*contains spoilers It is reported that screenwriter, and sometime director, Alan Ormsby (1943-) was inspired in the late 1960s after seeing a screening of the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) with some university friends. “Let’s do something like that,” said Ormsby after seeing the movie in downtown Miami one evening. The result would…
Read more The Slightly Deranged Screenplays of Alan Ormsby (Part One)
* contains spoilers There may be a few vampire movies that may be worth a look as they appear to have been forgotten over the years. They are no masterpieces… but they are better after a single viewing, which is always a good sign. Those movies are Dracula’s Widow (1988), Nightlife (tv movie 1989) and…
Read more The Cult of Director Christopher Coppola’s Dracula’s Widow (1988)
*contains spoilers There is a movie which will become more important as the years pass… should we not correct the environment… as a premonition of things to come. The film is The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), a fictional account of how the world, after the detonation of a couple of large atomic bombs,…
Read more The Climate Change Irony of The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962)
*contains spoilers The movie Angst (2000) isn’t a horror movie, it’s a movie about horror fans – and a tribute to those often isolated souls. Those fans who just want to connect in that crazy, horrible, violent, terrible, bloody… life and death genre! It is about the foetus in every hard-core horror fans mind –…
Read more The One About the Aussie Horror Fan who Wrote a Horror Movie!
*contains spoilers While he was filming Longstreet, Jimmy set up the James Franciscus Celebrity Tennis Classic to raise money for the now politically incorrect titled charitable organisation Foundation for Retarded Children of the Desert. Held in the Palm Desert area, the classic appears to have run a few years and should have helped Jimmy get…
Read more The Cult of the James Franciscus Facial Tan Club (Part Two)
*contains spoilers The James Franciscus Facial Tan Club came about in second year high school. My friends Scott and Paul were the members of clubs inscribed in my pencil case… along with The George Negus ‘I’m top shit’ Club and the Denise Marcos Orgy Club who were media figures of the day. We were fans…
Read more The Cult of the James Franciscus Facial Tan Club (Part One)
*contains spoilers Prince of Darkness (1987) is the second film in what John Carpenter terms his Apocalypse Trilogy. The first of these films is The Thing (1982) while the third is In the Mouth of Madness (1995). This one is by far the most underrated. It’s a Universal Picture! An MCA company, that is. And…
*contains spoilers The first time I saw Hearts of Fire (1987) was, surprisingly, on a big screen. For a film which tanked in London and was deemed not worthy of theatrical release in the United States this is definitely surprising. But there was a guy at the Gold Coast Theatre when I lived and worked…
*contains spoilers The music in Wrong World is minimalist, almost experimental, with harmonica, strings and drums which are almost incoherent like the mind of Moir. Certainly the music doesn’t seem to belong, much like Moir. He runs across Kennedy again and says “a rich friend” is funding him, shouting her Chinese, when she’d prefer a…
Read more The Poetic Film Triptych of Director Ian Pringle (Part Two)
*contains spoilers When I say Ian Pringle’s films are poetic I don’t mean in terms of verse but rather their – of not imagination – but their sensitive emotions and their style of expression. There are unknown rhythms to his movies, reflections on nature both human and animal, there is a contrast of man and…
Read more The Poetic Film Triptych of Director Ian Pringle (Part One)
