite gialli isn't enough, these cinematic perpetrators (François Gaillard and Christophe Robin) are also teasing some nunsploitation and even a little imagery lifted straight out of The Beyond! Website and trailers HERE.

Finally, I had to include this awesome poster for an unrealised feature, from Argentinian indie director Daniel de la Vega, that went by the title of Necrofobia. It's such a perfect piece of giallo inspired art that I think it merits inclusion. I haven't seen any of de la Vega's work, but he obviously has an unhealthy fixation with Euro horror that traumatises him like a rabid cat in the brain. For proof of that obsession just look at the titles of some of his previous films: Jennifer's Shadow and Death Knows Your Name. Hmmm, talk about wearing your influences on your sleeve!

Maury & Bustillo Update

2011-05-14T15:01:00.004+10:00

Anyone who's been following the EYE for a while should be well aware by now that I'm a huge fan of Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's highly dramatic, art/gore masterpiece Inside (A L'interieur). Find the soundtrack HERE.

I've been frothing at the mouth in anticipation to see if they can repeat that magic on their sophomore effort, Livide, now in post production. There's still precious little info available online - a Wiki page HERE, and an earlier post of mine that points to a detailed behind the scenes video (in French) HERE.

A couple of days ago a few images surfaced online, scanned from French magazine Mad Movies. The two images of the bloody girl have been around for a while, albeit in lower resolution, but the image of the clawed crone below is new. If any of my readers speak French, you can find the whole article HERE, and I'd be eternally grateful if you could leave a comment regarding any juicy details therein.

Hell's Gates: Long Weekend

2011-05-11T16:37:00.005+10:00

In a concerted effort to finish something I start, here is the promised second installment of what I hope to become a regular column on Australian genre cinema, remembered through ephemera and promo materials. Find the first Hell's Gates post HERE.

1978's Long Weekend, directed by the late Colin Eggleston, was probably my first real exposure to a locally produced genre film. As a child, a viewing of Long Weekend on the big screen made an indelible impression on me, the legacy of which lingers to this day. This film was almost certainly my first experience of being made explicitly aware of the callousness and destructive myopia with which we humans treat our environment.

I can remember the events of this film disturbing me for weeks, the relentlessly advancing dugong carcass in particular, which creeped me out in much the same way that King's insidious topiary animals did in The Shining. But Long Weekend has more significance to me than as just an early horror experience - it was instrumental in steering me down a path that would eventually lead me to become actively concerned about our mistreatment of animals and the environment (the other catalyst being the Dead Kennedys' song "Moon Over Marin").

Penned by legendary aussie genre writer Everett De Roche (Patrick, Roadgames, Razorback, Storm Warning and the recent Long Weekend remake), the film garnered quite a lot of well deserved acclaim on the European festival circuit, picking up a number of awards in France and Spain (including Best Film and Actor at Sitges '78). As a serious ecological horror film it was well ahead of it's time, leaving it's contemporaries - such as John Frankenheimer's Prophecy, released the following year - flailing in their respective toxic sludge pits. I believe it paved the way for the more mature eco-horrors of the future, such as Larry Fessenden's excellent The Last Winter.

In broader terms, it's a good little movie however you slice it, and I was pleased to discover upon a recent viewing that it hasn't been hamstrung by the passage of time and it's modest budget. Over three decades on, Long Weekend is still an effective, chilling and thought provoking little thriller, well worth your time.

As mentioned above, a couple of years ago De Roche returned to write an aussie remake of Weekend which was competently directed by Jamie Blanks (Urban Legend, Storm Warning), but seemed to get almost no attention whatsoever. As a remake it's quite slavishly faithful to the original, differing only in it's improved production values and the relative star power of James Caviezel. In the US the remake was saddled with the absolutely horrible title of Nature's Grave and a serious contender for ugliest DVD cover of all time, two factors that definitely didn't help the film's success stateside.

original Australian daybill

original Australian poster

beautiful French poster

Trans World Entertainment VHS cover

Interglobal Home Video VHS cover

an attractive one sheet for the remake

recent Synapse Films DVD release

Poster Ferox

2011-05-04T18:46:00.004+10:00

Check out the striking poster above for Ruggero Deodato's upcoming sequel to House On The Edge Of The Park (locandine for the original at right). It was designed by none other than blog-buddy Jeremy, aka Silverferox.

The film is set to star Giovanni Lombardo Radice (who also co-wrote), although what this means for Deodato's other gestating sequel is anyone's guess. Given that the Holocaust sequel would require location shooting in the Philippines (and has been struggling to get off the ground for a while), logic dictates that we'll more than likely see this one materialise first.

Jeremy is a talented graphic artist who specialises in "re-imagining" poster designs for classic horror and exploitation movies. Recently he seems to be receiving increasingly more commissions for poster designs for indie film projects, and given his talent it's no surprise. I'd like to congratulate Jeremy on his poster above - a fantastic piece of art, and an obvious career coup.

Take a look at his blog here. A few choice samples of his work below:

Rugged

2011-04-28T17:37:00.003+10:00

An alert to my fellow Sydneysiders, that New York rapper R.A. "the Rugged Man" Thorburn is playing The Gaelic in Surry Hills on May 5th. Fans of Frank Henenlotter will recognise his name from Frank's latest opus Bad Biology which Thorburn produced and co-wrote with the master (he also appears briefly).

I don't really know the man's music, but anyone who bankrolls the first Henenlotter film in a decade and a half is alright by me.

R.A. and Frank

Check out the track below that he wrote for Bad Biology. The lyrics are excellent, detailing the story of the making of the movie. Watch out for the line: "I wrote a script with the cult director Frank Henenlotter"!

Back From The Dead

2011-04-27T15:33:00.003+10:00

I move home from the Krankenhaus tomorrow, so it's time to get back to this blogging business. I still feel like shit and my brain is moving like industrial sludge, so my posts over the next few weeks will probably be of the less verbose variety. Maybe just some pretty pictures to viddy, my droogs.

Had to share this (via Fangoria), because it's just so damned cool. How cool? It's Snake Plissken, so it's holding steady on trajectory in the Gullfire and fast approaching Absolute Zero. For my money, there simply is no cooler badass in SF lore. Incidentally, check out the cover of the latest Fango. Fuck yeah.

This is a five minute clip of the legendary Alan Howarth performing music from EFNY and Christine just a couple of weeks ago at the Unsound Festival in New York. As the faithful already know, Alan also collaborated with JC on Big Trouble In Little China, Prince Of Darkness and They Live. The sound on this is good, so crank it up and enjoy!

Not enough? Well then, click the quote below for the OST to Escape From New York in all it's analog glory. It's at 320 and includes scans of all the CD artwork (thanks to the original uploader). Just to sweeten the deal I threw in some nice big poster scans for ya.

I don't give a fuck about your war... or your president

Hiatus

2011-04-04T17:47:00.002+10:00

Just a quick note to say that I'm moving into hospital tomorrow for four weeks of chemo and a stem cell transplant, so this is probably my last post until the first week of May. It'll be a new and interesting experience for me, because throughout my years of treatment, I've always been an outpatient. I'll have my laptop with me, however I'm not sure if there's any wifi access (we're talking public hospital here), but regardless I'll probably be feeling too shite to bother writing anyway.

I've been saving up some good reading for the occasion: Iain M. Banks' new Culture novel Surface Detail (I'm a huge fan); the first book in Joe Haldeman's new "Mars series", Marsbound; and Charles Burns' Black Hole which I've been wanting to read for years! As for viewing, I'll be sinking my teeth into The Wire season 3 and Deadwood season 3 - another couple of things I needed to catch up on.

I'll leave you, my friends, with this clip from a truly underrated classic, Dead & Buried (written by the dynamic duo of Shusett & O'Bannon). I hope my nurses treat me better than this evil bitch!

Akimbo And The Great White Bull

2011-03-31T19:43:00.002+11:00

There will be no salvation or respite from your aquatic nightmare, as you find yourself still treading water in the same chummy, shark infested seas as my last post. Below your anxiously beating legs the ocean yawns into seemingly infinite depths. Down... down through the Epipelagic and Mesopelagic zones, now deeper still, leaving the shadowy twilight behind for the crushing, frozen darkness of the midnight zone. No shapes can be discerned here, but one lurks nonetheless... an unseen giant, gracefully steering it's streamlined bulk into a steep ascent.

Carcharodon carcharias does not usually enjoy the taste of human flesh, but this one has already had a taste of this exotic meat... and liked it. There are no senses that you possess that could possibly alert you to the two ton horror hurtling towards you at 40 km/h, driven upwards by your pheromone trail of urine and terror...

Just as the great white shark lives to kill, Seattle's punk/metal wrecking crew Akimbo lives to crush, and if the abyssal depths don't pulverise your mutilated remains first, this epic album definitely will.

Certain genres of metal have just the right feeling of epic grandeur to make them perfectly suited to adapting the romance, mystery and violence of great seafaring mythology... and we've seen a lot of it in recent years (another album I often revisit is Ahab's Call Of The Wretched Sea). I've always assumed this trend came about because of a bad case of Norse/Anglo-Saxon/Christian/Middle-Earth/Conan/Elric myth-fatigue and the need to find fresh folklore and fiction to pillage. Well, the oceans have provided a great deal of rich material to play with, and I can't think of a better place to dive into those murky depths than from the muddy banks of this fetid little swamp. Oh, and with all the attention given to whales, sharks, giant squid and Dagon... don't forget THE CRABS!

Plenty of great music there landlubbers, but for my tarnished doubloons, Akimbo's Jersey Shores is the best of the bunch. Shores is a lovingly crafted ode to the infamous spate of fatal shark attacks that plagued the New Jersey coastline from July 1st to 12th, 1916. Five attacks in this brief period resulted in four fatalities, two of which occurred 26 km inland in an estuarine creek (including an 11 year old boy, Lester Stillwell). It's a fascinating story that I gather is pretty widely known in the States, but not so much elsewhere. Get all the gruesome facts HERE.

"the head, the tail, the whole damn thing"

As you've probably already guessed (or knew), just as Melville's inspiration for Moby Dick was the real-life sinking of the Essex; the 1916 NJ shark attacks were Peter Benchley's jumping-off point for Jaws. Spielberg's adaptation even makes a direct reference to the attacks - to quote the late, great Roy Scheider's Chief Martin Brody:

"And there's no limit to what he's gonna do! I mean we've already had three incidents, two people killed inside of a week. And it's gonna happen again, it happened before! The Jersey beach! 1916! Five people chewed up in the surf!"

There's been much speculation about the species and number of sharks involved in the Jersey Shore attacks, and from my limited knowledge I'd say that Benchley's unofficial summation of events is pretty unlikely. Given the ferocity of all the attacks, and the estuarine location of two, it sounds more like the behaviour of one or more bull sharks to me, as they're partial to hunting in brackish waters and are able to tolerate fresh. Just recently in the Queensland floods, two bulls were spotted cruising through suburban streets in Goodna (just 20 km from Brisbane). Also, bulls - along with tiger sharks - are generally regarded to have a more aggressive nature than white pointers.

I've often wondered, if Benchley and Spielberg had opted for a bull or tiger instead of a white... would the white still be saddled with it's erroneous reputation in popular culture as the most dangerous of sharks? Perhaps, simply due to it's more majestic appearance... but who knows?

It's interesting to note that the city I call home was blighted by a similar (but not fatal) spate of attacks a couple of years ago. To quote my own post on Illogical Contraption last year:

Here in Sydney we're home to (or regularly visited by) a number of potentially dangerous shark species such as Bulls, Tigers, Hammerheads, Makos, Bronze Whalers and Great Whites. In the last couple of years we've seen a spike of attacks in the harbour and on surrounding beaches, with three attacks over a three week period in February and March last year (the worst of which involved a naval diver in the harbour losing a hand and a leg to a Bull). The increase in attacks is generally attributed to over-fishing of oceanic waters and the cleaning up of Sydney's marine habitats (by pumping our effluent further out to sea for the last couple of decades). I'd like to point out that despite our local media's best attempts to demonise these beautiful creatures, I'm rabidly opposed to the culling of sharks.

All of this provides plenty of food for thought while your ears are being pummeled by Jersey Shores. And pummeled they will be. Although this album finds Akimbo dabbling in some gentler, more meandering passages in between their regular crushing attack, there's still plenty of satisfyingly raw, destructive power here. Standout track for me is "Great White Bull", which kept threatening to snap my neck when I first bought this. Fucking amazing song.

I should add that San Francisco's Giant Squid also released a concept album based on the same events entitled Monster In The Creek, but - in my humble opinion - it sucks shark cock. Both albums have tracks titled "Lester Stillwell".

Contact and buy stuff from Akimbo HERE & HERE

Dive into Jersey Shores HERE

Finally, does anyone know if a live recording exists for either of the Black Flag cover sets they played last year in Seattle and Portland (with the singer of Black Elk)? I want.

Eaten Alive

2011-03-19T18:34:00.003+11:00

Zombies. Monsters. Ghosts. Demons. I'll always love 'em, but the truth is that they just don't scare me much anymore. Unfortunately, desensitisation is an inevitable side effect of watching too many horror movies... sooner or later, the dreaded phantom of ennui casts it's long shadow over the enthusiasm of every long-term horror addict. I crave the unbearable nerve-shredding terror that I felt watching Evil Dead for the first time, but with each passing year it's an itch that's getting harder to scratch.

Well, for the second time in a year I'm happy to report that I've seen a movie that succeeded in scaring the shit out of me (the first was Adam Green's Frozen, which I raved about here).

New Aussie shark thriller The Reef falls under the same sub-genre as the aforementioned Frozen and their close cousins, Open Water and Black Water. The settings may differ, but all these movies are almost identically structured, exploiting the same universal fears and presenting them with the same pseudo-documentary realism. They're effective and scary purely because of this straight-forward simplicity.

In a time when genre film is increasingly reliant on gimmicks and twists to reinvigorate old ideas, it's refreshing to see these movies that are so unpretentious. Not every horror director can pull off the sociopolitical commentary of Romero or the philosophical musings of Cronenberg, and when they try, all too often it comes off as dishonest and shoehorned in - an attempt to lend a sense of depth and meaning to what amounts to little more than a conglomeration of cliches. The thing about these new nature shockers is that they don't need to be cerebral, or even unpredictable, to be frightening - the fears therein are primitive and visceral. The thought of being eaten alive by sharks or wolves is no less horrifying in the 21st Century than it was for our distant cave-dwelling ancestors.

For obvious reasons, The Reef is a closer relative to Open Water than Frozen, but where Open Water was only partially effective at evoking terror, Andrew Traucki's new shark-attack flick had me feeling a twinge of nervousness every time I set foot in the ocean this past summer (I caught an early screening a few months ago, just as summer was kicking in down here). In fact, I'll go on record here as saying that I think it's far and away the best shark movie since Jaws. Part of the film's success lies in Traucki's decision to reign in any temptation to try to outdo Jaws, and the film really benefits from this restrained approach and lack of excess. There's only one shark, and it's not a giant, just a very respectable 12-15 foot Great White. The shark behaves like an animal, not a monster; the protagonists like people, not heroes.

Although I didn't really like Traucki's previous crocodile thriller Black Water (set in Queensland, but shot in mangroves not an hour from where I'm sitting now), it does provide a good example of the degree of realism to which Traucki aspires. If you have any doubts about the veracity of that film's storyline, you shouldn't, as my friend Phil found out the hard way some years before it was made. At the time he and some friends were living a pretty feral existence in a rainforest region of Far North Queensland. Phil's no fool, has a good knowledge of the bush, and is respectfully aware of the myriad dangers it conceals.

One day a simple miscalculation found them deep in a mangrove area, with the tide coming in much earlier then expected - and very rapidly. All of them were well aware of the very real and present danger of saltwater crocodiles and promptly started hauling ass out of the swamp. Soon enough, the tide was too high and the danger of salties too great - so they were forced to take to the trees for the rest of the afternoon and the entire night, only crawling out, sore and exhausted, the next morning. They never even saw one that day, but statistics dictate that they made the right decision to climb those trees, and it may well have saved their lives.

You'll notice that I'm giving precious little away about The Reef. Honestly, it's such a pared-down little film, that to give away too much would be to do it a disservice. What do you need to know about it? It was masterfully shot on digital camera (a couple of Red cameras I believe) and looks gorgeous. The cast represents something of an Underbelly reunion, which is no bad thing. It builds tension that will wind you up 'til you're squirming in your chair. The next time you swim in oceanic water deeper than 30 feet, you'll keep feeling the urge to look behind and underneath you. Maybe curl your toes up and draw your legs in a little closer to your body. You'll try to relax as you start to hyperventilate... but there's no point telling yourself it's only a movie... because it's not.

It's Tom Cruise's Fault

2011-03-08T21:27:00.007+11:00

That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die

RIP GDT HPL

"Douchebag"

DEAD

Hell's Gates

2011-02-23T22:36:00.005+11:00

Hell's Gates: the treacherously narrow and shallow entrance to Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania, named so by the hapless convicts whose fate it was to pass through it. Once through those ominous Gates, the starving and scurvy ridden wretches would disembark at their destination - the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station at Sarah Island. For many of those unfortunates it would, quite literally, be their final destination.

It's also the name I'm giving to this new weekly feature dedicated to Australian horror. Each week I'll endeavour to celebrate a different Aussie horror movie through posters, ephemera and behind the scenes pics etc. In the wake of Mark Hartley's brilliant Ozploitation doc Not Quite Hollywood, there seems to be a renewed international interest in Terror Australis, so I hope some of you degenerates get a kick out of this!

I can't think of a better way to start this than with the most notorious convict ever to pass through Hell's Gates - Alexander Pearce. That's his skull at top. The infamous cannibal convict is probably Australia's most enduring folk horror figure, being the subject of several biographies, documentaries, a couple of pop songs and - of course - horror movies. Some lurid info from Wiki:

Pearce led an escape from Macquarie Harbour Penal Settlement and became notorious for cannibalising his fellow escapees as they travelled through the West Coast of Tasmania.

Pearce was eventually captured near Hobart and confessed that he and the others had cannibalised each other over a period of weeks, he being the last survivor. Pearce and Greenhill had been the final two, each struggling to stay awake for days out of fear the other would kill him. Greenhill finally nodded off and Pearce killed him with an axe, then ate him. Pearce made it to the settled districts, being sheltered by a convict shepherd until he was captured several months later. The Hobart magistrate did not believe Pearce's cannibalism story and was convinced the others were still living as bushrangers. Pearce was returned to Sarah Island.

Within a year he escaped a second time, joined by a young convict named Thomas Cox. Pearce was captured within ten days. His captors found parts of Cox's body in Pearce's pockets, even though he still had food left. Pearce confessed that he had killed Cox because he was a hindrance to him. Pearce was taken to Hobart, where he was tried and convicted of murdering and cannibalising Thomas Cox. He was hanged at the Hobart Town Gaol at 9am on 19 July 1824, after receiving the last rites from a priest. It is reported that just before Pearce was hung, he said:

"Man’s flesh is delicious. It tastes far better than fish or pork."

No mention of chicken then? Strange because ~~I've always found~~ I've heard it tastes more like chicken.

Anyway, in the last couple of years we've seen two Pearce films, and they couldn't be more distinct from each other in style and substance...

First up, Jody Dwyer's 2008 shocker Dying Breed. A flop at the Aussie box office, I personally enjoyed this less than original, but impressive debut. This one shifts the Pearce cannibal tale into a contemporary setting, by making the antagonists not the man himself, but his inbred descendants (the famous man-eater does make an appearance in a brief prologue sequence). You've seen The Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw, so there's nothing really new here, but there's still quite a lot to like about it. Shot on location in Tasmania in trying conditions, it has atmosphere to spare and looks fantastic - all rain, mist, mud and very cold looking forest. It's more than competently made, with good production values, decent turns from the thesps (even the annoying Leigh Whannell of Saw fame) and some tasty gore. I love this poster, which managed to raise the ire of our very own guardians of morality, the OFLC (our version of the MPAA/BBFC).

Released the following year, and existing on a different cinematic plane altogether, is Jonathan auf der Heide's more somber take on the grisly story - Van Diemen's Land. This one plays like Werner Herzog or Terrence Malick's take on the cannibal genre - slow burning, archly shot and obviously filmed on location (again in Tasmania) under unpleasant conditions and considerable duress. The results are astounding, showing off the grandeur of the Tassie forests, but twisting the beauty into a menacing Green Inferno - cold, hostile and utterly unsurvivable. This one won't be to everyone's tastes due to it's slow pace and emphasis on atmosphere over dialogue and action, but for the more patient viewer it's well worth the effort.

Death portrait of Pearce after his execution

The Mighty Monarch Of Exploitation!

2011-02-18T21:34:00.005+11:00

A few days late, but I want to acknowledge the passing of notorious sleaze producer David F. Friedman, partner in crime to the similarly infamous Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Starting in 1961 the two worked together frequently, first on Lewis' early nudie-cuties (The Adventures Of Lucky Pierre, Daughter Of The Sun, Nature's Playmates, Boin-n-g), and then on the seminal Grand Guignol trashfests Blood Feast, Color Me Blood Red and Two Thousand Maniacs! (the latter being a personal fave of yours truly).

The blood-letting in these flicks may be tame by today's standards, but it has to be viewed in the context of the era in which they were created. We're talking about splatter movies that were made almost 50 years ago! To give it some historical perspective: Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris closed it's doors for the final time in 1962... mere months before Blood Feast was unleashed on the world in '63.

With that in mind, I don't think it's hyperbole to say that Feast could be considered the symbolic heir to the anarchic, underground spirit embodied by that famous theatre. A harbinger of less morally constrained times to come... when a voyeuristic fascination with the darker and more carnal side of life would become a deep-rooted and permanent fixture of the mainstream psyche.

About a decade later my fondest and most rewatched Friedman-produced sickie was puked out, whereupon it immediately commenced goose stepping it's sexy jack boots all over the fresh graves of Good Taste and Decency. That film was of course Don Edmonds' delirious Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS, and it remains my favourite Nazisploitation flick to this day. Speaking of which, can any of my uber-knowledgeable readers comment on the origin of that Ilsa artwork at the top of this post?

Today, the legendary HGL posted a few warm words of his own about his old friend at Fangoria. It's well worth the read, here's an excerpt:

"On the set, Dave sometimes took a “What am I doing here?” role, but we all knew better. Once, the neighbors of a home in whose yard we were filming one of our goofy FX called the cops. A determined-looking policeman arrived, ready to growl and fuss. Within five minutes, Dave had the cop playing a role in the film."

"The rushes are late? Dave makes a phone call and they’re here by taxi. My ancient Mitchell camera isn't grinding? Dave knows somebody who will drop whatever he’s doing and come over to fix it. They want to kick us out of a location? No problem, just let Dave talk to them."

Check out the rest of Lewis' obit at Fango HERE.

Well, so long Dave, and thanks for all the mammaries!

Black Death & The Current State Of UK Horror

2011-02-16T16:53:00.003+11:00

English auteur-in-the-making Christopher Smith failed to make an impression on me with his slasher debut Creep. Fortunately, his output since then has gone from strength to strength, revealing a versatile director with a broad and original vision. On his first four movies, I'm impressed with the ease at which he's stayed within the horror genre but moved so effortlessly between sub-genres. From Creep, to Severance and Triangle, each successive film has marked what feels like an almost exponential growth in maturity and intelligence.

The culmination of Smith's work so far is his slow-burning, bleakly apocalyptic medieval fantasy Black Death, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Behold these two recent posters for it by Simon Bisley, who did a similar one for Neil Marshall's Centurion last year. I like that these artworks create a connection between the two films, because, to my mind, they're tonally quite similar. In fact I think there's a kind of parallel synchronicity to Smith's and Marshall's careers so far, the two becoming more confident and skilled in tandem. It's definitely not a stretch to say that these two fellows - along with Simon Rumley - are leading the charge of the NWOBH invasion.

Speaking of which, UK horror has been in consistently fine form for the last few years. I'm frequently blown away by new British movies, seemingly popping up out of nowhere. For example, has anyone seen Outcast, directed by one Colm McCarthy? I saw it the other night and, despite a rather rote feeling conclusion, it's brilliant! One of the coolest occult horror flicks I've ever seen, and bound for kvlt status I'm sure. In terms of pagan, witchy mysticism, it may well overshadow Robin Hardy's upcoming Wicker Man sequel, The Wicker Tree, which - if the trailer is any indication - is looking worryingly hokie (please prove me wrong Mr. Hardy).

Buffalora Returner

2011-01-26T15:57:00.003+11:00

"I'm the watchman of the Buffalora Cemetery. I don't know how the epidemic started. All I know is that some people, on the seventh night after their death, come back to life. I call them Returners, but frankly I can't understand why they're so anxious to return. The only way to get rid of them once and for all is to split their heads open. A spade'll do it, but a dum-dum bullet is best. Is this the beginning of an invasion? Does it happen in all cemeteries? Or is Buffalora just an exception? Who knows? And in the end, who cares? I'm just doing my job."

So says Francesco Dellamorte. However, it appears that he may be the one doing the Returning now, in a Michele Soavi written and directed sequel to his Dellamorte Dellamore, considered by many to be the last truly great Italian horror film (although I recently loved Federico Zampaglione's Shadow - more on that soon!). Fangoria is reporting that whilst conducting a recent interview with Dario Argento, Luigi Cozzi dropped this juicy bit of news:

“Michele has told me that he has started to write the script for a special horror project he plans to shoot between the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012: a sequel to his Gothic masterpiece Dellamorte Dellamore. He’s going to produce it himself and wants it to really be a great, strong, shocking Italian horror movie.”

Soavi has been conspicuously absent from the horror scene since his '94 masterpiece blew minds, although a couple of years ago he did tease a return to the genre with a project called Catacombs Club (which now seems to have evaporated into the celluloid ether).

Several years ago I caught a screening of his 2006 crime thriller Arrivederci Amore, Ciao (right) at a local Italian film fest, and although the story didn't make much of an impression on me, as a visual stylist it showed Soavi still very much at the top of his game. Years later, after only one viewing I still have some vivid images from that film indelibly printed on my psyche: an atmospheric monsoonal jungle - neon-lit noirish bars - a starkly cold hallway. He even had regular collaborator Sergio Stivaletti on hand to provide some animatronic FX, so it was obvious that his years of hiatus and as a TV director hadn't taken him too far from his roots.

It's curious that this should eventuate now, what with the other adaptation of Tiziano Sclavi's Dylan Dog comics - Dylan Dog: Dead of Night - just doing the rounds recently. That one stars Brandon Routh as the titular detective, but I'd love to see Rupert Everett and François Hadji-Lazaro reprise their roles in this.

Here is your obligatory Anna Falchi photo.

Perhaps listening to Manuel De Sica's score for Dellamorte will help you to ponder some of life's deepest philosophical questions: is there any real point to all this living, loving and dying? Is our perceived universe even real? Past this tunnel is the rest of the world...

What do you think the rest of the world looks like, Gnaghi?

ゴジラ

2011-01-19T00:00:00.003+11:00

The recent news that Monsters writer/director/cinematographer/editor/SFX wunderkind Gareth Edwards is the puny human selected to helm the new (American) Godzilla is awesome. I liked his Monsters a lot. Edwards has the sensibility to strike the right balance between SFX spectacle and character/story that could give this movie the gravitas and pathos that the big G deserves.

Of course we all know what happened the last time a studio other than Toho attempted this. It was bad. Unbelievably bad. However, balance was restored in 2004 when Toho (with the assistance of this badass) put a violent and final end to that Yankï gaijin kaijubortion. Ryûhei Kitamura's Godzilla: Final Wars saw the real Gojira completely fucking murder that fraud by throwing it into the Sydney Opera House. I actually stood around for a while one day as part of that sequence was shot, watching terrified people run down a debris strewn street not five minutes from where I live.

So, if there's one good thing to come out of that Hollywood fiasco, it's that it provides a ready-made and exhaustive primer on just what not to do this time:

Step 1: never hire Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich or Patrick Tatopoulos for anything. Ever. Again.

Step 2: just do the opposite of every single frame of that monstrous piece of shit.

Legendary Pictures is the company behind the new Godzilla. This instills a certain amount of confidence, as they're known for producing huge genre productions that comfortably sit at the smarter end of the mainstream spectrum (recent home to Christopher Nolan & Zack Snyder for example). Anyway, they've made a good start by offering the gig to Edwards.

Now, obliterate skyscrapers and melt tanks with your atomic heat ray, driven to destroy by the epic kaiju scores of Akira Ifukube and Masaru Sato. Stomp on the cover.

"Children of the night... what music they make"

2011-01-15T15:21:00.007+11:00

Last night I crawled out of my rotting coffin, ascended from this vaulted cellar and took to the city streets. Not in search of human prey and warm blood, but to see Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet perform their Dracula score live in front of a screening of Tod Browning's magnum opus.

It was quite an experience, seeing a beautifully restored print of the 1931 Universal classic in Sydney's most atmospheric old theatre (right). All of the ushers were dressed in Transylvanian black (including long capes with crimson lining), which was a nice touch.

This was my first time hearing the 1998 score, and I was impressed by it's originality, Glass having seemingly avoided falling back on the conventional motifs common to most modern horror scores. This music isn't so much creepy or scary as it is dramatic, but thankfully not the melodramatic orchestral bombast that has always been the bane of Hollywood. The Kronos' small ensemble of strings and piano don't overwhelm the imagery, and the style - which is reminiscent in parts of traditional Hungarian and Romanian gypsy music - is perfectly suited to the film's moody Gothic atmosphere. A good example of cinematic revisionism done right.

Bonus trivia: you probably already know that the Kronos Quartet performed the memorable score for Darren Aronofsky's Requiem For A Dream as well as his visionary (and sadly overlooked) The Fountain, but did you know that Philip Glass contributed two original pieces to Michele Soavi's The Church?

Holocausto Sperduta Nel Parco!

2010-12-26T16:06:00.007+11:00

It's Xmas, so let's take a moment to reflect inwardly and... nah, fuck that, let's talk about Cannibal Holocaust and House On The Edge Of The Park instead.

300-issue-old Fangoria just reported that Ruggero Deodato wants to cast David Hess in Cannibal Holocaust II. Earlier this year I heard that the project had fallen apart (see poster at right) - but assuming that Fango's sources are correct, Holocausto Canibal II would reunite the notorious duo for the first time since the excellent House On The Edge Of The Park and the execrable Body Count.

A comment on the Fango article also mentions some discussion of Federico "Shadow" Zampaglione coming aboard to serve as assistant director on the film. To really fill me with holiday cheer however, I'd like to see Deodato send everyone's favourite whipping boy Giovanni Lombardo Radice into the green inferno. But given Radice's very public regrets about Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox, that ain't gonna happen!

If all goes to plan, Deodato and Hess might be sweating it out on location in the Philippines at some point in the first half of 2011.

"Price check on Lembas Bread, aisle 3 please"

2010-12-10T17:39:00.004+11:00

At the supermarket yesterday, the bearded fellow with furrowed brow at the checkout next to mine turned out to be none other than Elrond Half-Elven - son of Eärendil & Elwing and Lord of Rivendell. At over 6,000 years old, the one-time herald of Gil-galad is a legendary veteran of the War of the Ring, having done battle with the foul hordes of Morgoth's Servant at both the Fall of Eregion and the Siege of Barad-dûr. At Barad-dûr he fought bravely beside Elendil and Gil-galad, even as both were felled by the Dark Lord's hand. I assume he was at Woolworths to stock up on lembas, miruvor and maybe a case of Ent-draught.

I politely asked him if he'd be returning to Middle-Earth for The Hobbit. With a twinkle in his eye, he smiled and said yes...

Bloodclot Movies!

2010-12-04T15:48:00.001+11:00

In 1983 Rock For Light was among the first 20 or so punk records that I ever bought or heard. I could go on about how it challenged my understanding of what the philosophy and culture of hardcore could be about (not that I thought about it in those terms at 14 years old), but the more important point is the music itself. The inclusion of religion may have confused and annoyed me, but it paled into insignificance before the devastating ferocity of the Brains' sonic attack. The previous year I'd been completely floored by the blinding intensity of This Is Boston, Not L.A. and Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record, but neither of those LPs had the sheer hair-raising emotional power of Rock For Light. It was mind blowing.

I saw them at the Marquee in London six years later, just before they split for the first time. I remember being surprised at how laid back the band looked while shredding so hard - all except H.R. that is. He didn't move around the stage much, but he exuded the white-hot, unfaltering commitment of a man completely possessed. A wide-eyed madman on a mission, his presence filled the room in a way that I've seldom experienced since. As they tore through their set and H.R. threw his large frame through a couple of his signature back flips, I barely averted my eyes... even when the pinned and drunken crusty behind me pissed all over my leg.

As always seems to be the case, such ardent zealotry comes at the expense of a sense of humour, open mindedness and, perhaps, sanity. H.R. didn't like the Big Boys... and he doesn't like movies either:

Here's to the maker,
The film double taker,
The illusion type faker.
Guaranteed shaker,
Paravision viewer,

Or it just may seem
Lost the real scope of life.
The hope of life,
To cope with life,
And found it on the screen.

And how many times have we heard that line do you think
I'm blind to trade my mind for what you call fine.
Never in my time I'm not in your movie.

Hey, what can it be on the big white screen
Hey how can you see you're living in 3D.

I guess you think you're at the movies somewhere.
Stale popcorn don't you stand in your chair stale popcorn
Don't you stand in you chair.

A child is influenced by the make believe
To take advantage of this truth is cold hearted sin.
So I say to youth right now.
Don't sway to the unjust,
No matter what they say,
Never give in.

Or should that be "never have fun". Anyway, I'm a strong believer in separating the artist from his art - what they do at home is their business, not mine. An eccentric and abrasive personality seems to be a byproduct of genius.

This is for anyone who's only heard the poorly remixed and rearranged Caroline Records CD. This is the original 1983 PVC mix and song order, and remains the only way to listen to this album. Fuck revisionist reissues! It's a pretty big file in FLAC, so you'll have to delete some of that trendy new shit to make room for it...

F.V.K.

Livide

2010-11-25T21:54:00.004+11:00

Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, the french duo behind the stomach churning (and heart rending) À l'intérieur, are definitely two new genre talents to watch... and if you're a fan, you're gonna want to see this...

They've been hard at work on their sophomore project - Livide - for some time now. It looks to be a major departure in tone from Inside (i.e. less violent), something I was initially torn about when the project was first announced. Inside is one of my most revisited and loved films of the last decade, so a big part of me wanted them to keep treading similar gore-drenched territory, especially if they could find that same perfect balance between all out carnage and strong, sympathetic characterisation. But I also respect filmmakers who don't rest on their laurels after a successful debut.

Livide looks to be considerably less gory... but not entirely bloodless. The production design is steeped in Gothic atmosphere, eschewing the realism of Inside for a dark fairy tale aesthetic that is clearly evident in the few stills that have surfaced (particularly the eerie image at right, which made a big splash when it hit the major horror sites a few weeks ago). I've been scouring French blogs and websites since, looking for fresh news on the production, and my exhaustive search payed off this week when I found a recent 25 minute behind-the-scenes vid on the CANAL+ site.

It's in French of course, but it features an exceptionally detailed look at the film's production design and location. There's also a good look at the creation of some makeup FX, and what appear to be some bizarrely creepy animatronics (see above). Amongst the footage of various scenes being lensed (including a look at the shooting of that eerie "floating girl"), there's a few tantalising glimpses of the film itself. Interestingly, a key point in a lengthy interview with Maury and Bustillo refers to Suspiria, and they seem to be drawing a comparison between their film and Argento's.

Check out my screenshots, and then take a look at the whole video HERE. It briefly shifts it's focus to other films a couple of times, but keep watching as it returns to Livide, and some of the coolest stuff is near the end.

Queen Of Horror

2010-11-24T16:32:00.007+11:00

Countess Dracula is gone.

Beautiful Ingrid Pitt, beloved by horror fans for her roles in Hammer's The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, as well as Amicus' The House That Dripped Blood, has died at age 73. She also had a small role in one of my favourite films of all time, The Wicker Man...

The Queen is dead, Long live the Queen!

Rare Exports

2010-11-19T23:37:00.004+11:00

A few quick thoughts on Rare Exports, which I caught a couple of weeks ago at the Fantastic Planet SF & Fantasy Film Fest.

This odd Finnish production has generated quite a bit of positive buzz on the festival circuit, and it's not hard to see why. Despite some unfortunate flaws in the last 20 minutes, there's so much to like about Rare Exports up to that point that it's hard not to root for it. Two weeks on, and some of it's imagery has stuck to my brain like glue, proof that it's original premise and some incredible cinematography have made for something unique and memorable.

Reports that the tone of the movie is akin to 80's children's horror/fantasy like Poltergeist and Raiders Of The Lost Ark are spot on. As with those movies, it maintains that precarious balance between family-friendliness and darker, edgier, adult horror.

This is a refreshingly different kind of kid's movie than we're accustomed to in the US, UK, Australia, etc. Perhaps the "Finländare" have healthier, less prudish moral values then we're saddled with, because I was surprised to hear the word "fuck" uttered about ten times throughout (both in Finnish and English). Rare Exports also proudly flaunts a very high quotient of old man cock. There's enough of it on display here to lend gritty realism to at least two concentration camp dramas. Personally, I resent my culture's hypocritical double standard regarding profanity/nudity versus violence, so I applaud Jalmari Helander's copious use of expletives and "Joulupukki kulli" (yeah, that's Finnish for Santa Penis).

Rare Exports benefits from some nicely textured characters and an original premise, but it's real secret weapon is a constant barrage of impressive visuals (it took home top honours for cinematography at this years Sitges). The film opens on some panoramic shots of an incredible mountain location that had me picking my jaw up off the floor, and it doesn't let up from there. If nothing else, it's an insanely beautiful film, brimming with loads of creepy arctic atmosphere. My only real complaint is an over indulgence in CGI and Spielberg style action in the final minutes, spoiling the moodier atmosphere up to that point. It's a minor quibble though, and shouldn't put you off checking out this bizarre little rarity.

Workin' For The Company: Yaphet Kotto & The Nostromo

2010-11-15T17:38:00.014+11:00

Thanks to the hard work of Seth from Lost Video Archive, Unflinching Eye is proud to join some of the most stellar movie blogs around, in a week of appreciation for one of genre cinema's great undersung actors - Yaphet Kotto.

Alien boasts one of the most remarkable character ensembles in SF cinema. A grumpy, disheveled assembly of seven space-weary technicians, flight crew and a scientist - all as different from each other as the alien is to Jones the cat. The crew of the USCSS Nostromo is as famously iconic as you'll find on any of SF's great starships, so it's a credit to the charisma and presence of Yaphet Kotto that he manages to stand out so memorably amongst such illustrious company. Let's take a look at Parker...

After being prematurely awoken from hypersleep ten months from Earth, there's few romantic aspects to life in deep space aboard the Nostromo. Just a workaday environment of boredom, tedious labour, routine and tense cabin fever. They're all company workers, but no one aboard the Nostromo exemplifies the banal, industrial nature of interstellar mining more than Engineering Technician Brett and Engineer Parker.

Parker is obviously a man with a chip on his shoulder, and it's not hard to see why. It may be the 22nd century, but social attitudes haven't changed much, and "starship mechanic" is still considered to be the same working class trade as corresponding positions today aboard a ship or oil rig. The work is hard and thankless, the conditions cramped, hot and filthy. Parker resents his higher paid, better off colleagues, especially the aloof, terse academic - Ash.

All J.T. Parker really wants is to get back into hypersleep, get home and get paid. And a bonus for this unscheduled and annoying detour (to some shitty little rock in the Zeta-2-Reticuli system) wouldn't go astray either dammit. Is that too much to ask of those fucking fat cat Weyland-Yutani execs? The burly engineer knows the company well, and that remuneration isn't likely, but it can't hurt to keep working on captain Dallas anyway. At the very least there's some satisfaction to be gained out of getting under the captain's skin. If life is tough for Parker, why should the captain have it any easier?

Of course, trust that stuffed shirt of a science officer to drag some obscure bylaw out of the handbook, threatening Parker with total forfeiture of pay. What an asshole. Begrudgingly, Parker concedes - sealing his fate.

But this landing on LV-426 ain't gonna be no "walk in the park".

When this bothersome detour leads to a crisis, it's Ellen Ripley who comes to the fore as a natural leader. But it's Yaphet Kotto's sarcastic and snidely obnoxious Parker who rises above his selfishness and personal grievances... to become the reluctant hero of the Nostromo.

When Kane's unimaginably violent and sudden death leaves the crew shocked out of their senses, it's Parker who instantly acts, grabbing a knife. He alone has the quick reflexes and courage to respond to the situation. However, in the heat of the moment his decisive action is foiled by Ash's desperate outburst, distracting Parker long enough for the blood-streaked alien to make it's escape. His attack with an eating utensil probably wouldn't have been very successful, but the point is that he reflexively risked injury or death in the face of appalling horror and great danger.

When Ripley is assaulted by Ash, Parker once again jumps into the fray without a moment's hesitation, heedless of his own safety - but it's his final moments that truly define the character's heroism. When Lambert is confronted by the organism, freezing her into a state of terrified paralysis, Parker doesn't turn and run. He selflessly stares death in the face, in a suicidal attempt to save the one member of the crew who has contributed the least to their survival (due to her pathetic indulgence in self-centred hysteria).

Parker's final moments are a screaming nightmare - a cold, terrified sweat erupting on his forehead just before the alien's metallic jaws smash through his cranium, instantly reducing his pink brain-matter to a gory mush.

Why did the initially cynical and selfish Parker respond in such a heroic way? Was it just guilt at ordering his friend Brett to chase Jones the cat... unintentionally sending him to his death? Or was Parker just waiting for the right time to shrug off the chip on his shoulder and fulfill his potential.

Whatever the truth was behind the man, we'll never know... Parker's molecular remains are just a vanishingly insignificant trace of stardust now. Light years from his home, forever a part of that cold quadrant of interstellar void that was his death place. All that remains on Earth, an epitaph on a lonely company bought plaque...

J.T. Parker (ID# 313/S4-08M)

Born February 4, 2080, San Diego, California, UA.
Died June 6, 2122, location unknown

We live, as we dream - alone

A WEEK OF YAPHET KOTTO:

Monday Nov. 15th
Unflinching Eye - Alien
Raculfright 13's Blogo Trasho - Truck Turner

Tuesday Nov. 16th
Lost Video Archive - Raid on Entebbe
Manchester Morgue - Friday Foster

Wednesday Nov. 17th
Booksteve's Library - Live and Let Die
Horror Section - Warning Sign

Thursday Nov. 18th
Mondo 70 - Drum
B Movies and Beyond - The Monkey Hu$tle
Cinema Gonzo - Report to the Commissioner

Friday Nov. 19th
Illogical Contraption - Eye of the Tiger
Ninja Dixon - Across 110th St.
Lines That Make Things - The A Team (TV episode)
Things That Don't Suck - Blue Collar

Saturday Nov. 20th
Breakfast In the Ruins - Bone
Lost Video Archive - The Park Is Mine

100% fresh Yaphet Kotto all week long!

Infected Zone

2010-11-12T17:47:00.008+11:00

A few thoughts on the Q&A screening of Gareth Edwards' Monsters that I caught the other night. I was very impressed by the film, and not only because of it's surprisingly solid production values achieved on such a low budget. From a purely objective point of view it's a good movie however you cut it - intelligent, absorbing and full of intricate detail, all beautifully captured by Edwards' masterful camera work.

Monsters is unique in it's genre of kaiju-influenced cinema (e.g. Cloverfield), in that it's a genuine character piece first and foremost, a simple drama played out against a lavish background of grand science fiction. The setting of a fantastic new reality is taken completely for granted by the two central characters, due to it's "distance" from their lives, and it's constant, over-saturated coverage in the media. They are desensitised to this reality in exactly the same way that we feel removed from the war in Afghanistan. It's just something unpleasant that most of us are only exposed to in sanitised snippets on TV. This clever conceit is what makes Monsters so effective, by making the SF concept a normal part of it's everyday reality, it brings it to life in a very realistic way.

The film also has a unique tone and structure for a creature feature. The focus on it's two characters, instead of constant action, allows Monsters to drift along at a more languid pace, giving the story plenty of room to breath while allowing the characters to develop more fully. There's a refreshing amount of stillness and beauty in the way it's shot and edited, a credit to Edwards' skill with a camera.

This multi-talented young Englishman is definitely one to watch. He comes from a visual FX background and much has been made of his home-produced CG creature work for this film. I was expecting a standard on about the same level as Australia's Undead (the Spierig brothers famously did their extensive CG on a single Mac at home too), but was pleased to see that Edwards' work on Monsters is far more impressive. His work here is actually of a higher standard than much of the rushed CG seen in big budget "spectacle" movies. Monsters proves once and for all that it doesn't matter how big your budget is, if you rush through post production with not enough time, thought and love, you get piss-poor results. Are you listening Big Studios? Shit in = shit out.

Edwards' talents don't end at VFX though. He also wrote, directed, shot and edited his ambitious little monster movie. At the Q&A the other night he was enthusiastic and witty; cracking jokes and generally seeming to enjoy the limelight. Here's a few points of interest that I took away from it:

- A while back some movie website claimed that the budget for Monsters was $15,000, and the figure seems to have stuck as fact. You only have to watch the first five minutes of the film to realise how unlikely that is. My one question for Gareth was to ask him to reveal the actual budget (before marketing etc). He said that the site making that claim simply added up the cost of their equipment, ignoring all other expenses, such as travel for the cast & crew of five to it's shooting locations in five countries (Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico and Texas). Not to mention accommodation and the rest. He said that as "no one has been payed yet" it's still too early to give a definitive answer, but when all is said and done the figure will be in the hundreds of thousands (but definitely under $500,000).

- The monsters have a detailed backstory. They came to Earth as spores, trapped in samples collected by a returning unmanned mission to Jupiter's sixth moon Europa. Europa is a young moon with an ice crust, and there's a popular hypothesis that if it still has a molten core, there's a high probability of a mineral rich, life sustaining ocean under the ice. The aliens in the film are aquatic animals from Europa's subterranean ocean.

- Although he was quick to point out that he doesn't think he's achieved this, Edwards said his intention was to make "the most realistic monster movie ever made". Those words were written on the front page of his first draft script.

- After getting Vertigo Films on board as producers, he only had three months to write & cast the film as well as location scouting etc. The shoot was six or eight weeks (can't remember), with a week of pick-ups later on. The first cut of the film was a whopping four and a half hours, requiring eight or nine months to edit. CG and post was four months. This really surprised me as I assumed an indie film as ambitious as this would have taken at least five years to pull together.

- There's a huge amount of fictitious signage, graffiti and murals throughout the movie and I was amazed to find out that it was all CG. Edwards said that whenever he got a good take, he'd end the shot by panning away to a blank wall or empty sky (to later insert planes or helicopters), a practice that completely perplexed the producers when they saw the raw footage!

- The entire crew consisted of himself, a line producer and a sound technician. The cast of two are a real couple.

- Their guerrilla shooting style was completely opportunistic, making use of everything around them to add a sense of realism. All additional actors (including an excellent performance by the "ferry man") were locals who agreed to participate for a few bucks. Although the film was scripted, much of it was improvised around whatever they just happened to shoot. The details of the story changed and evolved depending on the footage they captured.

For example, there's a scene involving some cows that appears to be scripted. In reality the cows just wandered into the shot, so they worked them into the sequence. In one of the Central American countries they shot in, the government surreptitiously assigned a squad of soldiers to follow the crew around (apparently for their protection). This worked perfectly for Edwards, as he started including them in the background, giving the impression of an increased military presence near the alien quarantine zone.

Monsters truly is "the little SF movie that could". Even more so than last year's District 9 or Moon (both of which I love). The slower pace and focus on characters may put off people who are accustomed to the excesses of big studio SF, but I urge everyone reading this to go out and catch it in a theatre if you can. It's not everyday that you get an independent genre feature of this quality, and it really deserves to be supported.

I'm off to see Mexican cannibal drama We Are What We Are tonight. I'll post some thoughts on that soon...

BIO•SLIME

2010-11-10T19:56:00.003+11:00

I'm a life-long fan of The Blob (I love Chuck Russell's gory '88 remake), and Larry Hagman's Beware! The Blob occupies a special place in my heart as being the movie that utterly scared the shit out me as a little kid. For a year after seeing it I was petrified that the crack under my bedroom door would suddenly spew forth an unstoppable mass of sentient, flesh-absorbing protoplasm. Blob-monster movies are a rare occurrence, so when one finally creeps around it's a reason for fans of the sub-genre to celebrate.

I've been hungrily following the oozing progress of writer/director John Lechago's Bio-Slime for a couple of years now. It seems to have had a drawn-out post production process, which isn't surprising when you consider how FX heavy the film appears to be. Successive teasers have gradually revealed more of the impressive looking creature & gore FX, and this most recent trailer boasts some tantalisingly disturbing imagery.

Lechago's Bio-Slime (recently retitled as Contagion), seems to have expanded on the traditional blob formula by mixing in elements of Carpenter's The Thing, The Raft from Creepshow II, demonic horror and Gigeresque biomechanics. These varied influences, and some clever low-budget practical FX look to have resulted in something that is satisfyingly disgusting and unsettling to behold. It recently screened as part of the Chicago Horror Film Festival, where it unsurprisingly took home the award for best FX.

The finished film is currently seeking a distributor at the AFM, so hopefully we'll get word of a DVD release in the near future. For now, enjoy this gooey trailer...

The Thing From Another World

2010-11-08T17:51:00.002+11:00

My last post prompted reader Steven to request some of the Thing From Another World books, published by Dark Horse Comics back in the early '90s. They released a few mini-series', this short two-parter being the first (and probably best) of the bunch. The first issue's lurid cover art appears to be based on the demonic visage of the Norris monster from the movie.

This pseudo-sequel to Carpenter's film picks up immediately after the movie's conclusion: Mac and Childs suspiciously eyeing each other off amongst the burning ruins of Outpost 31, resigned to the inevitability of their fates - hypothermia or assimilation. The action in this story plays out entirely in Antarctica, a locale that the comic's writers would unwisely leave behind for future miniseries'... discouraging me from bothering to read any further. I'm not interested in seeing this ancient extraterrestrial depart the frozen wastes that it has haunted down the lonely aeons - entombed in primordial ice, patiently sleeping alongside it's literary brethren, the Elder Things. Hit the link to get weird and pissed off.

ASSIMILATION COMPLETE

"They're not Swedish Mac, they're Norwegian"

2010-11-05T01:38:00.005+11:00

Full disclosure: one of my most keenly anticipated movies of next year is the prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing.

As I recently said of Alien, The Thing is another of my top-five "Mount Rushmore of Celluloid" films. A movie so influential on me, so close to my black, festering heart that it's position upon that gory edifice is assured until the day I die. So how can I condone this new abomination... this prequel? Quite simply, I just can't help it.

Although I've decried the practice of remaking recent movies, I've made my peace now with the remaking of older films. We've already seen so many of our sacred cows slaughtered (with varying results), it's become obvious that a new version of an old favourite doesn't really damage the original film's legacy. The original still remains - unsullied, unharmed and ready to be discovered by new generations of genre fans.

When it was announced that Dawn Of The Dead was being remade, I was among the hordes of righteously angry Romero fans. It was unthinkable to me that this cinematic sacrilege could possibly result in a good horror movie. But in spite of all my naysaying, James Gunn wrote a good screenplay (intelligent, nuanced, lacking Romero's social commentary but packed with solid characters and genuine pathos), and Zack Snyder directed a gory, scary movie that paid tribute to Romero where appropriate, while treading enough new ground to make it interesting.

Dawn '04 was brought to us by the same production company that is behind next year's The Thing - Strike Entertainment. With only eight films yet released (to my knowledge), Strike already has a very impressive genre pedigree: the aforementioned Romero remake; James Gunn's excellent but criminally overlooked Slither; Alfonso Cuarón's superb SF masterpiece Children Of Men; and this year's critically acclaimed The Last Exorcism (haven't seen it yet). As far as production companies go, The Thing appears to have found a good home (host?).

Who goes there? Not Mac and Childs.

But what of all the little creative details that are so crucially important for this movie, and without which it simply won't work? Well, things aren't looking too bad:

- first time director Matthijs van Heijningen has always maintained that he has a huge amount of respect for Carpenter's film, and wants his prequel to dovetail with it, not "update it" or "make it fresh and hip" (ugh). The tone of the new film is said to be serious, grim and R-rated.

- This attitude is reflected in his casting choices. An interesting ensemble made up of more or less unknown Norwegian actors and a respectable group of english language thesps. The inclusion of an attractive young woman (i.e. the threat of an unnecessary love interest) isn't a worry - Mary Elizabeth Winstead has real acting chops, and van Heijningen is said to have made a point of "plaining her up", as befits her role of archaeologist. I also appreciate the "pseudo remake" casting of Joel Edgerton as a grizzled helicopter pilot and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (excellent in HBO's Oz) as his tough co-pilot. The two are obvious stand-ins for Kurt Russell's MacReady and Keith David's Childs, and I don't mind the homage. Sure, Edgerton is no Russell (who is?), but he's no air-headed pretty boy either.

- In line with the original's theme of isolation (not only in the hostile, remote environment, but within each person, as they come to distrust their colleagues), the word is that a major plot point involves the language barrier contributing to a rift between the inhabitants of the Norwegian base and their invited foreign guests. An interesting idea.

- As reported by various sources, an exhaustive amount of research went into replicating the Norwegian base as seen in the '82 film. Sets like the room that holds the "ice block" have apparently been slavishly recreated down to the finest details. It's also said that the Norwegian base sequence from Carpenter's film was religiously used as the primary source of reference for the screenplay and production design. All of MacReady and Copper's grim discoveries in the original will be included and explained in the prequel.

- The film was shot in the super-wide scope format favoured by Carpenter and frequently collaborating cinematographer Dean Cundey.

- Most importantly the creature FX are said to be mostly practical, generally only utilising CG to enhance details. This process was used extensively in del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy II, and the results there were impressive and sometimes astonishingly good. Also, the company providing the visual FX are the talented folks who worked on District 9, so what CG there is should be top notch. As far as the actual design of the creature, there's a vivid description of one of it's incarnations here, and it sounds pretty much in line with Rob Bottin's work. Although reports of the budget seem to vary at between 35 and 70 million (depending on where you look), Twitchfilm recently quoted an article in Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, which claimed that 15 million was spent on the creature FX alone. That's a fuckload of writhing, tentacled, DNA assimilating, weird and pissed off... THING.

So. Do I think it'll live up to Carpenter's movie... or come even close to it's awesomeness? No way. I'm not a complete chump. But if any of the above is to be believed, then there is some potential here. Like I said, I'm such a fan of J.C.'s flick that I just can't help but be enthusiastic about revisiting the ultimate in alien terror.

Artwork by Tyler Stout.

"Why don't you take your social regulations and shove 'em up your ass"

2010-10-31T23:02:00.008+11:00

Remember what I did
Remember what I was
Back on Halloween

But what's in between
Where are your ideas
You sit around and dream
For next Halloween

Why not everyday
Are you so afraid
What will people say

After Halloween

Cannibals, Monsters & Santa Claus

2010-10-28T17:35:00.004+11:00

I haven't been going out to the movies much recently, but I've got a pretty solid week of cool genre geekery coming up soon. Between the 6th and 12th of November, I'll be seeing a diverse trio of movies as part of two separate film festivals and an advance screening Q&A. All three are some of this year's most talked about flicks, so I'm pretty excited.

First up is this Finnish fantasy/horror film, directed by Jalmari Helander, which cleaned up at this year's Sitges Film Festival, taking Best Cinematography, Director and Picture. It looks to have been made in the spirit of that very particular '80s style typified by Spielberg's collaborations with Tobe Hooper and Joe Dante. Light, entertaining horror fare, but somewhat darker and edgier than the average kid's flick. I'm also a sucker for movies that are shot in the snow, and apparently Rare Exports looks terrific. This is screening as part of the Fantastic Planet SF & Fantasy Film Festival.

Two days later and I'll be catching one of my most hotly anticipated movies of the year - Gareth Edwards' Monsters. I love low budget films that manage to transcend their financial limitations, and the word is that Monsters achieves this in very clever ways. The main attraction for me here is obviously the titular Lovecraftian invaders (apparently, although the "reveal" is sparing, the FX are impressive), but I'm just as intrigued by reports of Edwards' vérité approach to location shooting - utilising real situations and crowds to gain a heightened sense of realism. This one is followed by a Q&A with Edwards. Cool!

Finally, I'll be seeing Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are (Somos Lo Que Hay) as part of the Hola Mexico Film Festival. This tale about a family of cannibals has been getting raves from horror fans, and took home both the Best Feature & Screenplay awards at this year's Fantastic Fest. I know next to nothing about this one, and I intend to keep it that way. I want to taste it just as fresh as the flesh being devoured by it's protagonists!

So, it looks like a wall-to-wall week of pretty unique horror movies, all of which actually show some promise. As they say, "it never rains [blood], but it pours"!

Perfect Organism

2010-10-27T18:57:00.006+11:00

After my recent nostalgic post remembering the great H.R. Giger's work on Alien, Jason, friend of The EYE and author of the superlative Cinezilla, thoughtfully sent me these two beautiful photos of Carlo Rambaldi's original animatronic head from the '79 masterpiece.

Jason took these shots last year, whilst on a biomechanical pilgrimage to Switzerland and Germany - to Gruyères, to visit the Giger Bar and H.R. Giger Museum, and Frankfurt, to meet and interview the artist himself at an exhibition of his work. You can read J's own account of his unique experience with the Swiss master here.

These shots offer an unusually detailed look at some of the finer aspects of the monster's anatomy, so please click on them for a good look. This alien head still resides in Giger's personal collection, having been given to him by Rambaldi after production on Alien wrapped.

Thanks again J!

The Mark Of The Vampire

2010-10-23T20:05:00.003+11:00

I'm three years into treatment for lymphoma (chemo, radiation and the rest), and I'm just emerging now from a particularly nasty few months of heavy chemo and a stem cell transplant. My strength is just starting to return, and it feels great. All this shit has kept me from writing as much as I'd like to recently, and I'm hoping to start posting more frequently again until my next round of treatment begins.

I want to show off a gory bit of medical tech that I had to wear around for a couple of days recently. It's called a Vas Cath, or central venous catheter. It's a "port" that is stitched into the neck and connected to an access tube that runs directly into the Jugular Vein, on down through the Superior Vena Cava and into the heart. In spite of the fact that it sucked having it in, a perverse part of my sci-fi horror lovin' mind couldn't help but appreciate it's similarity to some cool biomechanical imagery in some of my favourite flicks:

unfortunate Max Renn's Videodrome-tumour induced episode of a gun assimilating itself into his "old flesh" via a series of gorily tunneling conduits...

... and even more so, the disgusting Harkonnen "heart plugs" from Lynch's Dune.

Finally, much to my amusement, after having the device removed, my doctor described the hole left in my neck as "the mark of the Vampire". Groovy.

You Are My Lucky Star

2010-10-22T02:48:00.008+11:00

I pinched the above photo off that website run by the cheerful, portly guy from Austin TX. It's just too cool not to repost. Alien occupies an unassailable position on my top-five list, my Mount Rushmore of movies if you will, and after 31 years of fanatical worship, it's not everyday that I'm treated to a behind the scenes pic that I haven't seen before. This one of Bolaji Badejo relaxing between takes is a real beauty.

Giger's groundbreaking design work on Alien has been watered down with each successive (and progressively worse) entry in the saga. I've always intensely disliked the look of the designs for Alien 3 and Resurrection, and the less said about the AVP shitfests the better. Those two movies bled every remaining drop of mystique and fear out of the monster, to the point that it just isn't scary anymore. The only post-Alien modifications to Giger's design that I like are the xenomorphs in Aliens. Similarly, the queen in Aliens is the only addition to the Swiss artist's work that I like. She's scary and still works so well simply because she's a big, entirely practical creation - impressive and lifelike. And despite James Cameron completely shafting Giger, Stan Winston obviously respected his predecessor's work. You can see it in the details of his design for the queen.

All that aside though, it's when I see rare pics such as the above, showing a fresh perspective of Giger's work, that I'm reminded that the alien is still the scariest movie monster of all time (with Rob Bottin's incredible work on The Thing very close behind). It takes me back to being 11-years-old in 1979 again, reverently thumbing through the Alien photo-novel at my local bookshop, eyes agape and imagination running wild.

Giger's alien wasn't just a man in a suit. It was a fully realised and believable biological organism with a complex life cycle - egg, facehugger, chestburster, adult. The wet entrail-like bowels of it's egg; the facehugger's translucently pallid flesh and visceral underbelly; the sloughed-off skin... it's all just so intensely real.

"I have confirmed that he's got an outer layer of protein polysaccharides.
Has a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicon,
which gives him a prolonged resistance to adverse environmental conditions.
Is that enough?"

Added to that organic realism, Giger's creature designs look menacing, lethal, and above all, primordially evil (all of which is reinforced by the desolate, hostile environment of planetoid Acheron and the haunted tomb of the derelict ship and egg chamber). That behind the scenes pic at the top, showing the head with it's "dome" removed, reminds me of just how malevolent the alien is. On one level it's just an animal, a "perfect organism" with "structural perfection [that] is matched only by its hostility", but underlying that is a creeping cosmic evil that could only be compared to that described by Lovecraft... and could only have come from the truly unhinged imagination of H.R. Giger.

"It's adapted remarkably well to our atmosphere
considering its nutritional requirements."

It's stuff that would have given Lovecraft himself nightmares, and in spite of some of the travesties that have followed in the wake of the 1979 masterpiece, Giger's disturbing vision still holds up hideously to this day.

Mayonnaise And Ketchup

2010-10-20T00:14:00.001+11:00

Here's something amusing for my fellow gorehounds. I received an email today from a subtle and tasteful rapper from Austin, Texas, who goes by the moniker of MC Sex. He's promoting his new album Love Songs, and in his own words:

"This here is a music video set to 42 of my favorite horror/violent/revenge/bloody movies of all time: Mayonnaise and Ketchup.

There’s a heavy focus on scenes with badass females doing badass bloody stuff to complement the song's theme which becomes apparent quickly. It's quite possibly the bloodiest music video around."

Young Mr Sex probably isn't too far off the mark with that claim. There's not a lot of Mayo to be seen in this video, but there is most definitely an excess of thick, red Ketchup.

Musically speaking, hip hop generally isn't my thing, and I can't really vouch for the quality of this little ditty, but I won't deny a sense of kinship in Sex's taste in movies. This vid is a lovingly assembled montage of some of the wettest moments in the cinema of splatter, among them some of my faves, including Inside, High Tension, Hellraiser, Evil Dead II, Slither, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, Ginger Snaps, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Machine Girl, Martyrs, Teeth, The Descent, Carrie, Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Basket Case, Last House on the Left, Rabid, Battle Royale, Tokyo Gore Police and Frankenhooker. He's provided a full list of the 42 flicks used here.

By the way, this is sexually explicit stuff (duh), but if you're easily offended by that kind of thing you're probably reading the wrong blog anyway.

Soundtrack: Hostel Part II

2010-10-14T21:55:00.002+11:00

Appropriately enough after the last post, here's the soundtrack to Eli Roth's sequel to his groundbreaking tale of a new underground capitalism, the jaded desires of the filthy rich and dumb American teenagers in peril.

This is really worth picking up because I've added the incredibly beautiful and haunting "Synecku Synecku" (by Varmuzova Cimbalova), which is not included on the original soundtrack. A serious omission from the OST, because it's easily the most memorable piece of music from the most emotionally stirring sequence in either film.

Right off the bat, I want to say that I don't get the popular hatred for Roth amongst horror fans. I understand that his frat boy humour and antics can be annoying... but the simple fact is that Eli makes a great horror film. Much better than most I might add. People criticise his movies for being too referential, but I think the way Roth does it is tasteful and cool. It's odd because the thing that strikes me about all his movies is how original they are despite all the homage in them.

And his movies are scary. The first time I saw Cabin Fever at the Sydney Film Fest, I was scared shitless. Angelo Badalamenti's eerie score over that ominous bleed to red still fills me with dread. And as well as being genuinely frightening, his movies are just well made... thoughtfully scripted, impeccably shot, carefully composed, tightly edited and gorgeously graded. Yeah, as you can tell, I'm a fan. Of course I can understand people not liking his work - each to their own after all. I just don't get the hate.

Would you sign my Cannibal Holocaust DVD please?

When Hostel came out it was original, scary and subversive. It's a great horror film, and I like it a lot, but it's actually my least favourite of Roth's films. Hostel Part II is my favourite. I prefer my Euro-horror to J-horror, so the first movie's love-letter to Japanese gore (Takashi Miike cameo; guro inspired Japanese girl having her face blow torched and eye mutilated, etc) is no match for the sequel's many groovy European references.

From the fun Ruggero Deodato and Edwige Fenech cameos to the tense and scary sequence that homages Aldo Lado’s sleazy Last House rip-off Night Train Murders, the movie is a blast for Italian horror fans. Another pretty obvious Euro-horror reference is Elite Hunting CEO Sasha's cold blooded killing of one of the the "Bubblegum Gang" kids, which recalls the unflinching child carnage on display in Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill A Child, a taboo that is rarely seen in American cinema.

Finally, check out the giallo-esque, eye-popping primary colours above in that jarring transition from the hot red of the Countess Bathory sequence to the icy blue of Iceland's scenic Blue Lagoon. Beautiful stuff.

So, do you have the money and the balls to join the most exclusive country club around... Elite Hunting? If so, click the quote to place your bid!

Would you like a Smint?

Srpski Film

2010-10-08T22:35:00.003+11:00

It's probably lazy when writing about film to continually resort to comparison with other films, but I still find myself doing it a lot. Perhaps it's particularly hard to avoid when discussing horror, because it's a genre that's continually feeding off of itself for new ideas. To paraphrase something I read at Fangoria recently, horror cinema gets by for the most part by cyclically regurgitating popular tropes and cliches, delivering what the fans are perceived to be hungering for at the time. The industry toils along in this opportunistic fashion, becoming more and more predictable and stale, until the next fresh idea is introduced in a new groundbreaking and original film. Yet sometimes a movie is original enough to stand on it's own, while comparisons to previous movies are still impossible to avoid. One such movie is Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film.

A Serbian Film feels as if Spasojevic watched the Hostel movies, and rather than being insulted by Roth's exaggerated perception of the troubles in post-soviet eastern Europe, saw it as a challenge to up the ante as far as disgust and brutality.

Above a subtext about American ignorance and xenophobia, Hostel is about the potential for entrepreneurial capitalists to exploit the instability that has resulted from rapid social, economic and political changes in the region (former Czechoslovakia in Hostel). However, it does so using a premise that is absurdly far fetched, requiring a major suspension of disbelief to go along with.

A Serbian Film on the other hand is grounded in a terror that is all too real and which is frequently seen in the news and dramatised on TV - the burgeoning illegal sex slave trade. The only really unrealistic element of Spasojevic's film is the snuff-industry angle, an urban myth that has been shown to be just that - a myth (see David Kerekes' & David Slater's excellent Killing For Culture: An Illustrated History Of Death Film From Mondo To Snuff published by Creation Books). Beyond that though, the events depicted in A Serbian Film are believable and are all the more appalling for that realism. Compounded with that sense of reality, the explicitly depicted atrocities in A Serbian Film make the violence in Roth's movies pale by comparison, making the whole experience that much more visceral, disturbing and just plain vile.

Another recent movie that has to be mentioned when talking about A Serbian Film (and Hostel I & II) is Martyrs. Beyond the similarities in premise (highly organised secret societies with paramilitary elements; torture and killing for ideological and financial motives) the four movies share a similar visual aesthetic. They're all shot, lit and colour graded with a kind of hyper-real slickness (particularly Srpski and the Hostel movies), and in the production design of the secret institutions all four films share a clinical, futuristic look that is more akin to science fiction movies than horror.

Beyond that comparison with Martyrs though, the more obvious similarity between the two movies is that it's the current Euro-horror film that is both topical and utterly transgressive in it's violence. This year's most talked about cult film for hardcore horror freaks. So, I guess my final word on A Serbian Film is what I see as the differences in motivation for Laugier and Spasojevic.

Almost every review I've read for Spasojevic's disgust-fest mentions the almost impenetrable ambiguity of it's "message" about the current state of affairs in Serbia. Western observers are looking for a meaning beneath it's violence and coming up with an almost unanimous cry of "I can't work it out, I guess you have to be Serbian to understand it". I can't fault all of these reviewers for seeking that deeper meaning, because I strongly believe that in much the same way as T.F. Mous' notorious Men Behind The Sun, Srpski is posing as a message movie to give it more gravitas, but ultimately it's little more than a very well made, highly memorable exploitation flick. Perhaps in both cases there was an original "higher" intention that was eventually lost in the desire to simply be as nasty as possible.

Martyrs could also be criticised for having a dubious and ambiguous meaning, but what Martyrs has in spades that Srpski lacks... is heart. As mean spirited and hard to watch as it is, it's a deeply emotive and affecting movie because you care for Lucie and Anna and witnessing their fate is heartbreaking. The horrible fate of Milos and his family did not elicit that emotion in me, just a dull sense of shock and revulsion.

I think the difference in the two director's intentions is most evident in Laugier's widely publicised assertions that the writing of Martyrs came from a deeply heartfelt place within him, at a time when he was going through a difficult period of particularly black depression. When I watch his film, I can see and feel all that emotion up on the screen. When I watch Spasojevic's Film I see a cynical, sneering exercise in depravity lurking shallowly beneath a thin veneer of sociopolitical commentary about porn, the illegal sex trade and some dodgy allusions to the Yugoslav wars. Just another exploitation flick, albeit one of the most disgusting ones I've ever seen.

After all that you might think that I hated A Serbian Film...

... but I actually really liked it.

Why? Because - like you - I'm a card carrying sicko!

Frostbite

2010-09-24T13:35:00.013+10:00

A big part of being a seasoned horror movie freak is the hunt, is it not? Swimming through a sea of mediocrity to occasionally find an island of greatness to bask on for a while. Then setting out again across the Ocean of Disappointments in search of the next one. It seems as one gets older and sees more movies the hunt gets more challenging. One's tastes mature, and then of course there's the small matter of jadedness and desensitisation. For example, I've grown out of enjoying gore for gore's sake, so flicks like the August Underground series bore me senseless these days. Of even less interest to me is the ubiquitous mega-budgeted SFX extravaganza. I get little joy from watching millions of gigabytes of pixels flying dizzyingly across the screen. And then there's the rest... remakes, sequels, prequels, re-imaginings, reboots, adaptations, homages, satires etc etc. There's a lot of "product" around, but not much new under the sun.

Of course the holy grail that we're always looking for is a quality horror film that genuinely brings the fear. One that makes your skin crawl, your eyes widen and your jaw drop. A white knuckle, edge of the seat terror trip.

Things have been pretty thin on the ground for me recently. A Serbian Film was shocking, disgusting and disturbing, but despite being a slick and handsome affair, it felt too contrived to really upset me. I actually liked it a lot, but beneath the veneer of implying some kind of deep sociopolitical message, I think it's really just a finely crafted shock-fest and little else. An engaging and rough ride, but ultimately superficial.

So last week, I sat down alone at 2:00am and watched Adam Green's Frozen. I wasn't that impressed with his previous retro-slasher Hatchet, but when I read the synopsis for Frozen way back when, I was immediately drawn to it's simplistic, real life horror scenario. It's bare bones plot - three skiers, forgotten by resort staff, and left hanging high up on a chairlift as night falls - shares the same premise (and exploits the exact same fears) as 2003's Open Water - that in an everyday routine situation that is taken for granted as being completely safe, a simple oversight can result in unimaginable horror. And the resulting terrors are the same in both movies: the physical and psychological effects of prolonged exposure to the elements... suddenly finding oneself no longer at the top of the food chain... the dread of isolation, and despair of facing one's impending death.

Where Open Water elicited a sense of dread and hopelessness, Frozen ups the ante and executes the premise far more effectively, moving beyond dread to moments of sheer adrenaline pumping terror. As darkness leads to cold (which is worsened by bad weather), and the skiers gradually become more aware of the seriousness of their situation, the tension slowly builds. But it's the fate of one of the characters at about the halfway point that really got under my skin. I was shocked at how profoundly this character's death upset me. The way that the sequence is staged is agonisingly painful to watch. The torture and pain that is explicitly shown is wince-inducingly appalling, but this character's ultimate fate proves once and for all that what is left off camera and up to the viewer's imagination can be far worse. This sequence disturbed me and haunted me for days. And the terrors don't end there... frostbite is a bad thing too.

With Frozen, Adam Green has crafted a taut, fat-free thriller that cleverly uses the banal realism of its premise to create a situation that is far scarier than being chased through the woods by any number of masked killers. This is something that you feel you could easily read about in the news, and it's that plausibility that makes it really terrifying.

And if you've ever been on a chairlift yourself as the sun is setting... the evening cold and gloom descending over the mountains... it's too easy to imagine yourself up there with those three Human Popsicles. I honestly think I'd rather be eaten alive by sharks.