30.04.2025

CEMETERY MAN (1994)

dir. Michele Soavi, 103 min. English language

Francesco Dellamorte is the put upon caretaker of the small Italian town of Buffalora’s cemetery where he’s tasked with interring the dead and then re-interring them with prejudice if they rise from their graves, which the cemetery’s residents have a tendency to do. Dellamorte has only his addled amico Gnaghi to help him stem the tide of the undead, navigate the increasingly deranged townsfolk, and find his own place at the very edge of life.

Directed by Michele Soavi, who studied under greats like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, and based on a novel by Tiziano Sclavi, the famed author of comic series Dylan Dog, Cemetery Man (or as it was far better titled in Italy Dellamorte Dellamore) is a bitter farewell to the golden age of Italian horror cinema that breaks down its own narrative to examine the mechanics and appeals of the genre. Running the gamut of tones from slapstick comedy to overwhelmingly chilling existentialism, Soavi creates and then breaks though layer upon layer of iconography until all that’s left to combat is the very notion of symbolism in narrative construct. Featuring an incredible performance from a young Rupert Everett as Dellamorte, the film is a much lauded cult masterpiece that Martin Scorsese deemed one of the best Italian films of the 1990s.

Audience Note: This film contains a depiction of sexual violence

07.05.2025

VENUS IN FURS (1969)

dir. Jesús Franco, 86 min. English language

Jazz musician Jimmy Logan is obsessed with the beautiful and mysterious Wanda, an obsession that doesn’t end when he finds Wanda’s corpse washed up on the beach. So begins Wanda’s tale of revenge as she stalks the men responsible for her death throughout planes of consciousness to deliver her deadly vengeance, all while Jimmy tries to put together the pieces of who she was in life and who she now is in death.

Part sleazy sexploitation, part arthouse dreamscape, and part metaphysical slasher, Venus in Furs is arguably the incredibly prolific exploitation director Jess Franco’s most accessible and yet most daring work. Full of formal experimentation and elaborate staging, the film relishes in its genre credentials whilst at the same time using a cinematic language of suggestion and imposition to deliver its distinct flavour of erotic myopia. Allegedly spawned from a conversation between Franco and Jazz legend Chet Baker, with Franco trying to use the dreamlike quality of the film to mimic the fugue state Baker would enter during his solos, the film is a technicolor dream with location shoots in Rome, Marbella, Barcelona, and Istanbul. If you’ve never come across Jess Franco before, this is a great place to start.

14.05.2025

THE VISITOR (2024)

dir. Bruce LaBruce, 101 min. English language

Strobe Warning: Some scenes in this film have a strobing effect that may affect photosensitive viewers

A redux of martyr/hot guy catholic marxist Pier Paolo Pasolini’s incendiary 1968 film, the latest feature from provocateur Bruce LaBruce (Hustler White) is a fleshy exercise in joyous excess. The Visitor takes place mostly within a sterile London statement home, where a mysterious stranger upends the lives of a bourgeois family by having sex with all of them in a variety of escalating scenarios. As the games of seduction take over the familial ties unravel, leaving them adrift in a world without a moral centre. Yes it’s Teorema but not as we know it, pushing into funnier, stranger and more explicit territory with the cheeky charm and hey-let’s-put-on-a-show attitude that marks LaBruce’s best work.

And The Visitor is indeed some of his very best work, recontextualising his snarling DIY spirit into a new queer cinema landscape with an energy and freshness that makes the enactment of taboo desire a ludic and strangely safe space. There is commentary on post-colonial race fantasies as filtered through the fantasies of the kinds of people you see on Grand Designs, and a superliminal marxist bone to pick with the entirety of assimilationist culture— but above all else it’s a triumph of imagery and a good old fashioned porno with heart.

Audience Note: This film contains graphic content and unsimulated sex, among other things

21.05.2025

SAMURAI REINCARNATION (1981)

dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 122 min. Japanese language w/ English subtitles

After Christian rebel leader Amakusa Shiro is beheaded along with thousands of his followers, his anguished soul renounces God and turns to Satan to wreak his vengeance. Shiro is resurrected with dark powers to raise the dead, bringing back legendary figures from Japanese history and wooing a faction of Ninjas to help him overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate and enforce a reign of chaos over the land. The only chance for salvation lies with the one eyed samurai Yagyu Jubei and a mystical sword capable of killing demons, but the challenge Jubei faces in wielding the sword to strike down his hellish foes is the greatest he’s ever faced.

Samurai Reincarnation is notable for being one of the few genre films to fully embrace Christian dogma for pulp ends, and as much as it is a thematic examination of the changing face of Japanese spiritualism it is primarily a vehicle for Japanese exploitation deity Kinji Fukasaku, director of Battle Royale and recent Pink Flamingo entry Black Lizard, to unleash some of the coolest mystical swordplay ever captured on film. With a cast led by action legend Sonny Chiba and featuring a young Kenji Sawada along a younger Hiroyki Sanada, along with Japanese Academy award winning art direction and Fukasaku’s masterful eye for violence, the film is an explosive and operatic tale of spiritual warfare with an intricate thematic tapestry that kills history and then brings it back to life.

24.05.2025

CASTRATION MOVIE ANTHOLOGY I: TRAPS (2024)

dir. Louise Weard, 275 min. English language with English subtitles
What if Berlin Alexanderplatz was set in the contemporary Pacific Northwest, and was also trans? Find out in the first volume of Louise Weard’s extraordinary Castration Movie Anthology: Traps. Chapter 1 of this 4.5 hour saga (it flies by trust me) centres on a young production assistant named Turner and his descent into inceldom, flowing into Chapter 2 in which Michaela "Traps" Sinclair, a Vancouver woman in trouble, and her friends navigate sex work, DIY transition and love. A freeform narrative anchored by the grounded interactions of fully developed three-dimensional characters and a vein of painful authenticity tempered with humour, Castration Movie is a film for our atomised times.

This may sound like an insular, inside-baseball trip but if you’re alive in 2025 and have tried to find human connection there’s something here for you. It’s also extremely centred around the kind of people who have contemplated surgery and/or know what transmaxxing means, so if you’ve ever sat awkwardly in the living room of a toxic poly t4t throuple while waiting to buy gear it may have special resonance for you. This is not a compromise or diminishment of experiences in the pursuit of a relatable, accessible story: Weard has located something so ephemeral and specific that if you watch it with the right kind of eyes it may realign you.

Audience Note: This film contains graphic content and unsimulated sex, among other things

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