"Can we turn on the lights again?!"
Finally available for easy viewing in quite good quality!
Of the canonical American horror filmmakers of the 60s & 70s, Hooper's filmography has perhaps been the most difficult to piece together. His numerous TV productions have left many films in limbo, while his divergences into non-horror meant the rabid fans have not bootlegged their hearts out to keep them in circulation. The essential release by Arrow Video of Eggshells and The Heisters on blu-ray…
It's not surrealism.
It's not metaphor or parable.
It's the genuine discordance of an ouroborus of power that cannot be broken without detonating at an atomic level.
It is the true madness that humanity threatens to make the last defining feature of Western Civilisation.
Schrodinger's Murder invested & gated thoroughly through and through by gaslight.
The house of cards beneath and behind all houses of cards; the project of patriarchy, from the engineered internalised idolatry of youth to the mutual cannibalising…
Excited and bitter. Rocking and rolling. Standing in the shoes of our elders (as we set them on fire).
There's a wonderful essay in the booklet of Radiance's restoration of Big Time Gambling Boss that contains a wonderful anecdote and quote from director Yamashita Kosaku. In the last years of his life he worked on educational films for children, which seemed to one interviewer to be at odds with his earlier career as a director of yakuza films, specifically ninkyo eiga (chivalry films). Yamashita responded: "Such nonsense! All of my yakuza movies are educational! Haven't you seen my movies?".…
In going through an article on Vermont folk horror from Arrow Video's excellent American Horror Project Vol.2, in relation to DARK AUGUST, I was reading up on a spate of experimental witchy films from early 70s Vermont in Steven R. Bissette's informative essay. Through it I discovered this "experimental" short.
Made in 1972, it was screened independently throughout the region being one of a handful of "essentially secret films," writes Bissette in the Arrow booklet, "self-distributed by the filmmakers themselves…
A jewelled crown of paracinema, a prize that was never meant for mere mortals, Surviving Edged Weapons comes to us from a golden age of violence & silliness. It was a police training video, created for a professional elite to educate & enlighten. How a man jiggling at the speed of danger, hips flexing & thrusting, was meant to train a police officer in the ways of self defense remains a mystery. There are many mysteries surrounding this film, such as who the…
