Morricone Youth: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Last night I pushed through a haze of post-work fatigue to attend a screening of Romero's NOTLD (first time on the big screen for me!), with live accompaniment by New York's Morricone Youth. The band are here in Sydney to perform their re-score of the Pittsburgh lensed zombie classic, as well as Miller's MAD MAX. Having done zero research on the band beforehand, I went into the screening unsure of what to expect. Rock? Synth? Chamber orchestra? Taking my seat, third row from front, it became immediately obvious from the setup (bass, guitar, drums, two keyboard/synth rigs, vocals) that my secret hopes were to be rewarded: I was in for some proggy goodness, ala Goblin.

Morricone Youth delivered on that promise in spades, at points almost outplaying the Italian masters at their own game. What they've essentially done here is to give NIGHT a sister score to Goblin's iconic cues for DAWN OF THE DEAD. Mounting waves of pounding rock, throbbing synth and spooky glockenspiel, elevated to euphoric levels by some fantastic, operatic vocals (performed by a woman who I can't find a mention of anywhere, what gives?). Some research this morning reveals that they recently toured with Goblin in the States, and have previously re-scored a number of other cult films.

It's a shame that last night's haunting, powerful vocals are barely represented on the vinyl release of NOTLD, because their impact, live in front of the film, was immeasurable. The word transcendent comes to mind, making this my favourite viewing of Romero's seminal classic to date. The experience gave me a new and deeper appreciation of the film: the radicalism of its civil rights theme, its gorgeously lit black and white cinematography and wonderful editing, both courtesy of a young and hungry Romero. It throws into sharp focus just how talented and utterly electric the young Pittsburgh artist was. This film was dangerous, and exactly half a century later is still vitally important.

If you get a chance to see this show (especially with vocal accompaniment), don't sleep on it!

Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

George A. Romero

I could write thousands of words on the life of George A. Romero, but frankly I'm feeling too gutted to put the words together. His influence on horror, on cinema, is inestimable. His influence on me personally since 1979 has been profound.

Cultural iconoclast. Cinematic maverick. Rebel. Romero's films held a mirror up to the western world, encouraging us to reflect on and examine some of our ugliest problems: greed, xenophobia, social injustice, militancy, and nationalism. In his life and work he was fiercely independent, never compromising his values, toiling to the end outside of the corporate studio system that he railed against.

And the man was quintessentially cool, a quality that saturates his entire filmography. Countless imitators have tried to equal the badass chemistry of Peter, Roger, Fran and Stephen, but only Romero could have created an elite squad of apocalyptic survivors as perfectly cool as that foursome.

In 1968 the release of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD heralded the modern era of horror cinema. The father of that epoch is gone, but his legacy lives on in every film, every shot, every frame of the genre that he was so instrumental in shaping.

Goblin 2013

Last month the mighty Goblin came to Sydney and played the Metro. Seeing them was one of those real bucket list moments for me, and the show not only survived my high expectations, but totally blew my mind. Walking home afterwards with a few beers in me, I felt like a grinning, giddy fanboy. I had just seen fucking Goblin live, and not at some big festival, but in a small venue!

The lineup on this tour consisted of original members Claudio Simonetti, Maurizio Guarini and Massimo Morante. Joining them on bass and drums were two younger guys who I didn't recognise, but looking at their Wiki page it appears they might have been Bruno Previtali (bass) and Titta Tani (drums).

This lineup just killed it. Simonetti and Guarini, both on keyboards, delivered all those throbbing, spooky, atmospheric sounds and melodies that are etched into every horror fans brain, Claudio in particular handling his rig with style and elegance to spare. Guitarist Massimo Morante, looking every inch the tripped-out proto prog rocker, was on point too, and it was amazing seeing him play the eerie opening of "Suspiria" on a mandolin. Adding further atmosphere to proceedings, the band was joined on stage by local Theremin wizard Miles Brown for the Phenomena theme.

After hitting the stage to thunderous applause, they set the mood with a full rendition of 1976's Roller, which was cool, but after that the black leather gloves were slipped on, the gleaming straight razor was picked up, and the band got down to serious horror business. 

What followed was a selection of choice cuts from Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebrae, Phenomena, Sleepless and Dawn Of The Dead, and it was pretty fucking rad my fiends. I have to admit, I kind of lost my shit a little when they played the stuff from Dawn ("L'alba Dei Morti Viventi" and "Zombi" if I remember correctly, but I was pretty drunk by that stage. Did they play "Oblio" too or did I just dream that?)

Goblin are hitting North America later this year. Don't miss them!

Photos: Chris Evans

Bill Hinzman

artwork: Chet Zar

Bill Hinzman, famous for his portrayal of the "cemetery zombie" in Romero's Night Of The Living Dead, has died. Some may consider him to be a minor player amongst the pantheon of modern horror cinema, but I think his contribution was a vital one, and certainly worthy of memory.

He was after all the original "modern" zombie. The ancestral progenitor to an endless horde of the walking dead that has been infesting our screens for the 44 years since he lurched out of that first cemetery.

In fact, the legacy of NOTLD is virtually immeasurable. Not only is it the forerunner of the modern living dead film, but many consider it to be the precursor to modern horror cinema in general. It heralded in an era of horror that would be more visceral, allegorical and thoughtful than anything that had proceeded it.

Viewed in that light, Hinzman's contribution to horror as the inaugural monster of the new era is a profound one indeed.

Bill also had minor parts in Romero's next three films - There's Always Vanilla, Season Of The Witch and The Crazies, on which he also served as D.O.P.

Mondo Zombie

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.

Kill Sports

Check out my post over at IllCon on fictional sports in SF and horror movies. It covers the sick death games found in Hostel, Cube, Rollerball and Death Race 2000, among others.

Argento At The Chauvel

Horror fans living in the Sydney area are in for a rare treat next month as the always genre-friendly Chauvel Cinema is hosting a season of double-bills comprised of Dario Argento's entire output from '75 to '85 (minus Inferno), each one followed by a choice pick from Romero, Hooper or Craven.

The season runs over four Fridays (February 26th to March 19th) and opens with a crushing double: Suspiria and Dawn Of The Dead. I saw a print of Dawn at the old Third Eye in Surry Hills years ago, but two of the reels were so damaged as to make it almost unwatchable (I still had a blast). A good print of Dawn would be great, but not as brain-meltingly awesome as seeing a decent print of Suspiria in a cinema. The other Argento movies are Tenebrae, Deep Red and Phenomena and I'm frothing at the mouth for all three. Sharing these doubles with the Italian maestro are Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre & Eaten Alive and Wes Craven's Last House On The Left. I can take or leave the Hooper flicks (having already seen a screening of Texas Chainsaw and not being overly fond of Eaten Alive), but it might be fun seeing a crowd squirm uncomfortably at the sleazy nihilism of Krug and company.

As ever, the big question is: ARE THEY UNCUT? I'll be finding out at the Chauvel, over four consecutive Fridays of mysterious killers, arcane witchcraft, flesh-eating corpses, inbred mayhem and bloody vengeance!

The Chauvel is the last vestige of real independent cinema left in Sydney (a disgraceful situation for a city of five million), and when they run programs like this it drives home the importance of supporting it, lest the Chauvel disappear along with the Valhalla and Third Eye. Details for all the screenings can be found at the cinema's website here.

Autopsy: 2009

Looking back at my first post below (from March last year), It's interesting to see how my expectations for 2009 panned out (or didn't).

My most anticipated film - Natali's Splice - has still not seen a release since being picked up by German company Senator International some two years ago. There's been talk of Senator's financial woes and possible studio meddling to tone down some of the films more confronting elements and give it a more "mainstream appeal". Ugh. An example of this short-sighted stupidity is the studio's idea to change the name from the evocative Splice to the utterly generic Hybrid.

There's still hope though! The film debuted at last years Sitges Film Festival to a positive critical reaction and came away with the festival's award for Best Special FX. Since then it's been added to this years Sundance midnight section where it will hopefully generate some buzz and find a new distributor. In the meantime the excellent twitchfilm.net is hosting a diary written by Natali documenting the experience of taking his monstrous labour of love to Sundance. The first entry can be found here.

So, looking back at my first post again, it's interesting to note that Romero's latest zombie film (going under the working title of "... Of The Dead" at the time of that writing) has since received a proper name as Survival Of The Dead, and opened at various festivals to very mixed reviews (it really seemed to polarise people). It's been picked up for distro by the genre-friendly Magnet and I for one can't wait to see it. I'm not a Romero apologist (I'll happily admit that about half his output has been pretty wonky) but I've found a lot to like in both of his "neo-dead" flicks. Yes, even Diary.

My prediction for an '09 release of Stuart Gordon's latest Lovecraft adaptation The Thing On The Doorstep was wildly off the mark as it seems to have all but vanished from his slate of future projects. The burly auteur spent the year working in his original medium - the theatre - on a one-man production called Nevermore... an Evening with Edgar Allan Poe starring who else but Jeffrey Combs. According to bloody disgusting he may now be attached to a horror project called The House On The Borderland which although not an H.P.L. adaptation, seems very Lovecraftian in nature. From bloody disgusting: "the supernatural thriller focuses on a family that relocates to a relative’s rural home only to discover it guards the border between our dimension and another which is inhabited by a race of hostile creatures." Sounds promising.

As far as the rest of the movies mentioned in that first post - Q.T. really silenced the nay-sayers by serving up a satisfying and exciting exploitation epic in Inglourious Basterds. A pretty amazing feat given how rushed the production was. John Hillcoat's The Road is finally getting a theatrical release this month after long delays. Early reviews have been pretty mixed, but at least it seems to have retained the grimness of Cormac McCarthy's book. Finally, Winding Refn's little metaphysical viking pic Valhalla Rising has still only been seen by a few festival goers but his other '09 film Bronson is one of the few last year that really surprised me. This hypnotic Kubrickian homage really blew my mind, in no small part due to Tom Hardy's intense performance. It easily made my top three for the year along with Neill Blomkamp's stunning SF debut District 9 and my biggest surprise of the year - von Trier's Antichrist. Von Trier was a director I had long dismissed as a pretentious art-wanker of the most annoying kind, but this sublimely beautiful and deliciously disturbing horror movie has had me completely re-evaluating my opinion of him (I've since watched Breaking The Waves for the first time and loved it). So in the end, not one of my top-three movies for last year was a film I was looking forward to - they all took me by surprise. A lot of the fun of being a film geek is the anticipation and speculation that comes with looking forward to movies, but the weird thing is that the end result is so rarely what you expected.

So, in the words of last year's real fantastic fox: CHAOS REIGNS!