Tag: James Curnow

Halloween Horrors: 13 Zombie Classics
Tomorrow marks the dawn of Halloween, a celebration that I was never entirely privy to as an Australian child. Each year its arrival was made apparent, not by the marching of costumed children through the streets, but by the sudden avalanche of American Halloween television specials that poured through the small screen into our living…

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.

The Dance of Reality: Jodorowsky returns and remembers
I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs. The difference being that when one creates a psychedelic film, he need not create a film that shows the visions of a person who has taken a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill. – Alejandro Jodorowsky, El Topo: The Book of the Film Alejandro…

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…

A Hijacking: Yet another airtight Danish thriller
There are two types of narrative filmmakers in this world (stay with me for a minute). Firstly, there are those who seek to have their films overtly participate in the drama that they present, depending on sophisticated camera work, powerful scores, expressive performances and dramatic narrative developments. Then there are those who stand back from…