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…
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…
After the massive international success of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), producer Sam Spiegel took a little longer to find the right material for his next project, and while it took 4 years for the next wave of films to materialize, his next trio of productions – The Chase (1966), The Night of the Generals (1967), and The Happening (1967) – were a mixed bag…
The incredible life of former safe cracker-turned WWII British double agent Eddie Chapman provides enough fertile material for a mini-series, and yet when his biography (co-authored with Frank Owen) was adapted for the big screen, it clearly suffered from the influence of the James Bond spy craze, with director Terence Young arguably responsible for the loose handling of factual material…
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