Some time ago I promised you good people and The Herd that I would review their stunning album Summerland. That was about ten months ago. I’m sorry. I got distracted with uni and other writing projects and, after a while, I felt the moment had passed and it was too late. This morning, however, I was like ‘No, Dammit! That album is still awesome and the people must be told!’ So here it is. The Herd’s Summerland. Better late than never. Read the rest of this entry »

When Dashiell Hammet’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, was first published in 1929 it was heralded as a revolution of the detective fiction genre. The Outlook and Independent claimed it to be “the best detective novel [they had] ever read” and The New Republic noted that it transcended the “tawdry gum-shoeing of the ten-cent magazine” (qtd. in Marling, Dashiell 87). The exclusive and “aristocratic” Town & Country magazine presented a glowing, 1,500 word review of the novel (Marling Dashiell 87). Hammett had gained the acceptance from the literary intelligentsia he had craved from the beginning of his career (Marling, Roman 105) and, more significantly, had galvanised the Hard-Boiled detective genre as a legitimate literary pursuit. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing pen and paper roleplaying games, of various sorts, since I was about 14 years old. By my reckoning that’s about 10 years of indulging in this particular hobby. In that entire time I’ve not found an easy way to explain what precisely a roleplaying game is to anyone who’s never participated in one themselves. The only way I’ve ever managed to explain how these games work is by inviting someone along to one and getting them to play. In short, it’s an abstract, alienating and strange pastime and every time I try to explain with my words, I done fail. So, once and for all, I’m going to try to explain what it is that roleplaying games are. Read the rest of this entry »

The world of early cinema is a murky and contested landscape of disputed claims to fame and innovation. The classic example of this is the continuing debate over the inventor (or inventors) who ought to be credited with the creation of cinema; Thomas Edison or the Lumière Brothers. Each invented a contraption that captured and repeated moving images in the 1890s and each saw the potential in these moving images as a future form of entertainment (though Edison’s early patents suggest that he saw a greater industrial opportunity in film than the Lumière brothers, who considered film a new sideshow novelty that would last about a year). We can see, even from this brief description, where the coming heartfelt rivalry between the Edison and Lumière camps originated, though we must always be very careful when making claims about the early days of cinema. The records and surviving films from this time are both patchy and incomplete: like the Lumière Brothers, nobody expected film to be anything more than a short-lived novelty. It is with this caveat that we will explore the creative works of Georges Méliès and what it is that he contributed to the early days of cinema. Read the rest of this entry »

For chrismas I recieved a Batman action figure and a dinosaur 3D puzzle. The only logical application of these gifts was Batman action theatre. I give you Batman vs Dinosaur.

Every night Batman would ride his pet dinosaur.

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Clive Barker’s Riding the Midnight Meat Train remains one of my favourite pieces of fiction. A young man moves to New York City, the mythical city of his dreams, only to find the ugly monstrosity that permeates every layer of the grim metropolis. The piece follows twin narratives from the perspective of the newcomer to New York City and a deranged, serial murderer who ritually slaughters people on a late night train service. Naturally, when I discovered that a film adaption had been made, I did everything in my conniving little power to obtain a copy and devour it. The results were very …satisfying. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, America, I want to play a game.

-Tagline, SAW III

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

-H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

If we examine American horror films from the 1950s leading up to the present day, we can see that, broadly speaking, decade by decade the fears which they exploit in their audiences have an undeniable root in the contemporary socio-political fears of the American populous at large. The 1950s saw a spate of so-called B-grade horror films which terrified people with their strong undercurrents of Cold War paranoia (with a particular focus on invasion by ‘the other’), such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Donovan’s Brain (1953) and, most notably, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The 1960s, on the other hand, saw a transition of focus from the Cold War to the more domestic issues of distrust of the establishment, the changing face of the American way of life and a condemnation of the Vietnam War with City of the Dead (1960), The Birds (1963) and Night of the Living Dead (1969). Read the rest of this entry »

I would like to warn you that this article contains some serious spoilers as it is more of a film-history piece than a review. If you’ve not seen the film, there’s really no excuse as it exists, free for all to see, as a public domain film. You can freely obtain it here and here. In fact, a google serach of “night of the living dead” should result in hundreds of sources. Go to it, it’s one of the best film’s ever made and, if after seeing it you disagree, my case is laid out below.

The modern horror film is an extraordinarily diverse group of texts that epitomize the tangled workings of American popular culture, which is at once business, art, and purveyor of entertainment and ideology.

-Waller 1987

The social, political and economic turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in the rise of American exploitation cinema. The simultaneous changes in both American culture and the American film industry created a zeitgeist of distrust for the scientific-military establishment and a media outlet for the expression of that distrust. This essay will explore the cultural landscape which gave rise to American exploitation cinema and explore the stylistic and thematic elements of it. We will focus on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as the definitive example of American exploitation cinema. It is the contention of this essay that exploitation cinema was more than a commercially opportunistic fad but that the industrial and political climate allowed young film makers to make statements with their work which were impossible to make under the previous restrictions imposed on American cinema. Before we can understand the thematic and cultural significance of these films, however, we must understand the political and economic climate of both the American film industry and America itself. Read the rest of this entry »

An Auteurist Approach to David Lynch

Since its inception the notion of an “auteur theory” has been a contentious one. More than just a framework for interpreting film it has extended to a framework for interpreting directors themselves. By examining the body of a directors’ work we can glean insight into their motivations, perspective, and understanding of people and the world that they inhabit. David Lynch is a man who has a very particular, strange and often frightening view of the world which he is not afraid of depicting in his films. This essay will examine the works of David Lynch with a particular focus on Lost Highway (Lynch 1997) and Inland Empire (Lynch 2006) (his most recent work to date) and attempt to interpret them with an auteurist approach. Read the rest of this entry »

My sincerest apologies to The Herd for my comments about them below. I have just listened to their latest album Summerland and retract what I said about them never quite reaching their potential. Rest assured, a review of Summerland is be up here, expounding its awesomeness!

I have noticed, since my review of Bliss n Eso’s Flying Colours album, that alot of people seem to be reaching our page by searching for Aussie Hip Hop and that there seems to be some demand for writing about it. So, I’ve decided to follow up with another of my favorite Skip-hop albums of the last couple of years. Settle in and get ready for some smooth, sunny, reggae and dub influenced hip-hop. Welcome to Astronomy Class: Read the rest of this entry »