the thing (1982)

on this mad list of the top 10 most gruesome death scenes from films, they have a collage of all of the death scenes from john carpenter‘s the thing (1982). these are some of the best fx ever, check it out!

there’s also clips from other cool films, check it out on hecklespray.com. they also have the 10 most disappointing film deaths ever.

FUN FACT: the thing was set in the antarctic (scientists are confronted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of the people that it kills) and the tagline was: ‘man is the warmest place to hide’. amazing!

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a night of horror – thursday april 10, 2008 at dendy newtown

this was the third screening of ‘a night of horror’ at dendy newtown that i attended this week, and the worst! oh it wasn’t that bad, three or four of the films were great, but the rest were pretty bad. it’s interesting – i love dodgy film, especially horror – and one of my favourite events of the year is always squatfest, which almost prides itself on showing lame films (alongside brilliant ones), but i found the quality of the films at this screening disappointingly crap.

maybe because they make you pay, or maybe because i assume that there are plenty of good short horror films being made, and a lot of these were shit? i dunno.

the night included: egg ghost (dongkeun lee – kor / usa), peekers (mark steensland – usa), halloween high (tyson hauff – usa), eel girl (paul campion – nz), akai (carlos gananian – bra), fine meats (guy verge wallace – aus), red harvest (dylan griffith – usa), go ask alice (shannon lark – usa), uninvited (shaune harrison – uk), victor and the machine (carlos talamanca – esp), the lycanthrope (lucas peltonen – usa).

egg ghost was pretty boring, where a clay-mation ghost takes a girls face. peekers was cool! it was the kind of film that kat and i reckon we would make – easy, short, and funny. it won’t seem funny in words, so i won’t explain it, but you can watch some of the mark steensland’s films on his site.

halloween high started with some laughs – it was essentially a rip off of a lot of horror films- mainly scream (not that scream is a credible horror film, of course). it showed a bunch of horror stars – freddy krueger (a nightmare on elm street, and related spin offs), michael myers (halloween – the best series ever), and leatherface (texas chainsaw massacre) – fretting over a spate of murders in their town. blah, blah, blah, it was jane austen taking revenge on the stars of horror for making kids watch their films on friday nights instead of reading pride and prejudice. lame. but they snuck in a few early laughs, so all was not lost.

eel girl was entertaining, i guess – i’m glad that it was as short as it was. at least the production and effects/make up were pretty awesome.

akai was shit on so many levels. it was an over complicated, boring, sexist vampire film – do we really need to see another film in which female prostitutes/escorts get murdered? we had no sympathy for any of the characters, which would be fine if either a) it didn’t go for 21 minutes, or b) that something happened. self-indulgent, and boring.

fine meats, the only australian film of the night, was sadly badly made clay-mation, not in a good way. not even fine.

red harvest, was the coolest i reckon. it was basically children of the damned meets 28 days later, and although obviously done on the cheap, was done really well – super clever. they created true drama and suspense by using simple tricks, and just concentrated on good make up when needed.

go ask alice was atrocious – i’m not going to waste too much space talking about it, just don’t watch it. if you don’t believe me, or are intrigued, you can watch it here, but don’t say i didn’t warn you. blech! it’s part of the viscera series, which is films made by women only, which is cool, but this is just an awful film.

the next film, uninvited, was really lame. i saw what they were trying to do, but it just wasn’t good to watch, and made me a little sleepy. a confusing synopsis: a writer has a car accident on christmas eve (without setting that scene at all, by the way), stops in a local pub, and an unscary ‘thing’ appears but nothing scary happens. then, it switches to him telling the story at a podium at his book launch. then the not-scary ‘thing’ from the pub is his reflection in the mirror at the very end. snooorrreee.

the last two were pretty cool, although victor and the machine is not a horror film. admittedly, it could be classified as a monster film – a small child fills his recently deceased dad’s body with a motorbike motor to make him work again – but it’s not horror dudes. that’s cool though, everyone liked it from what i could tell.

the closer for the evening, the lycanthrope, was hilarious. i don’t want to ruin this one, because it will hopefully show up online soon (i can’t find it now), but it was cool, funny, and gross. the only downfall was the out-of-sync sound (that’s annoying, huh), but everyone should watch it if you can!

overall, the ‘a night of horror’ film festival was awesome – of course there will be some films that you don’t like, especially if like me you watch 24 in one week!!! – but it’s still worth checking out these things out, and the good ones are worth the wait. heaps of cities have a similar festival – go and support it!!!

FUN FACT: texas chainsaw massacre character leatherface was loosely based on real serial killer ed gein, who also influenced the characters norman bates from psycho and buffalo bill from silence of the lambs, as well as the film in the light of the moon. popular guy.

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a night of horror – sunday april 6, 2008 at dendy newtown

film festivals happen all the time, and often there are pretty cool looking horror fests in sydney – at least one or two a year, anyway. i never go to them, because i’m completely slack, and only go to the cinema once or twice a year no matter how much i want to see stuff.

but i went to this one! a night of horror, just over a week of horror flicks, at the cinema near my house. i didn’t go to all of them (i wondered if anyone did though – like, a million horror films), but i managed to get to two screenings on sunday april 6 (and am planning on going tonight, too).

the first screening (4pm) was based around the debut of a silent/film noir adaptation of the h.p. lovecraft story the call of cthulhu (original text) (“that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.”).

trailer:

not the one with tori ‘gory’ or ‘horse face’ spelling that i never heard of until right now and what the fuck were they thinking?!?! ‘welcome home… to the end of the world’???

trailer:

the one that i did see was so good, though. i can’t believe how good this film was! it was so true to form, so fine, so well done. the attention to detail was incredible, and the sets and models were superb. on top of this, the original score was outstanding, and perfectly suitable. i could go on. so i will. the story is really great, and from what i can gather, the film was produced by the h.p. lovecraft hostorical society – so that’s why it’s so on the money…

i have discovered that you can get in on dvd, and if you like lovecraft, or 1920s style silent films, you should get it any way you can.

the film was preceded by 4 other shorts, all based on lovecraft stories, and the first of which i missed. the three that i saw left a lot to be desired.

the film that was playing when i entered, la partition, was a series of stills with a voice over (in french), as opposed to, uh, you know – film. it was better than it sounds, and there was one scene that began to put me on edge, but not enough i’m afraid. the second one that i caught, getting out (usa), was the coolest of the three shorter shorts, and featured crude animation and pretty lo-fi voice overs. i don’t really feel as though its worth going into detail of the stories, it might just be better to read the originals.

the third one, a legend told (sweden), was good for a laugh, and i got one fright out of it, but it till fell a bit flat. they really left the cinema craving something brilliant, and we got it with the call of cthulhu.

the 7pm screening – which was titled sick in the body, sick in the head and featured 10 shorts – was awesome, too. i saw my friend aaron out the front in between, and he felt as though after the call of cthulhu, he wouldn’t bother trying more films, as he was so satisfied. this made sense at the time, but i’m glad that i stuck around for the next screening.

two of the ‘films’ were video clips, from torture device (usa) and old world disorder (sweden). they were two of the worst fucking things i’ve ever seen in my life. these were the only mistakes that the curators made – they were seriously so bad, it makes me sick to think of them. not because they were grotesque, but because i was embarrassed to be in the cinema while they were shown, they were that lame. i managed to escape to the toilet during one, killing two birds with one stone, but somehow forced myself through the second. old world disorder? awful.

thankfully, the rest of the films were great fun. they went as follows: when sally met frank (victoria waghorn – aus), anesthesia (adam kargman – usa), hideous (benjamin sztajnkrycer – can), kirksdale (ryan spindell – usa), eyes of edward james (rodrigo gudino – can), on edge (frazer lee – uk), lobe massage (heath hanlin /megan ehrhart – usa), wretched (leslie delano/ heidi martinuzzi – usa).

the most terrifying, by far, was anesthesia. it began with a woman kneeling on the floor of a hospital room, praying to god make everything with her heart ok (replete with crucifix necklace). we’re then in the operating theatre, to witness her heart transplant. after anesthetic is administered, we are inside the woman’s head, looking out, and hearing her thoughts.

that’s kind of fucked up enough, right? but the anesthetic doesn’t work properly. her body movement is out, but her brain is alert. she can feel he cold of the gel applied to where her chest will be ripped open – ‘oh, that’s cold… wait…’ she realises that this isn’t right, so attempts to let the surgeons know by trying to move a body part. as she’s begging her finger to work, even just a little, she hears and sees the surgeon that’s about to operate as he turns around and offers the scalpel to a younger looking guy.

‘c’mon johnny (or whatever his name was), you’ve got to get your feet wet sometime.’ shit. she flips. she realises that not only is she going to feel everything that happens, she’s going to be operated on by a first timer. she really, really tries now, to get her finger to move. and it does. it pops up a little of the bed.

the young surgeon sees it and stops, looks around. ‘don’t worry, that’s just a nerve – it happens sometimes’, says a nurse across from him.

he proceeds to cut her chest open, and pull open her ribs. seriously, you see this shit happening. all you hear is the woman screaming – silently – screaming inside her head. screaming for god to help her, for the doctors to stop, for anything. this goes on for a while, before she screams for god to ‘take her anywhere but here, just take me away!’ and she flatlines.

the doctors, surgeons, etc. don’t know what’s happened, and they all look at the young surgeon with half-accusatory, half-sympathetic looks.

wow, so full on. it’s not that i’d necessarily recommend watching it, because it was pretty full on, but kudos for the shock and sick factor. i’ve got a pretty strong stomach, but this had a whole theatre of slasher-flick fans squirming and looking away, including myself.

my actual favourite of the screening was probably the eyes of edward james. i won’t explain it, as i’ve been writing about these films for ages, but here’s a synopsis from the infamous imdb.com:

roughly 15 minutes in length, the eyes of edward james is a suspenseful, intriguing narrative. shot in the first person p.o.v, the film is a very accurate depiction of the subconscious mind and the blur between memory and accuracy. very hitchcockian/lynchian, very noir.

gudino treats the audience with respect, allowing for an interpretive perspective of the film, and does not underestimate the viewer’s comprehension of the material – nor does he feel the need to blatantly ‘explain’ his vision to the viewer.

beautifully shot, this atmospheric film is a welcomed addition to the suspense/horror genre.

yup, clever film. the films were great, and all worth seeing (except for the music videos, of course). i feel really lucky to have the opportunity to go and see stuff like this, as anyone who is given that opportunity should. if you are that lucky, go and check some shit out – whether it’s film festivals, bands, art shows, or whatever – because without our support, they won’t happen again.

FUN FACT: on the greatest films website, there is a list of the ‘greatest scariest movie moments and scenes’, which includes the death of bambi’s mother! it is intended to be a collection of ‘the most classic, ‘scariest’ scenes in movie history, including film scenes that were once considered ‘scary’ upon their initial screenings, but have lost some of their shock appeal.’ awesome.

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