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A film ahead of its time, and a film that also marked the end of an era. Weird kids films would never again be 80s weird. It gets a bit stretched at times, with its feet in each realm, caught between a past that ed and a future that we had no idea would fracture reality so much. But that never stops it from being a beautiful love letter to cinema and the joy of nonsense, and it looks incredible. Those old school practical effects that would lose the spotlight for so long are on full display. Plus Charles Dance giving one of the all-time great action villain performances and Tom Noonan channeling The Hitchhiker from Texas Chain Saw Massacre. We didn't know how good we had it.

"She brought home a bee. We don't do bees in this house!"

Wife Stalker starts as a regular drama of marriage strife and yoga instructors, but its slow burn begins to steadily layer in unhinged performances that muddy the waters magnificently and make the outcome far from uncertain. I recommend keeping it that way, as Wife Stalker is clearly made by folks who know what they are doing and are having a blast twisting these very silly strings. There's a firm grip on the rudder that makes this compulsive viewing. I was cackling with joy at a slow push-in when a character starts to tell a story about liver. It's one of many little moments that build together to make for a memorable ride into high melodrama.
If Wife Stalker 2 existed I'd be watching it right now (as long as it was made by the same people). I'm currently away on location for a TV shoot and even my co-worker, that I'm sharing accommodation with, was pulled into this quietly confident tale of interpersonal shenanigans.

Illusion and politics as snakes and ladders - the snakes climb the ladders and everything else is left to slide. Harlequin never overcomes the feeling that it is half a film, but the half that exists taps some unsettling well that bubbles forth with disconcerting ideas about the misguided pathways that humanity has been dragged down. The mash-up of politics, history, and family melodrama feels like the strange dreams one would have in 70s Australia after reading the newspaper, watching The Omen, and listening to Boney M's Rasputin on repeat. It veers from silly to startling truths and back again. A man who is all facade has no way to hold onto significance, and so his grasp grows looser and looser, and the world is made worse for it. Just a shame that the filmmakers didn't just set it in Australia, instead very badly faking an American story. Sure, it was probably financial reasons that they did this, aiming to break into the American market. But no doubt they also knew that no-one would believe anyone would do this much machinationing to become a "powerful" Australian politician. Wincer does a solid job directing, but I wish this had been made by someone like Cronenberg or Skolimowski, someone with that bit extra to bring it all together and really slide the blade in.

Knocking off half a star from my previous rating because of the excessive exposition and yet I still had to hit pause to explain Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy to my friend to fill in the gaps.

After a long night working on an AppleTV production, dancing with the possibility of carbon monoxide posioning, introducing my co-worker to huffing vapor-rub to comfort suicidal lungs, and discussing the possibility of the werecow, I made the choice to watch this as I fall asleep instead of watching some tiresome guy making necro-porn.
I made the right choice.
The waves are rolling outside in the darkness, like memories lapping against your dreams. It's always moving in there, they never came to a rest.
May your nocturnal emissions be sweet.
Enter here.

All of the threads are important. Even the ones that aren't aware they are holding the suit together. Even the threads that break and go nowhere. Even the loosest ones going their own way. Even the threads that tickle and distract you in madness. The suit that is this thing called DoroHeDoro begins in a single fold that only lasts a few moments before another fold is revealed, and another and another and the unfolding of momentum shows that we've entered at a point in which Caiman is our focus but everyone has their own focus and this story could go on forever just sprawling outwards, until who we thought was our protagonist is just a lonely little dot on some kind of horizon. There is no more important element, so yes, it is about cooking and food and inter-restaurant warfare, as much as it is about violently destroying bullies, the never ending abuse of power and the disturbances caused by uneven resource allocation, in a world of sorcery, where a reptile headed man with no memory seeks vengeance while zig zagging through genres . But none of these things are more important, they are just the events and frameworks that shape the understanding you have of the past.

"And still, everything is lost in chaos."

DoroHeDoro is a Ketamine Saragossa Manuscript with a heavy dose of Hotline Miami vibes. It is no singular narrative or character. It is psychic vomit, a regurgitation of the many spheres that circle the sun of the human mind. Colliding as they are spewed into existence and die before they hit the floor. I have no idea about so much of what this thing is or where it came from but I did learn much as it went along, which the end credits of each episode helpfully point out. Someone with a beard once talked about solids and melting, but the time of fixed shapes has definitely ed so it's definitely now the age when everything is for sure still lost in chaos. Step by step. Gyoza by gyoza.
I need to rewatch this. I don't expect to understand more, but I know I will have even more fun.
Dreamy Mushroom!

Watched on Sunday June 1, 2025.

Kevin Smith really should've called the Catholicism Wow rebranding Vatican 3.WOW.
Catholics and Christianity in general are low hanging fruits and Smith doesn't do much stretching here. It certainly felt a lit more firey back in 1999. But he lands it well & while it may creak a little with age it doesn't embarrass itself. This may seem like faint praise, but this whole thing could have smug Icarus'd itself and instead it is a kind of wonderful in many surprising ways.
For instance, I was surprised at how much it felt like a Troma film in the end. I really shouldn't be, though, as both he and Kaufman are eternally teenagers; youthful jesters with sharp knives who are reacting to a puritanical society. The DIY silliness keeps it grounded and Alanis Morissette brings it all home perfectly.

The strongest element of The Poughkeepsie Tapes are the children. The truth of their performances was palpable. They too were made deeply uncomfortable by the people making this film and clearly wanted very little to do with it all. It was so believable and realistic. They were dangled in front of the audience as a promise of this killer's monstrosity, but they weren't having a bar of it.

The only other aspects that had any verisimilitude was how much the police wanted to ascribe genius to this killer instead of acknowledging their own failings; and how much of a try-hard loser the killer actually was. These people are generally so far up their own arse, which is precisely how fhey get caught (except when the cops are understaffed, biased, or just dumb as rocks).

The performances would probably be mostly ok if the dialogue wasn't so tremendously risible. Ok, sure, if you wish to Tommy Wiseau this and say it was actually meant as a satire, go for it, put those heavily tinted lenses on. I agree that it can be read in that way, but I do not believe that this was the intention. I think the filmmakers were just hooked on a diet of TV true crime junk food and were incapable of seeing through the jangling keys of distraction murdertainment. So the thing they regurgitated was exactly that, but it loses the sheen of believable propaganda when it doesn't have the hooks of Network ideology dug in to pull it towards acceptability. It goes off the rails and incidentally reveals the grotesque exploitation and nonsense that the professionally sutured television hides in order to keep the money and the power flowing to where it needs to be. The status quo is revealed! And it is stupid and misogynistic, and populated by people who can't acknowledge that which they do not know. Instead they profer reasons and excuses that build up boogeymen into mythic entities while making a quick buck of victims objectified to death and beyond.

But the thing that really shows this to be edgelord crap with zero ideas except abusing women?
When the criminology class is being shown the tapes there is almost no women in the class and the one woman we see is unable to watch, far more disgusted by what they are seeing than all the men in the room. Whatever it is saying by this representation it stinks of bullshit, lazy sexism. The same kind of sexism that resulted in generations of movie boys thinking that girls couldn't handle horror. Dude, they understand the horrors of the world better than you ever will!!

Congratulations on replicating a world of obnoxious bollocks with all of the insight of a billiard ball.

A bizarre experience. From the outside it looks like another swashbuckling jungle adventure for the whole family, mining pulp classics with dreams of riding the blockbuster ticket stubs of Indiana Jones. The opening scene has Kathy Showers, a Playboy playmate, bikini sunbathing on a Sri Lankan river with her Police Academy bad guy boyfriend giving off all the daft sex comedy setup vibes. And then we are introduced to Tennessee Buck laid out on a boat that is ing under the camera. He is surrounded by reptile skins. There is blood everywhere. It is an image straight out of a horror film. He wakes, crying out in a strange language for alcohol, flailing until he gets his medicine.
This is the film.
They are not tonal shifts. This is it. David Keith is here to assault you like an unhinged big brother who is going to poke you and tickle you in ways that are too much, are often surprising, that are increasingly exhausting, that border on the criminal and cross so many lines that you won't be inviting Uncle David to babysit your kids.

I did not expect this to go so hard in its brutality, ultimately owing more to rape filled Italian cannibal films than to anything Spielberg. It's a sleazy mess with a warped perspective that seems like someone amongst the filmmakers would have considered it to be progressive, offering occasional jibes that undercut the racism while lampooning pulp exploitation by pushing it into the realm of the ridiculous. I have to acknowledge that it pushes back against colonialism and cultural thievery than any of the Indiana Jones films, which may not be saying much but it's more than most British museums have done. In the end, however, this is the cinematic embodiment of the handsome dude with a chiseled jaw and a few too many buttons undone saying "Some of my best friends are black, and I luuuuuurrve chicks more than dudes!" as he slaps a woman on the arse. It's gross. It's weird. It's kind of a horror show. I can't say I enjoyed it but I won't be forgetting it any time soon.

There's a lot to appreciate here but everything is so rushed that there is almost no craftmanship. Discovering that they only had a US$60 million budget explains a lot of the issues. It's so much money, but not enough to buy the time it takes to get the best shot or the best integration of performances. The best scenes are the ones that would have taken the least time to setup, and thus could spend more time on getting it right. There's more than a few scenes or lines of dialogue that waste resources on unnecessary exposition & suggest a production without a firm grip on the rudder. It's even blatantly obvious that they shot a lot of it too be more violent & then (badly) reigned it in with harsh edits and skipping the CGI squibs. Which really is altogether a great shame as the actors are all bringing great character work and it keeps almost hitting that fabulous old school British romp energy but via Inglorious Basterds (very heavily via Inglorious Basterds, like, calm down a bit there fanboy). Ritchie may be an old hand but he has lost all skill in how to pare a low budget film down to its essentials and rip through to what matters. Totally up for a sequel but give it to some young kid that's been making films in his backyard and let that kind of ungentlemanly cinemania guide this ungentlemanly warfare once again into battle.

It truly is a perfect film.
I was having a bad day, and listening to You Are Good podcast discuss Robocop was improving the day but half way through I said fuck it and gave up on the day to flop on the couch and rewatch Robocop for the hundredth+ time, and It Was Good.

Layers upon layers of meaning and style that reverb with greater and greater significance as it all proves to be the most honest and genuine depiction of our manufactured future. Robocop has more to offer humanity than any other American film made in the 1980s.
But it isn't yelling at the audience to beware. This doesn't get tangled up in self importance. As they rightly point out in the podcast, it is more like a reassurance that it isn't just you, that Robocop sees this insanity and calls bullshit with you. It's beautiful. Through all the spectacle and apex 80s ridiculousness, Murphy's journey back to humanity shines through. How wonderfully they keep us in his shoes, not just through brilliantly haptic point-of-view shots. We feel the trajectory from human pawn through objectification and the threat of oblivion, and into revelation and rebirth as a being changed but ready to help others survive this mad world. It's genuinely beautiful.

Peter Weller deserved far more accolades and awards for this role than anyone had the ability to recognise at the time. The entire cast and crew bring everything home, with a rough and also elegant strangeness that unsettles while still suturing us into the nightmare. The editing of the film has few if any equals in action cinema. Constant whiplash while staying intensely focused on the road, even as we feel like every few scenes is another car accident that the whole production has thrown us headfirst into, then pulled us out and put us into another car that's going to go even harder into a wall a few scenes from now. It also feels like computer programming, like directives that are pushing all of this inevitably forwards with no alternatives. That is until Murphy comes jaw to maw with Ed-209. I recently discussed this confrontation in a comment thread on Jolemite's great review, and I don't have the ability to say it better right now so I am quoting myself:

Robocop may be the corporation's idea of a cop, but he fails to protect the corporations ideals and thus fails in the cop's duty to capitalism, which comes first and foremost as a protector of the status quo and the protection of goods and the rights of shareholders. Ed-209 is a Tesla guarding the dealership. It represents the ideal copaganda product, roaring and always blasting. Programmable and inefficient. Murphy almost lost his life to this object, and in doing so was stripped of the last of his objectivity. The pure force of unfiltered COP was like a burning flame, exorcising him of the PIG. This battle reveals his humanity, his subjectivity. It reconnects him. Murphy-Robocop is a being of empathy who understands the violation of humanity that is the end result of the corporate nightmare. Some may quibble as the film doesn't state this outright, but given that the journey is not one of justice but of becoming human again, I believe that he seeks to ensure that such violations will not be committed against anyone else. A protector of our right to be humans coexisting, not an enforcer of arbitrary rules coded into a rigged system (which are literally hampering his ability to even do policing). He isn't chasing down thieves or fining people on the bottom, and he is recognised as a victim of the same system that copaganda lionises.

If only we could all buy that for a dollar.

Where are the children of the art dealers now, the children of the white people who fleeced the Aboriginal artists?
Nothing has really changed, it's just that white people learned to not be such vile cunts when the cameras are around.

Worth noting that this is an early example of cinematographer Geoff Burton's work. He shot many of the key Australian films of the 70s & 80s, and would later direct The Sum of Us. His keen eye for visual narrative is already clearly apparent here.

Nekromumtic.
What will you destroy to hold onto the past?
A film pulled up from a savagely dark place, rummaged forth from bootleg VHS and staying over at the weird houses of strange friends. This is a wet place; of rain and tears and blood. The gore is gnarly and soaked (it will be curious to see which one of the particular scenes gets each person, mine was the first one BIG TIME, it hit some old dream nerve and my body reacted in twitching and squirming). The emotions will be difficult for some (a graphically dead Dad sets the plot in motion), and Sally Hawkins is looking to hit a lot of buttons (and does).
The narrative unfolds like a scrunched up parchment page from the book of the dead. There are many little details and nuances that are never openly stated and we only catch pieces of the between-the-lines. Such as why a character accepts some differences but requires a certain something to stay the same - it says a lot about needs and weaknesses in carers (vague, I know, but I don't feel like whacking a spoiler tag on this). It's all so complicated and yet so simple, which marks it as very human. These Philippou boys are much better at blending their edgelord imagery with beautifully tragically human creations than most (perhaps all) contemporary horror filmmakers. Abjection for violent disruption rather than shocking discomfort, which is a very important and significant difference. The former is loaded with meaning while the latter is loaded with self importance.
I like the last act quite a lot. It made me quite emotional. There's a curious character lurking in this film.

But. Australian regulations are such that there is absolutely no way that pool would not have a fence around it. I was once hassled at a rental property because the house had no fence blocking the backyard and we had a tiny inflatable pool setup one summer and that alone was against regulations.
Or, you can read that as another aspect of the failure of a properly functioning society to protect people in a manner that allows life to go on without recourse to fucked nightmare dark-siding whatever this is.

Also, I reckon you could have a pretty messy drinking game for every time Wendy ends a sentence with "luv".

A group of Australian teenagers discover the dangers of opening unknown doors as they explore a new realm of connectivity.

On the contagious nature of humans. To badly paraphrase Clive Barker, every person is a telephone book of webs. Wherever they are opened they are filled with emotional spiders. I said it would be bad, but it gets a point across!
Social media is not the reason for the metaphor in Talk To Me, but it is one of many fluidly interwoven backdrops that offer inroads to identification for anyone who has a history of being alive. This isn't a one-to-one thematic meaning kind of horror film. If you are bringing a history of grief or of addiction to any kind of escapism, then you will find a mirrored pool to peer into, should you wish some dark night of the soul vibing. But while it undoubtedly continues the trend of trauma themes, by not focusing on explanations the Phillipou brothers wisely move trauma into the less heavy handed backseat, a place where reasons-for-behaviours sit and kick the seat of the driver until they go careening into a tree; they may cause outcomes but they are not the whole story (I am writing this very late at night and I am going to paint this picture my own damn messy way thank you very much). A free-floating anxiety kind of film, where everyone is just a few happenings away from a freak-out, even though everyone is just a normal person. It's just life, and disaster is never truly far away, no matter how hard your loved ones try to make it not so.
It is not essential that they are young, but being young is about exploration and pushing on boundaries that do not seem any scarier than the myriad of threats that are daily criss-crossing their paths. When the horizon of boundaries is forever stretching further and further beyond limits, then the possibility of bringing a threat home to roost - in your house, in your heart, in your brain - become increasingly more probable. Running in the wrong crowd, or making the wrong virtual handshake. Being at the wrong party, or entering the worst forum. So easy to slip into a timeline where that same loved one who tried to protect you is screaming "WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!" and the way the world was yesterday is no more.

I'm going to avoid specific information that would spoil the ending but I do want to talk in a generalised way about the last half. I wouldn't say that Talk To Me runs out of steam, despite hitting a point where it doesn't have many places to go. I respect its lowkey unwinding because to do anything otherwise would be disrespectful to the unknown horror it sets up so well and dishonest to the palpably unsettling doom that it dangles before us. At a certain point it becomes more about what it doesn't do, and instead hangs its narrative upon the emotional stakes that it does a pretty good job of building. The path it takes, much like Benson & Moorhead's Resolution, refutes catharsis and embraces a complicated relationship with choices that can be unfullfilling, but which offers something of the cosmic abyss that Western horror films lose when they allow their protagonists to be active participants in their own fate. 'There must be a way to stop it' is almost always lazier than just disappearing into darkness. This film is certainly an intense and grim ride but I wouldn't say that it chooses nihilism or annihilation, but I also wouldn't argue if you thought it did.

The threads of past horror films are apparent in the weave, stitched into the fabric with a confident skill and understanding that strengthens the film. Talk To Me is another brilliant generational evolution of A Nightmare On Elm St (hi Grimcutty!), as it borrows a few odds and ends of Christian horrors like The Exorcist, and taking the parts of Hereditary that tapped horror and ditching the remaining 90% of that naff film (it would be interesting to write something on Talk To Me as a remix of Hereditary that ditches all the ill-conceived, projecting, self-obsessed, misogonystic Americanisms). It's a horror cocktail that doesn't outstay its welcome and it left me wanting more in a continuation. Talk To Me is a solid detour through hell.

Netflix true crime documentaries are beginning to feel more like trading cards. Abbreviated and interchangeable.
I said I was done with these garbage things, but then they went and did Fred and Rose West. It's one of the earliest news stories that I . "House of Horrors" headlines and the shock of those around me, but no real understanding of what happened. Having a British mum and being raised on UK culture had connected it to my world somehow, but I didn't discover how much it deserved that moniker or why until I picked up one of those weekly collectible magazine series about true crime when I was still absolutely too young. The kind of magazine that you could order a special binder for, like Tree of Knowledge. It was absolutely grim and written in that explicitly titillating and exploitative way that the British do so well. So the case has had that kind of psychic stickiness that comes from a youthful sideswiping, that isn't necessarily sought out later but when it lands in front of me I have to dive in, and - like many British cases - there are still significant gaps in the information and many questions remain. And yet, it can also feel like we know too much. It truly was a house of horrors and it is difficult to discuss many parts of the atrocities committed within without becoming exploitative. Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story isn't interested in the horrific details, which it takes to such an extreme that it somehow comes off feeling like it is going easy on Fred and Rose. The filmmakers are not raising ethical questions but their choices have me contemplating them. Do we need to know just how truly monstruous that household was, or is it enough to know that 12 people were murdered by this pair? Isn't murder enough of a terrible thing, and asking for more details is just ghoulish behaviour that should not be encouraged? Or are we protecting Fred and Rose when we do not tell of every terrible thing they did? We have entered into an age wherein these documentaries pretend at caring more about the victims and survivours than the terrible deeds and the perpetrators. But it will always be a secondary element when the framing of it all is their murderers and the balance of information always skews away from the victims. True crime is an ethical minefield that can never be made clean. So the least they could do is try to be genuine journalists and present more information that may help clear up some of the unanswered questions I mentioned earlier. There is a high likelihood that Fred had more victims from his earlier life. Fred only talked about the ones that he feared they would find, his talking about them became a foolish attempt to direct attention away from Rose. Fred had numerous head injuries from a young age and lengthy history of violence that suggests many things were allowed to slip through the cracks, but there is nothing about either Fred or Rose's early history presented here. Instead they are cast as monsters who seemingly came out of nowhere. Home videos presented in a detached and aloof style, and dodgy sound mixing to make parts of his interviews sound like a horror movie boogeyman. Exploitation badly masquerading as victim ing. Netflix yet again squanders an opportunity to place significant details about their early lives in front of millions of viewers, which could perhaps connect some dots and reveal some information that helps close some unsolved cases. That is why could help victims and justify its existence. Instead we get a three hour trading card. Collect them all, says Netflix. No thanks, I'm done with your fast food bullshit.

There's quality material in here but time has not been particularly kind to this documentary from the last days of broadcast television. There's a lot of recycled material from the 1981 British documentary, Walkabout To Hollywood, and none of it is the very interesting parts. In 2002 that would've been a more difficult documentary to see, so it's understandable that they would include footage from it. But the footage is more focused on how others perceived him, and the time could have been better spent elsewhere. There's more bitterness in this doco, which is entirely justified and understandable, and these recycled scenes emphasise that. The rest is a very brief peek into how he lived at the time of production, but in a manner that is no better than a DVD extra and would have een casually absorbed by a TV audience sippong the wine and feeling like they have experienced some secondhand frustration and thus have gained some insight. What I say is a bit harsh, true, but the way the doco shifts from Gulpilil's frustration at the film industry and the government to then showing him all dressed up for The Tracker premiere feels like a brief dip in darkness and then reassurance that it's actually ok. Gulpili says "Crocodile Dundee is bullshit!" in an eviscerating rant that says more about the state of things than anything else here manages to. This was made at a transitionary time when things were changing, and more First Nation stories were being made. But as powerful as the films included here are, The Track and Rabbit Proof Fence, they are still films that are more aboit white Australia than anything else and this doco does nothing to rectify that.

Bite sized bits of amazing. I bet the BBC deleted all the footage but if it still exists then someone needs to go and make the 3+ hour version of this. It starts as if it is going to be a colonial nightmare, with an old white dude interrupting David Gulpilil dancing for a bunch of enthralled kids to tell him YOU'RE ON TV AND THIS IS YOUR LIFE. I may have to hunt down that episode. But the British interruptions calm down after that. What follows is a brief travelogue of Gulpilil's adventures through the world, meeting tribal from America, playing didgeridoo with a jazz band, having white women hanging on his every word staring longingly into his eyes, and showing his world back home in the remote wilderness of Australia. It's beautiful and frothy, a moment captured in time and done well enough. But god damn I want to hear more of those conversations.

One man attempts to interrupt the life narrative of an old friend, one who has chosen a drugged doom spiral. Together they have an extended sleepover in a cabin on a reservation with mixed feelings about what is going on. No flesh shall be spared.

My kind of slice of life cinema.
Life is the pie, and the pupeteers are slicing all the pieces up and putting them to one side until they're ready to eat them. It's small and simple, but only because the keyhole through which we peep only reveals a portion of the world within. It's clear there is much more going on beyond the awareness we have, and that is made literal and metaphorical in Resolution. If your imagination isn't withered then you will perhaps feel the sublime dizziness of a metaphysical existence that only becomes more confusing and dreadful with each new clue or revelation. The push/pull of moving forward and giving up as duelling narrative forces, but also the growing together and apart that is always complicated and never simple. Perhaps it throws some people out of the film that nothing here is really about the decisions people make. A horror film completely devoid of catharsis. A horror film because the prison is held up and we see it & us spiralling into the mise-en-abyme. "Placed into abyss". The absorption of the illusion of freedom of will and choice, of direction and movement. Stasis and abyss. Can't we do it another way, they ask? The question hangs in the air. Feel it in your soul. Hope and doom together, it's beautiful.

Watched on Tuesday August 20, 2024.

Watched on Sunday July 28, 2024.

"We know that the world's short of energy, but, if we carry on like this it might be short of people too".

An apocalyptic tale that deserves, and could easily be made into, a film such as Contagion. Poison floating in the air. Poison settling in the dust upon your car on the way to shops. Poison in the words of ministers & officials who say there's nothing to worry about. the military and die because your superiors made you drag some machinery around in radioactive dust. Backs to the Blast gives space to numerous ordinary people who, at the time of production, probably don't have a lot of time left to live. Ordinary folks recounting the jobs they were tasked with, while not being told of the dangers or being offered enough protection against the most dangerous substance that mankind has monetised. In the posioned mining towns two women talk about the different colours of the dust that settles on everything, complaining that she had to give up cigarettes because of the damage the radioactive dust has caused to her lungs and asks "Why did we buy homes here?", and the answer is to die, to die for corporations and governments who see your doom as an acceptable risk. Backs to the Blast was made before the catastrophe at Chernobyl, so it makes its points with human stories instead of dramatic imagery. Just a bunch of normal Australians, people who trusted in the advertising, bought the packs and smoked it up until the truth was revealed in their health charts. This is basic filmmaking, but never boring. The stories of destroyed lives and the asinine bullshit from those telling us it's all fine stir up so much emotion that it could never be boring. These are the stories of people who couldn't be further from radicalisation, from making a fuss, who were just left to die for the facade of civilised and good Australia. It's horrifying. It's so god damned careless. And yet, even now, Australia is once again being forced to consider nuclear power because idiotic political parties are still in the pockets of mining corporations. Corrupt madness. David Littleproud should be forced to watch this film every day of his brainless existence until he learns that it can never be safe, that someone, somewhere, will always have to pay the price for the nuclear industry.
No jobs on a dead planet, dickhead.

A zone of pure annihiliation.

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2024.

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2024.

A rock n roll powerhouse of a film. If you're feeling down on sloppily made contemporary action films then put this beauty on. On a second viewing I found myself cheering on the craft and the themes as much as the protagonist. And oh boy was I cheering.

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2024.

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2024.

There's bones in the barn!!!
And amputated undead arms on the loose!

It warms the heart to see horror bringing together a family like this! At least I think that is what's going on here.
Written and directed by Bobby Harwell, an actor who was born in 1931 so he would've been in his late 60s when making this (depending on when it was made versus when it was released). He appeared in the Brendan Fraser vehicle The Scout and Spielberg's A.I.. But Bones in the Barn is his defining achievement and I am glad that we can experience it. It stars a bunch of people of his age or older, who are likely family and friends in the age old tradition of such DIY horror cinema. Don't let their age put you off for age can not stop weirdness. This is the kind of nonsense that Adult Swim works hard to impersonate. It's a hot mess of silliness and gosh darn it is a treasure. A diamond to be held aloft by the kind of weirdos who love cinema born of nothing but ion and the pleasure of creating with the people who mean the most to you.

Make your nonsense with love and release it to the world, you never know when someone is going to have an awesome time with it on a day long horror marathon, as we did. I had almost no idea what was going on and it didn't matter. Thanks Bobby, may you rest in peace,

You can watch it here
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzFmR-XeC6o

Are the parents alright?
Not really.

A second viewing revealed that Grimcutty knew what it was doing from square one. It's brilliant reworking of A Nightmare On Elm St was no accident and not at all incidental. I wish it had some more artistic flair to the filmmaking, but there's nothing to really complain about in that department and it does a good job of being gnarly in themes without skewing too adult for a younger market (who are definitively the target audience).
I'm catching up on films I meant to log but time slipped on by, so I am writing this long after October 2024. But as the world stands now I reckon I'll be revisiting this for October 2025. Bad parenting is nothing new, but the panicked madness has taken on a tenor that matches Grimcutty well. [Turns his cap and chair backwards as he stares meaningfully into the camera] Parents need to get back to driving their kids to school and stop driving them to madness and destruction!

Love this film.

Hooper returning to the themes of objectification and devouring from his earliest days, but riding high on the camp train from Spontaneous Combustion & I'm Dangerous Tonight. As potent a witches brew as the margins of 90s cinema can muster. Berserker cinema. The bastard heart of America always brought out the best in Hooper.

Watched on Saturday October 28, 2023.

Watched on Saturday October 28, 2023.

Watched on Tuesday October 3, 2023.

A young man chafes against a world of exploitation as he shops scripts and stumbles through love. But 'have you ever been to a military hospital', he asks, as the darkness of some past violence bubbles away at the edges of his sanity. The pleasantries are forever threatened; without stability there will be no more of anything....if only...such an oblivion would be a peace...

Once considered a lost film, William Sach's personal copy was long ago digitised from tape and that copy has recently finally become available to view here. It's rough, but not as bad as many VHS sourced prints.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLj_P-DQqio
Watch it. I do not recommend spoiling it, which is quite difficult to do as there is virtually nothing out there about this film (the only reference I could find in my large library of books was in Creation Books' Vietnam War Movies by Jack Hunter, who included it amongst a slab of titles about returned Vietnam veterans that he deemed 'boring'. Unhelpful and lazy, Jack). The plot description that generally floats around is so bad and incomplete that it could well be part of a CIA plot against this film. I have changed the one on TMDB & Letterboxd; I am still not sure it is a good plot description but you'll understand why it is difficult to give a simplistic breakdown once you have seen it. There Is No 13 is one of those experience films. I recommend watching it twice, or at least go back and watch the first few scenes with the song and the hospital immediately upon finishing. It plays very different, even if you do figure out the particulars of what is happening before the finale.

I first came across this film when I was offered the opportunity to guest on The Projection Booth Podcast to discuss it with Mike White and Heather Drain. It wasn't because of writer/director William Sachs (The Incredible Melting Man, Galaxina, Van Nuys Blvd.) that I said yes. It was the collection of crew and the tantalising prospect of a lost avant garde anti-Vietnam film. Riz Ortolani doing the score?! I'm in! I am glad I said yes because this film is genuinely something remarkable and deserves to be recognised for its place in cinema history.
There Is No 13 was mainly notable for the bit of trivia that its failure led to Mark Damon to give up acting and become a producer. His connection to American International Pictures meant that he worked both in America (Corman's House of Usher) and in Italy (Bava's Black Sabbath). It was through these connections that the very low-budget There Is No 13 was able to be produced, and hence the unusual connections fo the crew. When production was completed it only saw commercial release in Italy, where it is hoped a print may still remain as the original negative is long since lost in a storage error. No last minute reprise a la Wake In Fright, with which it has a tangential connection. There Is No 13 played at the 24th Berlin Film Festival in 1974, where it was praised by some of the jury but supposedly suffered audience backlash due to America's ongoing involvement in the Vietnam War. It did not receive the Golden Bear, which instead went to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz directed by Ted Kotcheff, who would later direct Wake In Fright.
There are rumours that the CIA was involved in its failure to receive distribution in America. Given the utter nonsense, waste of time bullshit that the CIA was up (along with its more meaningful fascist activities) I wouldn't be surprised if they did have someone watch it and help nix it. It may look harmless to a 21st century viewer but they were as incredibly paranoid then as Trump's dimwits are now about equally inconsequential (& consequential) things.

My first viewing of this film was interesting. Not amazing, not mind blowing. Definitely a film worthy of viewing, and significantly better than a lot of experimental arthouse leaning fare of its era. I have only seen a handful of Sach's films, which I still have not logged due to life stuff. I'd only seen The Incredible Melting Man before this year and I wasn't a big fan. Listening to interviews with him and exploring his filmography has revealed a filmmaker who never had the opportunity to show himself. This is probably the only truly Sachs film we have, and we almost do not have it. All of his films were meddled with or recut, forced into more traditional or normalised forms. He was a comedian whose sense of humour was definitely warped and probably more than a bit fucked. He would've fit right in now, but in the 70s & 80s it was not what his producers wanted. There Is No 13 is putting on a show, but its show is a mask. Nothing is ok underneath it. On a first viewing this isn't so clear. It's easy to mistake it for being the mask that it is wearing. On a second viewing the tension and discordance is apparent. My first viewing stirred some vague, mostly forgotten memories of Nicholson's Drive, He Said. My second viewing felt like Messiah of Evil. There Is No 13 isn't a film depicting a man ing his relationships and conquests against a backdrop of social and political upheavals. There Is No 13 is the restless emptiness of attempted existence in a society that offers no future for its chosen damned.
And I think I am in love with it.
Haunted cinema.

We go into far more detail on the podcast which you can listen to here
www.projectionboothpodcast.com/2025/05/episode-742-there-is-no-13-1974.html

Watched on Thursday March 20, 2025.

Did you know that during World War 2 the Australian media published stories claiming that nazi agents were behind strikes on Aboriginal settlements? These places are better described as forced labour camps. What irony. Sounds awfully familiar doesn't it, lioe something happening right now, as the world sits back and watches the genocide of the Palestinian people. The disinformation helped undermine the push for Aboriginal rights, for human rights. A news reel states "Australia is free. Perhaps in the past, too free", as it goes on to tell lies about German agents infiltrating Australia. All too familiar.
There are dozens of terrible, disturbing stories of white Australia presented here.
A group of Aboriginals brought from the settlements to Sydney with threats of having their rations taken away if they did not agree to play the natives in a recreation of Captain Cook's landing. They were held in a prison, locked up next to rhe dog kennels, to stop anyone from finding them and helping them.
An Aboriginal woman of later years sits at a dining table and tells of how the teacher at the camp, a white man, would spend much of his time sitting on his verandah doing not much at all but ing the time. He would leave her to be the teacher, a young girl not even in her teenage years with no education. She tells us how she would pick up the cane and strut back and forth in front of the class, threatening to hit anyone who who misbehaved or questioned her authority, because this is what they thought a teacher was. Our white culture is a void made of violence.

The white people take away the land, take away their labour, take away their resources and take away their children. Then demonise them for not having the ability to be equal or to stand on their own. Lousy Little Sixpence is a story of slavery, of rape, of the stolen generations and the many ways the Australian government authorised the seperation of families, not just by taking the children but also by deciding who could and could not live on the settlements. The people who tried to speak out against the tyranny were labelled agitators and forced out of their communities. They were hounded by police. This is Australian history.

You can find an interesting interview with director Alec Morgan here, who stumbled across these stories while touring a puppet show along with Indigenous activist, musician and filmmaker Essie Coffey.
He states that:

It’s hard to imagine now but there was nothing written about it. I thought, ‘What the hell are universities doing?’. I’ve stumbled over something just in one community – three elderly ladies talking about the shame of their lives being taken away – and there’s absolutely nothing I can read about this.

The stolen generation is recognised to a greater degree now. But it is easy to loose the details of the campaign against those who fought to be recognised, and the stories that show Australia was no better in its treatment of blackfellas than America was to those it enslaved.

There are a number of reviews here that describe Lousy Little Sixpence as simple. I find this curious, because recently I have watched Australian 20th century documentaries that are more pared back than this one. A lot of them referencing watching this in a Film History class, which goes some way to explain it. Compared directly to the hyper-stylised mediation presented in the streamer documentaries then this film has a surface appearance of simplicity but it really isn't. Simple is something like Too Many Captain Cooks, which contains the recording of a happening and nothing more, utilising only editing to shape the time it takes to unfold and push-ins/zooms to emphasise aspects. Lousy Little Sixpence draws upon archival footage, newspapers and photographs, combined with a variety of first person interviews. This is a foundational modern documentary format, not a simple one. Recreations, either through animation or performance are another layer of complexity that augments this foundational form. The introduction of computer technologies to bring artificial motion to photographs or any of the other flashy techniques that have appeared in the last 20 years are merely wrinkles upon this format. Lousy Little Sixpence may be basic and old school in its approach but it is wrong to call it simple.

Lousy Little Sixpence is brief but powerful. Every scene a devastating hammer blow against the deceitful, destructive foundation upon which Australia is built. The events are heartbreaking, but the filmmakers let the feelings come on their own without undue interference on their part. It is not exploitative or emotionally manipulative. This is a document of genocide. Testimony from a generation no longer here to tell of the long trail of blood and tears.
Essential viewing.

Takeover captures a fraught moment in modern Australian history and is one of the first productions by the Australian Instititue Of Aboriginal Studies. It was primarily recorded as evidence and testament to the happenings at the remote Queensland community of Aurukun, which had been established as a missionary settlement in 1904, during a period when the Queensland government was doing their usual corrupt thing by attempting to shutdown the entire community and displace the Aboriginal inhabitants. The locals had been forced onto the missionary during the previous 75 years, already displaced from their tribal lands, and abused by the usual religious psychopaths through much of that time. The latest displacement was, of course, fuelled by the greed of the of wannabe dictator and Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who ruled the state from 1968 til 1987. He was a dreadful human, long may he rot. Bauxite had been discovered under the community. Mining, one of Australia's great addictions.
Takeover is as basic as it gets, a simple recording of the conversations held at this community, amongst the locals, and with the various interlopers of varied intent. I had no idea what the outcome of the case was, so I found myself empathetically ing the people of Aurukun in a state of tense unease as they wait and expect the worse. It didn't help that the particular film stock, cinema verite style, and tropical location all put me in mind of Jonestown. Jonestown's destruction was quite the opposite of this scenario, as the external threat there was cooked-up by a lunatic white man attempting to hold control from within the community. The threat to Aurukun is very real and entirely external, but still a bunch of white dudes (now in terrible Australian 70s business suits of short sleeves and short pants, which feels dreadfully cult-like in its own tired way). One of the first people sent to the site, which can only be reached with ease by plane, by the Queensland government, is a police officer who just looks around for a bit and then leaves. It is deeply unsettling and says everything about the role of cops in these communities; he does not come to communicate, to share, to work with or to help. He exists solely as a threat, a quiet face of intimidation that the bastards know will bring back traumatic memories of past abuses and displacements. Absolute bastards. This documentary could easily be made into a very tense film, as it features a gutful of politic bastadry and back and forths as the Queensland government stubbornly digs it's heels in and forces the federal government of Malcolm Fraser to become involved. Their only option is to threaten Queensland with legislating human rights *GASP* for the Aboriginal people, which it seems like the federals don't actually want to do but can't have another Mabo on their hands. I will not spoil the journey further than this.
Takeover is an essential document in understanding how Australia is no different to the rest of the world in how it has acted towards its colonised inhabitants. It is not a happy document in many ways, but it is beautifully human and extraordinarily powerful viewing. The people of Aurukun speak for themselves, they stand up for each other, and they do not back down against corrupt capitalism masquerading as a government for the people. A slow-burn but nonetheless tremendous film.

Two brothers heading in different directions on the same empty road. The older returning to his Lebanese-Australian family, the younger falling away. There are few good paths from where they stand on Sydney's streets. Hatred lights the way from many who surround them, as belonging is only offered if you look and act the same.

The Combination is a solid crime drama from a desolate time in Australian culture. We were only just staggering free of John Howard's long, destructive, hateful reign as Prime Minister (lawyers should not be allowed to become leaders of countries, especially not racist ones that embrace fascist techniques). The Cronulla riots were only a few years before, in 2006, which is when this film appears to be set. For those who don't know - and I will put this bluntly and simplistically - the Cronulla Riots were a bunch of racist white fuckwits shaking their dicks and their fists around on beaches stolen from the First Nations peoples, in an antagonistic hate spiral directed at the Sydney Lebanese community. The Combination's screenwriter and lead actor, George Basha, drops a very traditional multicultural crime story in the midst of this social unrest. The particulars of the situation are handled well by an excellent cast, drawing out the flavours in a largely entertaining and believable manner. David Field, an iconic Australian actor directing for the first time, isn't here to show off, focusing on hitting all the necessary beats and ing the actors very well. Field has been in so many classic Australian films, from Ghosts of the Civil Dead to Two Hands, Chopper and The Rover. As far as I am aware there are only two Australian films to deal with the Cronulla riots, the other being Abe Forsythe's Down Under. David Field acts in Down Under, along with quite a few of the Lebanese-Australian actors featured here. The Combination only features it as an occurence on TV being watched, but the social issues and conflicts that resulted in the riot are central to the film. It is debatable as to who the primary villain of the piece is: a drug kingpin (who looks exactly like a young John Saxon in his meditarranean phase), or a teenage white supremacist (played by Daniel Webber long before he would play Vince Neil in The Dirt); both represent the destructive forces pulling the community into bad places. Of the two films, Down Under and The Combination, I prefer Forsythe's film because I am fucked in the head and I enjoy its messy leftist edgelord no bullshit sledgehammer approach. The two films aren't really comparable, however, as one is a ridiculous socio-political comedy that borders on nightmare, while The Combination is the well-trod boards of crime in a heartless world. They make a good pair though, and I am glad that we have them both to paint a picture of Australia that we'd rather pretend did not exist.

I have a whole thing I still need to finish writing about how we have been evolving & mutating Ed Gein's story every 15ish years give or take whatever amount of time, and how this is Fincher remixing Silence of the Lambs and dividing the acceptable yet urban legend parts of Gein's mythology (the cannibalism) again, and combining them with Clarice, and dividing that by new-media-technologies and the devouring wave of network technologies about to swallow us to imbue everyone here with a deep cultural resonance with strange, long roots, but the heteronormitivity and Americanised smoothing of this version really sucked the energy out of me so fuck it, maybe next decade I'll finally write it, if we aren't already all dead.
This has been a five star film for me, and I've said many times that it might be Fincher's best film if he had pulled off the trilogy, but watching it back to back with the Swedish adaptation left me thinking more highly of that film - which I didn't really think very much of as I watched it - & how it did more with less & still kept more in there. Fincher/Mara's Lisbeth is working so hard to appear more unlikeable & never comes close to Rapace's absolute disregard & bile. A shrunken Dragon Tattoo says it all. Fincher's still does many excellent and remarkable things, but fucking hell it's just so faux-uncontrolled and feels like a normal doll wearing someone else's skin. I was partly right, but it is the film itself that is aping Gein's real and imagined behaviours, cannibalising, and wearing skins that don't belong to it.