A funny movie on how sometimes fear is preferable to boredom, so much negative space and downtime for our hero and us to project something more exciting onto. I love the shot of Laura Paredes dragging her chair all the way down onto the beach, getting comfortable, then quickly realising she doesn’t like it down there in the sandy wind, and turning back. Real. That she’s ultimately right that something (if not her exact conjecture) is happening is a disquieting acknowledgement that fantastical paranoia is based in the kernel that the world is genuinely a sinister place.

Franco Nero as a beautiful drunk loser barely manages to survive the murder spree of a homophobic caricature and the oppressive open spaces of modernist architecture. Strong paranoid mood mostly on the back of the gorgeous, negative-space-heavy cinematography that makes all buildings look ready to crush the puny humans. Vitorrio Storaro’s post-Bulworth career is so depressing.

Pam Grier as fantasy and revelling in it. Her photojournalist who fucks has chemistry with everyone and basically no fear. The busy conspiracy plot sidelines her more than it should and resolves unsatisfactorily (with head-scratching racial politics to match), but she and Yaphet Kotto are a compelling team with a Richard Harrison/Bruce Le dynamic. Carl Weathers’ sweaty close ups give an extra oomph to his cipher psycho.

“Laughter - the bitterest and most subtle antidote to hope.” HBD to this movie and Keva.

Every time I watch The All Golden, it feels like the first time, so screening it with Static Vision as part of Neo-Intimacies was an honour and a pleasure. 

It was an additional honour and pleasure to interview director Nate Wilson for a deep dive into what exactly this movie is, how it all came together, and Jamie Gillis (among other things). Watch here: https://youtu.be/nRTW2zP7gz0

Performed intimacy power games (almost) entirely in one small bare unhomely apartment set. Slippery sound work that plays with ASMR qualities in disorienting ways - characters speaking too close from far away and muffled when facing away up close, never getting a clear sense of where any of these people stand with each other. Cringe horror is not an emotion I like being trapped with, so I spent a lot of the screening looking away from the screen. For another good ASMR domestic freakout, check out Sorority Girl Massacre: Black Static at Moment of Death.

No other filmmaker has been more expressive with goo, so it was an absolute honour to interview Joe Meredith about his underground paranoid biothrillers for Trash Day: https://youtu.be/mie1fInxLiU?si=Lhv5Qw-1w6R78ofi

In my last review, I wrote that someone needed to interview the filmmakers of Dogface …. and two years later, I did as part of Trash Day! It was an honour to talk to writer/director Felix Jordan about his psychotronic should-be classic: https://youtu.be/lDuBK-YibEY?si=QuB8Y8VxlOQyWkq-

Eat your spectacle, piggy! Gobble up the explosions, the falling buildings, the energy spheres and decapitations! Oink oink, stuff yourself with mass death and destruction and big phallic swords pulled from women’s torsos!