Sydney’s leading festival for cult and underground film, the Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF), is back for its 14th year from Thursday 10th September – Sunday 20th September. In 2020 the Festival will take place entirely online, offering a new opportunity for audiences all over the country to experience the glory of some of the world’s…
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Richard Bates Jr. is a film-maker that I’ve admired ever since I saw his first film, the wonderfully acidic and biting Excision. It successfully melded horror elements with a heavy dollop of dark comedy set within a grounded story. Add in a wonderfully talented cast with career-best performances from Traci Lords and AnnaLynne McCord, and…
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Ooo-ooo, witchy woman! Sorry, got the song in my head. After my viewing of Blair Witch, it’s only fitting that my next review will be about The Love Witch. Hearing the incredibly positive buzz from many festivals around the world, especially from the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), I was so excited to see this…
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Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi is an excellent documentary and cautionary tale. It tells the story of a Brown University student who went missing in 2013 and how he was wrongly accused of being one of the Boston Marathon bombers. The film is a sensitive one about an amazing character and a sad indictment of…
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Starting this Friday the Sydney Underground Film Festival will make its return to celebrate 10 years of being one of the most interesting, thoughtful, and provocative events of its kind in Australia. Throughout the years, SUFF has been a controversial program for cinephiles in Sydney, regularly engaging the local film community to showcase some of…
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I Am Not A Serial Killer is very much a tale of two sociopaths. On one hand you’ve got the young John Wayne Cleaver (Max Records) and on the other you’ve got the looming murderer (Christopher Lloyd) on the loose in the small midwestern purgatory of Clayton. It’s as much a coming of age story…
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Those mornings spent waking up early to watch Ryan and Jade of Cheez TV introduce some of the best damn television ever made need not be a distant memory with an event like this. Just over a week away, the annual Sydney Underground Film Festival will make it’s triumphant return to celebrate 10 years of…
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Sydney’s biggest showcase of cult and alternative films, the Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF), is back for its 10th year with a lineup of over 100 daring, experimental and controversial films. The festival will run over four big days, with screenings to include various Australian premieres alongside a collection of retrospective screenings, and special masterclasses….
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When the red band trailer for Dude Bro Party Massacre III was first released it struck me, and it struck me extremely hard; I hadn’t laughed that loudly since my eighteenth re-watch of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence then, that Mark from the classic 2003 “disasterpiece” (AKA Greg Sestero) is in…
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If Quentin Dupieux can make Rubber, a film about a tyre work, then I figured that this one that is about a person was bound to be gold. People are way more interesting than tyres! He really did make a film about a tyre (I’m not being weird… he is) and I’ve been told it’s great. But…
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Oh you like Korean cinema? Me too! You like violent Korean cinema? Yes please, me too! Have you seen any of Kim Ki-Duk‘s films? Me neither. When I read that he had directed 20 features and had received the Cannes Lion a couple of years back, I felt like I might be missing out on…
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Staring music and spoken word legend Henry Rollins, He Never Died is exactly the kind of Grindhouse trash you want to see at an underground film festival. It’s like reading a comic book that was self published in the days where that meant a photocopier and a guillotine. There’s something old school about this whole…
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There is a moment in Heaven Knows What when a mobile phone is thrown up into the night sky and a surreal sparkle of fireworks cracks and fizzles from the point at which the phone disappears. This is the only moment of beauty and relief that the film offers. The rest of the time, it’s…
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Director Takashi Miike is a workaholic, with 98 credits to his name on IMDb since 1991. A genre master, he has a devoted fan base; a group to which I admit I don’t belong, not because I’m not a fan, but simply because I’ve only seen one other of his films, Ace Attorney (2012), which…
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Gaspar Noé has proven himself an imaginative auteur, highly capable of and fiercely loyal to surreal, experimental cinema. He shocked with the unforgettable Irreversible and warped minds with the visually satisfying Enter the Void – undoubtedly his two most famous works – but now he seeks to add a more tender, sentimental touch with Love….
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Directed by music video and commercials director Platon Theodoris, Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites is a bizarre mix of comedy, drama, road movie and magical realism. Theodoris was inspired by a regular drop-in meditation class at a Buddhist Centre, an obsessive-collective partner Fritjof Capra’s book The Tao of Physics and his intense provocateur father. Made…
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In the early 1960’s a movement was beginning to grow amongst the African-Americans in the United States. It began in the south led by Martin Luther King Jr with a pacifist push but soon a group emerged in the west coastal city of Oakland (near San Francisco), founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale came…
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Where do you draw the line between fantasy and reality? When does thinking about committing a crime become a crime? Can we be convicted just because our Google searches were for suspicious or potentially dangerous things? These are just some of the questions posed by the chilling documentary titled Thought Crimes: The Case of the…
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The documentary, Killswitch makes some interesting points in support of whistle-blowers and hacktivists like Aaron Swartz and Edward Snowden. That is that their only real crime is that they’ve out-smarted you. Killswitch is an unoriginal but interesting film about the battleground that is the Internet, which describes how our rights to free speech and privacy…
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Peace Officer is one scary film and it’s not even a horror movie. This documentary is a timely and important one about the militarisation of police in the United States. It’s a fascinating, informative and balanced look at a complex subject and one that manages to hit all of the right notes. The story focuses…
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In a small town in America’s Bible belt, Christianity and tradition reign supreme. For the past 88 years a community in the Holy City of the Wichitas have staged an Easter passion play/pageant that once saw audiences number the tens of thousands. Jesus Town USA is a documentary that is warm and sweet-enough but can…
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Call Me Lucky is a fascinating and compelling portrait of one of the most memorable and significant voices in comedy that you’ve never heard of. However, once you hear Barry Crimmins declaration – “I’d like to overthrow the government of the United States, and I’d like to close the Catholic Church” – it’s hard to…
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The 9th Annual Sydney Underground Film Festival will kick off at the Factory Theatre in Marrickville on September 17th, and will feature an awesome line up of over 100 features, documentaries and short films. The line up features a list if the world’s most daring, subversive and experimental films, and to chat through it all,…
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Sydney’s leading festival for cult and underground films, the Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF), will once again spread over 100 experimental, subversive, and controversial screenings over four days this September. These screenings include various Australian premieres, special retrospective screenings, and Q&A sessions alongside masterclasses and live music. Provocative and notorious Writer-Director Gaspar Noe will be…
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You know what to expect from The Green Inferno the minute you find out that it comes from the gloriously twisted mind of Eli Roth. This is a man who brought us – among others – the hyper-violent Hostel franchise (at least the first two films; the third was a garbage rip off) and the…
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There are two film genres that are notoriously hard to get just right – horror and comedy. So does that make a horror-comedy mash-up near impossible to perfect? Evidently not-so for Kiwi writer/director, Gerard Johnstone who nailed it on his first try with Housebound. The first horror film to (finally) present a practical reason for…
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Human Meat Factory is a stop animation short created by Korean born director Anna Han. Aimed at engaging audiences by providing an animal’s perspective of the slaughter industry, the short will be screened as part of the 4th Seoul International Extreme-Short Image & Film Festival in Korea and the 6th Sydney Underground Film Festival. At a touch…
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