Category: Articles
Ozploitation: A love letter in images
Why use words, when images can do all the talking. A brief love letter to Ozploitation – the low-budget Australian exploitation films made after the country’s introduction of an R rating in 1971.
Movies and meaning: Understanding cinema as cultural artefact
It’s not uncommon for people to question why one might want to interpret a cinematic text – regardless of whether or not such an action was in search of a film’s implicit meanings, ideology or incidental revelations about the culture in which it was produced. These people commonly argue either that such an activity is…
Robots in Cinema: Artificial Intelligence and the Moving Image
The recent release of the trailer for the new Robocop remake started me thinking about the many films that deal with notions of artificial intelligence and robotics. From Frankenstein to Transformers, the creation of consciousness (accidental or otherwise) has been a part of the popular imagination for well over a century. While many have merely…
Ozploitation: Twelve Australian exploitation classics
Some might argue that it is paradoxical – perhaps even hypocritical – to follow a post lamenting the generally poor quality of horror cinema with one celebrating the schlocky oeuvre of Australia’s exploitation cinema during the 70s and 80s. I would suggest that an observation of this kind may well be absolutely correct, but such…
Great Horrors: Ten horror classics you might have missed
The horror genre promises more than any other in respect to emotive impact, and for this reason it is probably the genre in which failure is most common (along with comedy, perhaps). Horror films are very rarely actually scary, and worse than this, they are usually appallingly made. In fact, horror is one of the…