"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…

"A man don't know how many friends he's got till he dies."
"Sometimes he makes more friends by dying than by anything else he ever done."

1958 saw multiple films released by editor turned (briefly) director Gene Fowler Jr. Showdown At Boot Hill was released in the same year as his second film, I Married A Monster From Outer Space, which both share the same screenwriter. It's very clear between those two films and his debut, I Was A Teenage…

I went AWOL for a bit recently. I'm talking about here, on Letterboxd. But like Yuri, also in life on a larger scale. Part of it was disappearing in Japan for a month, travelling far and wide. Eating pork cutlet on Kyushu just like Yuri, as far from my disasters as I could get. I left on that journey immediately after watching Yuri On Ice with my Mum and the constant movement from place to place didn't allow for much…

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…