LUBRICANT

Blistering Singaporean hardcore, hailing from the same crew of Lion City miscreants responsible for Vaarallinen and Snaggletooth. Vaarallinen melted faces here in Sydney a couple of years back, and now it's Lubricant's turn to annoy Black Wire Records' long suffering neighbours. The boys from the little red dot are set to blow the roof off of Black Wire tomorrow avo. In the meantime, blow the roof off of your cranium with this shredding two song tour tape.

DIE

Enzo Sciotti

Fulci, Argento, Martino, Soavi, Lenzi, D'Amato, Cozzi and Lamberto Bava.

Enzo Sciotti's violent and carnal paintings have graced the movie posters of all these Italian horror/exploitation giants and more. Although he's best known for the slickly airbrushed, lurid imagery of his 1980s exploitation one sheets, this era represents just a small part of a long career that has produced a staggering 3,000+ posters. His work spans every conceivable genre, and includes artwork for the likes of David Lynch, George Romero and the Coen brothers. The gallery below is a pretty thorough collection of all my faves.

John Carpenter: "Night" / "Distant Dream"

Videos for "Night" from last year's Lost Themes and "Distant Dream" from the freshly released Lost Themes II, both on Sacred Bones Records. The new video - directed by the man himself - is obviously selling the live experience ahead of the band's 26-date tour of Europe and the US. I'm really hoping the tour goes well, and that Carpenter enjoys himself, for the purely selfish reason that I want him to bring his band down here.

GREEN ROOM Update

According to local distributor Rialto, Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room opens here on the 28th (and this week stateside, you lucky bastards). Oddly, there's no listing for it yet on the Classification Board's website (our equivalent of the MPAA and BBFC), not even for a trailer. It's also conspicuously absent from the upcoming release schedule of the theatre chain that's meant to be carrying it (Event Cinemas). This leads me to wonder if it might have run into trouble with our censors, but as it hasn't anywhere else in the world (that I know of) I'm sure there's no reason for concern.

While we count down the final days to Green Room's release, here's some goodies to tide you over. And don't let my snarky comments fool you, this is probably my most anticipated movie of 2016!

I've found Green Room's poster campaign to be less than compelling, a disappointment after Blue Ruin's beautiful one sheets by Akiko Stehrenberger and Erik Buckham. That said, it does make me smile to see Pavel Chekov in a Minor Threat t-shirt.

For my money, this Thai poster is the best of the bunch. It doesn't fuck around. It is an odd choice to put a pentagram on that door though. If it was a swastika it would have been perfect:

These comic art style posters are weird. Why the ESRB (video game) ratings? Rated Gruesome for thrash metal and Patrick Stewart is a nice touch though:

Hey, US teaser poster, 1999 called and wants its shitty looking extruded text back! A shame, because this is otherwise a great design:

I don't mind the US one sheet. Patrick Stewart looks mean, and the quote is ominous and chilling:

Hey, French poster, 1977 called and Jamie Reid wants his typography back!

Here's a cool mock flyer for the Ain't Right's fateful show. I think this was done for the Leeds International Film Fest:

Here's a couple of moody, Carpenter-esque cues from Brooke and Will Blair's score. These two brothers have scored all of Saulnier's films to date. A bit of trivia: Macon Blair - who played Dwight in Blue Ruin and also appears in Murder Party and Green Room - is the third Blair brother in the Saulnier production team. These tracks are excellent, and you can listen to a few more here.

Here's a track from the Ain't Rights, the fictional band at the heart of the film's story. The riffs are passable, even if the lyrics are as dumb as a bag of hammers.

CHAIN GANG GRAVE

"Fusion" has become such a dirty word for punks, and with pretty good reason. It's a sad fact that some great '90s bands like NoMeansNo ended up paving the way for some of the worst musical trainwrecks of the late '90s and '00s. For every band who got it right (San Francisco's The Mass), there were a hundred that are just unlistenable garbage. The pendulum swung, and now the DIY kids are so obsessed with back to basics "purity" (imitation) that almost everything just sounds the same, a trend that's no less tiresome and a lot more regressive.

Then a band like New York's Chain Gang Grave comes along, and things don't seem so grim anymore. Sounds that ride the line between the purity that hardcore needs to stay honest, and the progression that it needs to keep growing. This unholy fusion of hardcore, noise rock and death metal doesn't feel forced, it feels like just what I need.

Bury Them and Keep Quiet

PEELERS

What's red all over, and has coal miners, strippers, a subterranean contaminant and baseball bats? Sevé Schelenz's second feature, Peelers, that's what!

Schelenz's previous effort, 2011's Skew, is a superior shoestring haunter that introduced some fresh ideas to a well-trodden subgenre. The film features a couple of exceptionally creepy shocks that have really stuck with me over the years, those two moments alone making it well worth the price of admission.

With his new film, Schelenz seems to be taking a completely different approach to the straight-faced, restrained chills of Skew. Peelers looks like a soaking wet splatterfest, played for laughs and with little regard for good taste. It makes its bow this week at the Palm Beach International Film Festival, Florida. Take a look at the teaser below.