Maury & Bustillo Update

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).

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

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

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 Silver Ferox.

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

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

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.

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

Hiatus

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

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

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

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

RIP GDT HPL


"Douchebag"

DEAD

Hell's Gates

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!

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

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).