Letterboxd — Your life in film

This week I've been stricken by a bout of intense and serious stomach pain, a near constant fullness and a gnawing ache. Went to the doctor and turns out I have gastritis, an inflammation of my stomach lining almost certainly caused by my extremely poor eating habits. I wake up, have a coffee, eat occasional snacks rarely, lunch very infrequently. It's not uncommon for dinner to my first and only main food of the day. That's it. So, my body…

The first time I watched this I had no idea of its place in the extended universe of Michael J Murphy and I had it pegged as a sort of tamer UK version of Last House On Dead End Street, a satirical exploration of a filmmaker’s rage against cheap fraudulent producers and distributors. Watched after Death Run, the experience is much richer as you spot actors, locations and auteurist obsessions (like Big Dudes Working Out for a Long Time) and…

Having very little idea of how to start with Indicator’s, um, comprehensive box set of Michael J Murphy movies I thought a post-apocalypse movie would be a safe bet. 90 minutes later me and my friend Sol sat stunned, speechless. What had we just seen? The most remarkable heroic arc, from ‘whinging idiot’ to ‘the new Messiah’ outside Excalibur. Some very unexpected cannibalism. Mutants with pulsing faces. Post-apocalyptic bike gangs wearing the same skull bandanas you could buy (probably still…

I am a big fan of Australian First Nations director Ivan Sen but I missed seeing this film when it got a very brief release in between Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns.  Sen is a very hands-on director - this time he produced, wrote, directed, shot and edited the film and composed the film’s music score.  

Sen’s earlier films (he had a Melbourne Cinémathèque season in 2019) are quintessentially Australian stories.  This is his first film predominantly shot overseas and his…

Just clicked what an influence Romero is on Shyamalan, this in particular on The Happening and Knock (there is a line about this 'not just being a passing wind' that could be the inspiration for the former). Like Knock so much of this is about what it is like to wait for updates about the apocalypse from TV and media, praying for some intervention from higher up, an idea that isn't less terrifying 50 years later. I like that the…

In 2009 I wrote the following review for a now-defunct blog hosted by an undergraduate peer of mine. I'm reposting it here because I've never forgotten the film and I was really proud of what I wrote (also it gives some hints about where my critical brain was at the time). You can rent the documentary on Vimeo, but I would very much love if this film got a proper release.

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My favourite part of this film is the…

The big attractions in this Taiwanese martial-arts potboiler are two kung fu-fighting gorillas! They're played by stuntmen in two of the worst gorilla costumes you've ever seen, and they get a lot of screen time. There's a scene where our heroes stab the gorillas in their heads and blood shoots out like a fire hose. I don't think that's too much of a spoiler. A movie like this can't really be spoiled.

There's a lot of other fun stuff in…

I'm always up for a movie featuring a guy in a gorilla suit, so like Charlie Brown with the football, I had high hopes for this bottom-of-the-barrel porno from 1974. Alas, while Harry Reems does wear a gorilla suit in two scenes, he quickly takes it off. With the exception of Blonde Venus, I only like gorilla-suit movies if we're supposed to take the gorilla seriously, for example The Ape Man (1943). That said, I've decided to give this movie…

"Plot is tricky in character studies. Ideally they should be plotless, dwelling on the complexities and contradictions of human behaviour, guiding the viewer to one of several conclusions. That's unrealistic in the commercial cinema. The trick is to have just enough plot so that it seems like something is happening, but not so much that the viewer thinks it's about plot." (Schrader, Collected Screenplays I)

The plot is the problem, one of the problems anyway. A convoluted, half-baked slice of…

Over six years ago, a friend who was part of the queer support group at Uni recommended this film to me. I looked it up and was vaguely repulsed at what looked to be a gory mix of sex and violence. I didn't understand his recomendation, even after all the LaBruce films I've seen until now.

And for the first hour or so, I was still confused. There's the same lame political provocations, the same clever ideas buried under the…