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.

Looking Ahead

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?

Tutti il Colori del Buio

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 or listen to Tutti il Colori del Buio HERE...

A Dangerous Method

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

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

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.

Ken Russell

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

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

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

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

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...

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. Here.

Delirium

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 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.