John Aes-Nihil’s best-known work is the surreal re-enactment film Manson Family Movies (1984), which has its compelling moments and is fairly straightforward in structure, but this current documentary, co-directed with David Woodward…
Based on the book by John Geiger, Nik Sheehan’s documentary presents a pretty thorough examination of inventor Brion Gysin and his trippy gizmo, the dreamachine, a perforated spinning cylinder with an internal light bulb that mimics the sine wave which supposedly induces a dream-like state when one leans close with closed eyes, fully conscious…
Podcast interview with composer Fabio Frizzi on his tribute concert Frizzi 2 Fulci, coming to Toronto October 8th, and a review of the Frizzi-scored Contraband (1980), whose music debuted this year on CD from Italy’s Beat Records.
As much as Contraband is affected by weak dubbing (many of the male voices don’t wholly fit the age of the actors) and a sometimes uneven script with odd bouts of humour, there’s much to admire in this rare non-horror effort by Lucio Fulci, especially the film’s semi docu-drama style, with Sergio Salvati’s loose camerawork trained on grungy Naples locales, and Vincenzo Tomassi’s razor sharp editing which keeps the film’s pacing quite tight…
Reviews of Anatole Litvak and Sam Spiegel’s The Night of the Generals (1967) on Blu from Twilight + Terence Young’s Triple Cross (1966) on DVD.
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