SECOND THOUGHTS: CINEMANIACS AND THE HORROR SEQUEL

The horror sequel is one of the most unfairly maligned of all mainstream movies. Their very existence is often viewed with cynicism, many discarded as artless, crass grabs designed to milk a concept for a few dollars more. Audiences and critics eager to relive the precise experience of their favourite fright films often dismiss the follow-up for not delivering the same visceral rush.

The Melbourne-based film-fan collective Cinemaniacs are addressing the imbalance with a 4 film programme called ‘Scream and Scream Again’. In conjunction with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, this band of genre experts will present, for your reconsideration, Damiano Damiani’s Amityville II: The Possession (pictured, above), Jeannot Szwarc’s Jaws 2, Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II and Mike Hodges and Don Taylor’s Damien: Omen II.

“What I love most about many horror movie sequels is the idea that the monster is never truly dead and that the leading lady’s story is never truly over,” says Lee Gambin, one of Australia’s leading authorities on horror and Director of the Cinemaniacs team. “There is much more room for memorable cinematic moments, there is room to develop characters and move them forward and it’s always very cool to see actors from previous films reappear in new ones.”

SCREEN-SPACE spoke with the Cinemaniacs team to get their ying to the critical yang that greeted these films upon their initial release.

Amityville II: The Possession:
What the Critics said: “There are some good performances here, by Jack Magner and Olson in particular, and some good technical credits, especially Sam O'Steen's editing. It's just that this whole ‘Amityville’ saga is such absolute horse manure.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times; January 1, 1982.

What Cinemaniacs say: “I remember seeing it as a kid and being instantly hooked. I was addicted to the plight of Sonny and his descent into demonic possession which alienates him from his family. It’s such a creepy sleazy fun ride and I adore it! Not to mention it boasts super performances by the likes of Rutanya Alda, Diane Franklin and Burt Young.” – Gambin.

Jaws 2:
What the Critics said: “The shark may be bigger and its teeth sharper, but Jaws 2 does not have the same bite that the original Jaws gripped the country with three summers ago” – David Watters, Herald-Journal; June 17, 1978.

What Cinemaniacs say: “This film has plenty of bite! Chief Brody returns to face greedy capitalists, undiagnosed post traumatic stress and Amity Island’s curious case of over size sharks. Jaws 2 is bigger, meaner (poor Orca!) and more monstrous due to a mishap where half of his face is burnt off Phantom of the Opera style, casting a perfect portrait of a slasher villain, hell bent on eating horny teenagers AND a helicopter. You will never see Freddy or Jason do that!” – Ki Wone, Programming Co-ordinator.

Halloween 2:
What the Critics said: “This uninspired version amounts to lukewarm sloppy seconds in comparison to the original film that made director John Carpenter a hot property.” – Variety (author not credited); October 30, 1981.

What Cinemaniacs say: “John Carpenter has admitted that he co-wrote a lot of Halloween II at 2am in the morning after a six pack of beer and that he never wanted to make a sequel in the first place. With that in mind, just imagine how amazing it would have been if he'd been sober and interested! This film not only broke new ground by setting a Horror sequel immediately after the first film - it practically helped create the blueprint for slasher sequels that would be photocopied again and again throughout the 80s and beyond.” – Anthony Davies, Artistic Consultant.

Damien: Omen II:
What the Critics said: “Perhaps my resistance has given out but I must say that ‘Damien: Omen II,’ though it's as foolish as the first film, is rather more fun to watch and sometimes very stylish-looking. “ – Vincent Canby, The New York Times; June 9, 1978.

What Cinemaniacs say: “Scott Taylor's portrayal of the adolescent Damien is highly nuanced and complex. Damien: The Omen II paints its characters with shades of grey, giving the film an emotional resonance which adds to the horror. It is filled with some wonderfully stylised death scenes, a hauntingly beautiful score, fantastic cinematography and superlative performances. It's a great study into the nature of evil in our society while still being fun and frightening. A true horror classic that's not to be overlooked.” – Lisa Bartolomei, Researcher.

Details of the Cinemaniacs Season at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image can be found here. The group are also holding retrospective screenings regularly at the Tote Hotel.

A NIGHT OF HORROR / FANTASTIC PLANET 2013 FILM FESTIVAL SPECIAL

Coming to Sydney's inner-west on April 11 will be the latest edition of one of Australia's most respected horror film events, A Night of Horror / Fantastic Planet Film Festival (ANOH).

With an encyclopaedic eye for genre gems, founder and head programmer Dr Dean Bertram will offer one of his most extensive programmes ever. SCREEN-SPACE will be covering the event with constantly updated reviews, interviews and images. Please bookmark and revisit this page for the latest in A Night of Horror / Fantastic Planet images.

INTERVIEWS:

Space Man: The Armen Evrensel Interview: “My goal was to make it stand alone, proudly unapologetic as a low budget sci-fi comedy..."

Skin Flick: The Eric Falardeau Interview: "The hardest part when making that kind of film is always how much of yourself you put in it and how much darkness in yourself you have to get out to get the proper tone and feeling..."

Apocalypse Now: The Andrew Robertson and Lilly Kanso Interview: "We have a lot of extinction anxiety, which is what accounts for the fact that our movies, tv shows and video games are all obsessed with the genre..."

In conjunction with the A Night of Horror/Fantastic Planet Film Festival organising committee, SCREEN-SPACE was asked to interview three of the filmmakers attending the festival as part of Launch Pad, a series of World Premiere screenings to feature at the event:

Wet and Reckless: director Jason Trost and producer Lucas Till.

A Dark Matter: writer/director James Naylor. 

FEATURES:

Nightmare Factory: A Greg Nicotero Retrospective: “I have friends who will introduce me to people as, 'This is Greg Nicotero – he did the dick in Boogie Nights.'”

REVIEWS:

Buck Wild: "The overall impact suggests it will fall short of breakout hit status, but it is certainly fun enough for those that will watch anything zombie-themed..." Session time: Saturday, April 20, 11.00pm.

The Human Race: "A thrilling indie-sector vision that trumpets the arrival of a skilled, bold storyteller in writer-director Paul Hough..." Session time: Saturday, April 14, 7.00pm.

All Superheroes Must Die: "Constantly struggling to match the promise of its premise..." Session time: Thursday, April 11, 7.00pm. (OPENING NIGHT)

Cockneys vs Zombies: "A comic-relief bit part in an outrageously bloody zom-com may not have been the swansong that the late Richard Briers envisioned for himself..." Session time: Saturday, April 13, 7.00pm.

Found: "A grisly but oddly affecting amalgam of JJ Abrams’ Super 8 by way of William Lustig’’s slasher classic Maniac..." Session time: Tuesday, April 16, 7.00pm.

The Mansion: "Few movies have captured the tension of a post-catastrophic societal change with such teeth-grinding effectiveness..." Session time: Thursday, April 18, 7.00pm.

The History of Future Folk: "An all-too-rare example of the cynicism-free modern comedy..." Session time: Sunday, April 21, 7.00pm. (CLOSING NIGHT)

The Taking: "Destined to confound and frustrate as many as it frightens and disturbs, The Taking is a determinedly non-linear dreamscape of foreboding if occasionally abstract imagery..." Session time: Saturday April 13, 9.00pm.

Wet and Reckless: "These are not people you want to get stuck with at a party, but as caricatures of the worst type of modern celebrity, they work a treat..." Session time: Monday, April 15, 7.00pm.

Mon Ami: "Imagine Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar transplanted into a Fargo-esque milieu..." Session time: Saturday April 13, 5.00pm

Thanatomorphose: "...the loss of control of one’s physicality is a potent visual and metaphorical tool and the debutant director displays the by-products of degeneration with nightmarish style." Session time: Thursday, April 18, 9.00pm.

Space Milkshake: "One of the great joys of this daft adventure is that everybody is in on the joke but no one winks to the camera ironically..." Session time: Thursday Aprill 11, 9.00pm. 

FESTIVAL WRAP-UP:

Read all the winners of the 2013 A Night of Horror / Fantastic Planet Film Festival awards in our review of the event here.

BLOOD TYPE: THE TODD FARMER INTERVIEW

One of Hollywood’s most respected genre writers, Todd Farmer will soon revisit Australian shores to present his two-day industry and writing seminar at The Gold Coast Film Festival. As to be expected of the man behind such gruelling splatter classics as Jason X, My Bloody Valentine 3D and Drive Angry, the event won’t be your average ‘three-act template’ screen-writing gabfest.

“I guarantee Robert McKee does not have blood as part of his seminar, but I will,” Farmer says with a laugh, chatting with SCREEN-SPACE from his Los Angeles base. The 45-year-old Kentucky native has found constant work since landing in Hollywood in 1996, his commitment and natural talent catching the eye of screenwriter Dean Reisner (Play Misty for Me; Charley Varrick; The Enforcer). One of old Hollywood's finest craftsmen of thrillers, Riesner (pictured, right) mentored Farmer before passing away in 2002.

“He taught me how to deal with the gatekeepers, how to deal with the guys who can’t do what we do.” says Farmer, recalling the industry knowledge the veteran imparted about the new regimes, who bombard young writers with often inane ‘script notes’. “He taught me to argue those kinds of notes three times and if you can’t convince them, let it go and cash the cheque. We are here to tell the best story we can tell but at the end of the day, somebody is paying for that story. And I listened, because he wrote Dirty Harry, High Plains Drifter and Starman, all great stuff.”

Farmer got his appetite for the horror/fantasy genre from many of the same sources as the rest of his generation (“I grew up reading Stephen King, so that’s a big part of it, as well as Jaws, Alien, Aliens, Halloween and the Star Wars trilogy.”) and has parlayed his talent into a career highlighted by new spins on old franchises.

“I wrote a draft of Freddy vs Jason, which was fun, so I’d like to actually work with ‘Freddy’. We also did a draft for a new Hellraiser, which was a thrill and I would’ve like to have seen come to life,” he says. “I grew up with those movies and I like re-telling their stories.” Also doing the rounds are unproduced treatments for the Halloween and Ghost Rider properties; these works are highly favoured amongst genre-friendly industry insiders, but are unlikely to see the light of day.

His most successful films to-date have been the spectral thriller The Messengers, on which he recieved a 'Story by' credit (featuring a pre-stardom Kristen Stewart; pictured, above left), and the three-dimensional remake of the seminal 1981 slasher, My Bloody Valentine, helmed by his professional partner, director Patrick Lussier. The $100million global take of his 2009 reworking of the legend of ‘The Miner’ still eases the sting of failure the pair felt on their 2011 follow-up project, Drive Angry, starring Nicholas Cage and Amber Heard.

“That was a tough one because, apart from some constraints that were imposed because of the budget, Drive Angry was exactly the movie we wanted to make,” Farmer recalls of the experience. The critical drubbing and meagre box-office still rankle the writer, though his outlook has become pragmatic over time. “The fact that people just didn’t go and see it, that hurt. Those that saw it seemed to have really liked it. Those that didn’t (like it), I’m fine with that, too. We knew we were making a film that was either a love-or-hate prospect. What I don’t ever want to do is make movies that people go to see and forget after a while.”

The vicissitudes of fanboy response was also experienced after the release of Jason X (pictured, right), his 2001 relaunching of the iconic hockey-mask killer of the Friday the 13th franchise, directed by the late James Isaac. “With Jason Vorhees, there had been nine other movies and it was time to do something different. Because of Freddy vs Jason, there was no way we could tell a story that took place in the present,” recalls Farmer of the narrative logic that took the machete wielding villain into orbit. “I suggested we set it in the future, the original idea being to have it in sort of a Blade Runner-type world. But early on we knew we couldn’t afford to create cities of neon and stuff that like that, so I said ‘Alright, fine, let’s make it Alien and put it on a spaceship.’”  

Todd Farmer is enthused about the future of big-screen horror, an optimism he hopes to share with young Australian screenwriters at the event in April. When asked if the glory days of horror films were a thing of the past, he riles up. “No, man, they’re still around!” he bellows, the Kentucky accent peeking through for the first time in our chat. “Back when I started, there were only a couple of outfits making horror movies, Dimension and New Line. Everybody looked down their noses at it, thought that horror was beneath them,” he recalls. “Then Scream came out and changed the landscape. Then The Ring was a hit, and there were a whole lot of films taken from Asian horror. Then, torture porn ran its course. Now, every studio has a genre department, though admittedly some are doing it not so good and others are clearly better than others. But horror is here to stay.”

Todd Farmer will be hosting The Gold Coast Film Festival’s 2013 Screenwriting Seminar, a two-day event to be held April 22-23. Bookings are essential and available at The Gold Coast Film Festival website.   

NECRO-NOVACASTRIANS: NEWCASTLE'S DAY OF THE DEAD

Now in it's fourth terrifyingly fun year, the brrrrrain-child of a fun-loving group of zombie nuts is producing some short film shockers in Steel City.

The nomadic nature of the great shuffling undead will be celebrated in the port city of Newcastle on Australia’s eastern seaboard this weekend with the annual Zombie March (pictured, above, in 2011) taking place through its streets and parklands. In conjunction with the cosplay extravaganza will be the short film event Scream Screen, featuring next-to-no-budget efforts from local filmmakers who will get to watch their blood-drenched efforts on the big-screen at Tower Cinemas in the dead centre of town.

“Zombies hit such a nerve for people, especially in Newcastle. My sponsors all came on board because they are zombie fans,” says Ella Reed (pictured, right), one of the founding members of the Newcastle Undead Society, the ever-growing band of living, breathing aficionados who drive the event forward. “Two friends and I were encouraged to apply for some funding from a youth arts body,” she recalls. “We thought of the most ridiculous idea we could and they gave us a ridiculous amount of money.”

From humble beginnings, the Zombie March has taken on an epic sense of the absurd and is enjoying the kind of year-to-year growth in popularity that would be the envy of many event organisers. “It started small with around 100 zombies marching through huge amounts of rain and the footy grand final to now having around 400 zombies march,” says Reed, a born-and-bred Novacastrian. “The hope is to continue to expand and grow the event to turn it into a large scale festival with zombie art, zombie zines, comics and stories. We keep infecting so we’ll get there one day.”

Reed is particularly enthused with the film festival component. “There is a theme of black comedy for this year. I like people using their sense of humor for this topic, it makes it more morbid. Each year the films get better and better, I’m excited to see what people come up with every year.” The nine finalists, which feature such pun-tastic titles as ‘Board and Gored’, ‘The Undead and the Unsuitable’ and ‘A Break in the Monotony’, will be judged by ABC Radio’s Rod Quinn, Screen-Space’s own Simon Foster and evergreen Newcastle celebrity, Maynard. The 2011 winner, Paul A Verhoef's thrilling splatterfest Unconsumed, can be viewed below.

The festering-ivities (alright, enough puns) start shuffling at Newcastle Museum from 2.00pm and will finish in King Street for the Scream Screen showings.

THE NATURE OF THINGS: THE LEE GAMBIN INTERVIEW

Between penning acclaimed plays (the Stephen King opus, King of Bangor) and contributing features to Fangoria magazine, Melbourne-based author Lee Gambin (pictured, below, with Molly) writes books on the subject that most inspires him - the horror film. The 33 year-old sat with SCREEN-SPACE at a bustling Melbourne eatery to talk about his soon-to-be-published work, Massacred by Mother Nature: Exploring the Natural Horror Film, an in-depth analysis of the sub-genre known as eco-horror.

Why this book, why now?

It is a favourite sub-genre of mine, one of many, and it is very much under-discussed. It sometimes manages to creep into some film theory books but no one has really tackled it in depth. I grew up loving these sorts of films, watching them all the time. Most of them did come out of the 1970s, to cash in on the environmental movement, which was really taking shape, on the back of the hippy culture. The anti-war anger was subsiding and the new cause was the climate. By the time the 80s came about, Greenpeace and Wilderness Society and PETA were huge and the message was that we better look after the environment or it will turn on us.

By what characteristics did eco-horror define itself?

These films brought us the ‘new monster’; rather than having some supernatural creature, it was just rats or dogs or rabbits or some such thing. Mother Nature turning on mankind. And going through it, I realised it actually has spawned a whole lot of subgenres within itself, such as the mutated monster films, or the ‘human help’ films, like Willard or Jennifer, where outcast people enlist the help of animals to do their bidding. It is not as massively popular as the slasher genre or demonic-themed films, but eco-horror was still huge, particularly through the 70s and 80s. And it still survives today, in those films by Asylum, things like Dino-croc.

What were the films that have emerged as the most influential in the eco-horror genre?

The two that really stand out as pivotal moments in the field, that provided credibility for the genre, are The Birds and Jaws. But for me, I loved all the films that were made as Jaws rip-offs. Things like Tentacles, which was awful but wonderful, or Orca, which was a genuinely beautiful film. Films like Piranha and Night of the Lepus. I am a huge fan of all the Bert I. Gordon movies, like Food of the Gods and Empire of the Ants. All the killer insect movies, like The Swarm. And many of these films are so seldom seen.

And I discovered that many films are not specifically credited as eco-horror works but...

...right! Films like The Corpse Grinders, which was about these cat food entrepreneurs who aren’t getting any business so they start to grind corpses into their cat food and the cats that are eating it start to develop a taste for humans.

How are the sub-genres inherent to eco-horror represented in the book (pictured, left)?

The book discusses these in the different chapters, which was hard to (categorize) because there are heaps of different, say, killer dog films, so I had to have a whole chapter about dogs, or insects. There are heaps of those giant creature, ‘atomic age’ films, like Tarantula, and lots of those cold war fear and anxiety films, like It Came From Beneath The Sea. Then we have chapters on such things as stock characters in eco-horror. Just like slasher films have ‘the final girl’ and ‘the masked killer’, eco-horror has the ‘wise native character’ who already knows about the monster or the ‘specialist’ who sympathises with the animal or, and this is very different from other horror genres, the ‘male protagonist’.

As well-versed as you are on the subject, were there aspects of the genre that you discovered for the first time in your research?

Oh, absolutely! Most of it was to do with the production side of the films. For example, I had no idea that Joan McCall, who was in Grizzly, actually wrote a screenplay for a sequel that never got made. And that it would have had George Clooney and Laura Dern in the cast. There were some amazing things, like that Sylveser Stallone was supposed to Squirm. So many amazing elements that added to the fun of writing it. The book is a combination of analytical and info but very much written in my voice, so it’s not an academic piece but it also kind of is (laughs). And it is all about animals. I have been asked if it covers stuff like Day of the Triffids, but no. I could have done that but then you get into a territory that would have to include natural disaster movies and I’m not going to sit and write about stuff like Twister. I don’t really care about them. I mean I do love a lot of those films, but...y’know.

Are there Australian eco-horror films?

The eco-horror message is perfectly condensed in The Long Weekend (pictured, right), one of the greatest Aussie films.

And were eco-horror films always the by-product of the B-movie producers?

Well, there was Jaws and The Swarm and Cujo, films that were backed by the major studios. Every now and then, the majors would surprise with an eco-horror film like Warner Bros did with The Pack (pictured, top). But most of them were B-pictures from studios like American International Pictures, starting with Frogs (video, below). Which I think has helped to grow the genre’s cult status.

I guess, finally, are eco-horror films a thing of the past? Are the fears that drive them no longer the fears of the larger society?

Oh God, no! There is a Korean film called Pig Hunt. Major studio films like Liam Neeson’s one, The Grey, which is all about wolves. All those wonderful Asylum films, like Sharktopus and what not. There will always be those surprise ones, like The Grey, that sell themselves as ‘action-thrillers’ but which are really just the latest variation on the great B-movie eco-horror traditions.

Massacred by Mother Nature: Exploring the Natural Horror Film is available via mail order through Midnight Marquee Press and at selected specialist book stores.