The beauty of the short-form FF format is that there’s little time for exposition, something which can destroy both horror and SF when not done well. These aren’t Cixin Liu short stories, designed to make you think differently about the nature of the universe -- they’re V/H/S short stories, designed to be spooky, nasty, scary or some combination of the three.
Films
31 posts
What worked perfectly on a sketchy VHS at home suddenly seemed to fall flat on the big screen. It’s all about the suspension of disbelief -- being able to believe something you know intellectually is a fiction is real. Turns out it’s easier to do that when you’re not in a building whose very existence is predicated on showing people things that don’t exist, and when you’re not in the company of hundreds of people eating popcorn.
Initially conceived as a parody by feminist author and civil rights campaigner Rita Mae Brown, the film was ultimately financed by exploitation maestro Roger Corman, a man whose ‘bung some topless girls in it’ attitude to making his money back leads popular consensus to dismiss the film as the product of a bizarre marriage that ultimately serves to nullify the film’s best intentions.
...creatively, Jodorowsky has always embodied a near singular collision of European high art and Latin American magical (sur)realism. Despite having been born in 1929, and thus being over thirty before the Sixties even began, Jod’s unique and psychedelic approach to writing, art and film-making clicked into place during that decade like a machine-tooled piece of jigsaw, its liberated, vision-questing aesthetic perfectly in tune with the new age of Aquarius:...
Towards the end of FF’s reign came Ti West’s The Sacrament, which is definitely at the more awesome end of things, and is one of the few I’d save as an example of what CAN be done with the format. Nobody can accuse West of lacking ambition or creativity [...] and what The Sacrament lacks in budget it more than makes up for in sheer balls.
what these bright young directors did lead to was a further interest in the films that inspired them, largely the various European new waves of the late fifties and sixties. It seems to be the origin of this film, which liberally lifts from Georges Franju’s 1960 masterpiece Eyes Without A Face. Make no bones about it, it isn’t a nod, or an homage, it is a straight-up pinch of the whole plot. Well, it is not quite Eyes Without A Face; but it is Face Without The Eyes.
Ozu stands apart. There are few film-makers who command such unanimous acclaim, detractors few and far between, critics as one enraptured by his singular style of delicate, melancholy social satires. This acclaim largely sits upon his post-war films until his death in the early sixties, but his early films remain in need of being seen by a larger audience. It’s a task the BFI has set about with its ongoing blu-ray releases of early Ozu works, and they have chosen two more corkers to focus on this time around.
Well-regarded but under-seen on initial release a decade ago, The Borderlands has become something of a beloved cult favourite, one that along with Ben Wheatley’s early work was key with reviving folk at the centre of horror culture. On its tenth anniversary, this Second Sight re-release gives an opportunity to re-examine the film, and to find it even stronger than the first time round, standing head and shoulders above many of the films that have followed in its footsteps, whilst remaining kind of inimitable, a totally singular concoction.
It does well to initially evoke its era. The film’s primary tones are garish neon and sweat on skin, like a grimy San Junipero, and the set design and cinematography do well to create sense of a place where macho sleaze permeates every nook and cranny of the town. The problem is the characters that inhabit it feel too archetypal, too lacking in the eccentricities and unpredictabilities that would make them believable.
This re-release of cult classic Alligator finds it in as joyous as ever; a fun, knowing creature feature wrapped in a lovingly extensive package of remasters and extras from the ever-reliable 101 Films.
The film takes this classic western trope, establishing a small band of characters and setting them off on an expedition, but foregrounds the violence and cruelty at the heart of their quest, with every encounter they stumble upon drawing more and more out of them, and further brutality into the story.
There is something strangely admirable about how big Mad Cats swings, its commitment to its own childish rambunctiousness; but ultimately it can’t string itself together beyond a funny idea and some well-done set pieces. There’s certainly an interesting film-maker in there, and there is evidence of it here; but equally there is one that is still finding their feet, still to nail the difficult execution of a particular brand of absurdity.
Against the backdrop of a 2023 which brought a BFI retrospective, and what looks to be his late career masterpiece, EO, comes this release from Second Run of three of Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s key early works. They show a truly forward thinking director, whose work from this era remains relatively under-seen compared to his contemporaries, despite it containing some true classics of the European New Wave.
To this end, the existence of this film alone is heartening. Varda now sits at a place where a documentary like this can get green-lit; broad, populist, removed from the academic and cinephile discussions she was once the reserve of. Here we get Varda by those that new and loved her and her work; her family, fellow filmmakers and critics, and as such it’s by no means a deep dive, though enjoyable all the same.
Cleopatra Nouvelle Vague‘s Marc Collin adopts a fly-on-the-wall approach with Le Choc du Futur to transport you back in time to a synthetic studio in 1978, peeling back the years to remind us why electronic music truly matters. It’s difficult, if not perhaps impossible, to truly maintain a perspective on […]
Blue Underground Blue Underground‘s 4k restoration of Lucio Fulci‘s The House By The Cemetery is a handsome beast indeed. Cloaked in a faux-3D lenticular cover, it consists of three discs — two blu rays featuring the movie itself and a really quite ridiculous amount of extras, and a CD of […]
James Green and Nick Dawson release their self-titled Silences EP on Courier Sound on 8 July. The short film of the EP being recorded at Bear Hug Studios is premiered here:
Oleg Puzan (AKA Dronny Darko on Cryo Chamber) has a new album coming out on CD via Glacial Movements under the name Line Spectrum,
Demiurg / London 3 March 2019 This is a story of two enigmas. One is an inscrutable totalitarian art-rock collective, and the other is the most secretive state on Earth. And this is all about what happened when the two collided to the strains of a much-loved feel-good musical with […]
Preceded by the “Chateau” single earlier this month, unconventional musical subversives R.O.C return with their first album in twelve years, Bile And Celestial Beauty, appearing on rocmusic on 29 March. Oleg Rooz has created seven short films to go with the album, and his video for the track “Divorce”, which is […]