It’s enormously easy to imagine a version of the 2007 killer crocodile movie Black Water that’s considerably worse. That’s because it would basically be the 2003 killer shark movie Open Water, a much-hyped movie that wasn’t particularly good, but did create a model for ultra-low-budget thrillers set in one location with just a couple of […]
The torture porn fad of the mid-’00s was one of the dreariest developments in the history of horror cinema: take the imaginative gore effects of the early slasher films, strip away the merry exploitation hucksterism, and replace it with bitterness and a fascination with the human capacity for cruelty. I have seen at least a […]
Undead was the first feature film directed by TV commercial veterans and visual effects artists Michael & Peter Spierig, twins who go professionally by The Spierig Brothers. And when I say “the first feature”, I am not at all communicating how much of a first feature it is: the kind of first feature in which […]
I will begin by saying that I have seen the film we are about to dig into with three different arrangements of capital letters: Bedevil, BeDevil, and beDevil. I have decided to favor the third, partly because it’s how the title is rendered onscreen, partially because that’s how a couple of art museums refer to […]
The release date might say that we’re in the bright and shiny new decade of the 1990s, but everything about Bloodmoon feels hungover from the ’80s in the most mortifying way. Not least of these things – indeed, arguably foremost among these things – it is a slasher film, plain and simple, and it took […]
It’s almost certainly just random noise and not real evidence of a greater trend, but as I spend these weeks diving into the thrillers and horror films of the Australian film industry, I’m finding a lot more dead children than I’d expect to see in a similarly arbitrary sampling of Hollywood horror films. And with […]
Of all the deadly animals on the Australian continent, none of them is more impressively terrifying than the massive saltwater crocodile, 20 feet of territorial ambush predator honed by nature to have the primordial look of some ancient devouring evil. And here we have what is, to the best of my knowledge, the earliest Australian […]
Given the incredible number of Australian animals that can kill a human in a variety of unpleasant ways, it’s absolutely no surprise that there are horror films about such creatures. The only surprise is that there aren’t more. As far as I can tell, the first killer animal film in the country’s history was 1978’s […]
The cumulative directorial career of New Zealand-born Tony Williams consists, near as I can tell, of one short film, seven made-for-TV documentary shorts, two narrative features, and (thirty years later than the rest), three documentary features. Of that entire list, the second feature, 1982’s Next of Kin, is the only thing that is even remotely […]
Upon its release in the summer of 1981, Roadgames, the second (and final) collaboration of director Richard Franklin and writer Everette De Roche after 1978’s Patrick, became the most expensive Australian film ever made up to that point (a title it would hold only for a few weeks, until the opening of Gallipoli). That is, […]
The Ozploitation cycle of the ’70s and ’80s was one of several exploitation film booms during that period, and like most of them, it was focused on genre films that could be made quickly and cheaply. This is, indeed, baked into the idea of “exploitation cinema”, which is all about identifying profitable trends and hungry […]
We come now to an exciting moment: the first appearance on this site (but by no means the last) of two of the most significant names in Australian horror around the end of the ’70s and the beginning of the ’80s, director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Everett De Roche, whose names are attached to some […]
