Don Von Taylor’s powerful 1992 documentary Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest explores the infamous case of two teenage heavy metal fans who were allegedly driven to commit suicide by subliminal messages embedded in the songs of Judas Priest. One kid succeeded in blowing himself away with a shotgun, the other, Vance, did not. He managed only to horribly disfigure himself when the shotgun slipped from his grip as he pulled the trigger. 

Fueled by religious extremism, self-deception and grief-induced ignorance, Vance and his parents found in rock and roll the perfect scapegoat for the dysfunction in their own troubled lives.

The film follows the efforts of the parents of the surviving teen to take the English heavy metal band Judas Priest to court based on their belief that the suicide was triggered by the two boys obsession with heavy metal and in particular a track by Judas Priest called “Better By You Better Than Me” from their 1978 album Stained Class which the prosecution alleged contained “satanic” backwards masking which drove the boys to suicide.

This was at a time when the right-wing Christian fundamentalists of America were focusing on the “evil” influence of music on the young and as a response in 1985 the Parents Music Resource Center was set up by politicians wives Tipper Gore (wife of Al Gore) and Susan Baker (wife of James Baker) and led to those infamous “Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics” stickers which basically told the kids which albums to buy if you wanted to annoy your parents!

Out of this milieu of rabid censorship came the Christian fundamentalists who believed Satanic influences were at work in the music industry and one of their key propaganda weapons was the belief that certain records contained subliminal messages that were played backwards and masked beneath the song (Stairway To Heaven is probably the most famous example of this deranged belief system).

The film is essentially the story of the court case where Judas Priest and their defense team challenged the prosecution who alleged their music “caused” the surviving teen James Vance and his deceased friend to engage in a suicide pact.

Twenty years on the court case itself may seem absurd and yet the Christian fundamentalists are as powerful as ever and a new “moral panic” is just as likely now as it was twenty-odd years ago.

In this sad and disturbing film, it is the progenitors of the Devil’s music, Judas Priest, who come off as paragons of sanity and clarity.

Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest has inexplicably never been released on video or DVD. It’s an unsettling experience but well-worth watching.
 

 
This soulful 1963 documentary directed by Dietrich Wawzyn and shot in gorgeous black and white for German TV takes us to the roadhouses, churches, pool halls and streets of the American south where something deep, powerful and poetic found expression in the blues, jazz, gospel and rock and roll. If one were to look for the spiritual core of the USA, direct your eyes and ears to the music and artists presented in this film.

On The Road Again reminds us of a world familiar and yet distant, a place that will never exist again but persists at the edges of our consciousness like the insistent memory of an old lover stuttering in the sprockets of memory’s dysfunctional machine, an America vaguely recalled which has been buried under a tacky facade called “America,” composed of viral shopping malls, endless interstates and cookie cutter suburbs that cover our land like a scab made of plastic and plywood.

The movie moves with a grace, energy and rhythm that echoes the music it documents. We follow the camera eye as it captures…

[...] Mance Lipscomb singing “Goin’ Down Slow” on his front porch in Navasota, then follows piano player Buster Pickens as he leads the film crew through Houston dives and pool halls looking for other musicians. They locate Lightnin’ Hopkins in a garage partaking in a game of chance, and Hop Wilson playing bluesy steel guitar in Miss Irene’s Tavern. In Dallas-Fort Worth piano player Whistlin’ Alex Moore whistles along to a rolling boogie woogie, and B.K. Turner, who recorded in the 1930s as Black Ace, plays his signature tune on lap top National steel guitar.

In San Francisco, Lowell Fulsom, one of the foremost shapers of West Coast blues is filmed, then across the Bay King Louis H. Narcisse, the spiritual leader of the Mt. Zion faith, at his Oakland temple leads his congregation in stirring gospel rockers like “Let It Shine.” Heading east, Rev. Louis Overstreet brings the gospel to the winos, gamblers, and the down and out on the streets of Tucson, Arizona.

In the shadow of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, the Blind James Campbell String Band, one of the few traditional black string bands ever filmed, plays “John Henry.” At the easternmost point of the journey, J.E. Mainer and his family band play the fiddle breakdown, “Run Mountain” in Concord, North Carolina.

Celebrated New Orleans clarinetist George Lewis is filmed at the newly opened Preservation Hall playing “Royal Garden Blues” and a plaintive version of “Burgundy Street Blues,” which is enriched by images of French Quarter street life. Piano player Sweet Emma Barrett gives a rough barrelhouse treatment to “I Ain’t Gonna give Nobody None of my Jelly Roll,” and the Eureka Brass Band plays at a funeral in the New Orleans tradition.

We need to keep the connection to the richness of our cultural traditions. Without them, what we call America is a projection of what corporations want us to see…an advertisement for our lesser nature, a culture composed of instant obsolescence and the lust for things we don’t need. Without music, art and a sense of the sacred, we are doomed to an existence as one dimensional as the reflection staring back at us from the flat screen TV in a dead man’s bedroom, where desolation and spiritual deprivation cast their shadows against our flesh like the wings of giant phosphine bats. 

Forget the naked lunch that progress has placed on your plate and feast on this:
 

 
Another curio from the Jim Henson vaults, this time the audition tape of a 14-year-old Jennifer Connelly for the 1986 cult classic Labyrinth. You gotta admit Connelly totally nails this audition, selling the action with her own reactions when there is literally nothing there. When he speaks near the end, you can tell Jim Henson is impressed:
 

 
This Ain’t California is a 90-minute documentary by director Martin Persiel that takes “original clips of the “wheel-board-riders” – straight out of the East German scene in the 80s – and mixes it with animations and reencounters with the protagonists today. It is not just a well thought out story on its own – this film also raises the aesthetic bar.”

From the film’s website:

Life in the GDR as it has never been seen: a film that shows a unique generation from the GDR in the 80s which has never before been shown in a film. It is free from the classic GDR clichés, which are often adopted by the occidental point of view.

A film in which the East takes a look at the West, right up to the year 2011 – always with one theme clearly in focus: friendship.

 
Visit This Ain’t California‘s website to learn more about the film and how to support its release. 
 

 
Via KMFW

 
Taking a page from Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? which re-dubbed humorous dialogue over a Japanese spy movie to make the plot about a recipe for a egg salad, René Viénet’s 1973 film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (“La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques?”) did the same sort of thing, but here the cinematic Situationist provocateur is less out for laughs (although there are plenty of them) and more about the political subversion.

The raw material for Viénet’s détournement is a 1972 Hong Kong kung fu flick titled The Crush (唐手跆拳道) directed by Tu Guangqi. In Viénet’s hands, the movie was turned into a critique of class conflicts, bureaucratic socialism, the failures of the French Communist Party, Maoism, cultural hegemony, sexual equality and the way movies prop up Capitalist ideology, all in a manner that would turn such a product against itself, using Situationist aphorisms, arguments and in-jokes.
 

 
Below, an excerpt from Can Dialectics Break Bricks?. If this looks like your cup of espresso, you can download the entire film at Ubu Web.
 

 
End Of The Century is one of the finest rock documentaries ever made, doing justice to one of rock and roll’s great bands. Directors Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia wring a tremendous amount of emotion in telling the story of a band that was as exhilaratingly wonderful as they were dysfunctional. With the help of Danny Fields, Joe Strummer, Legs McNeil, Arturo Vega, Rob Zombie and a shitload of friends, critics and admirers, this flick will remind you of why you fell in love with this band in the first place. Sometimes the simplest and purest of concepts reach epic dimensions.
 

 
Richard Matheson, the author and screenwriter, celebrates his eighty-sixth birthday today. Few writers have been as original or, as influential as Mr. Matheson, whose novels, stories, and screenplays have infused our cultural DNA. Watch / read any sci-fi / horror / fantasy entertainment and you will find Matheson’s genetic code somewhere in the mix.

Over a career that has spanned 6 decades, Matheson has produced a phenomenal range of novels and short stories, many of which have supplied the basis for such films as I Am Legend (the version with Vincent Price is better than Will Smith’s, though Charlton Heston’s The Omega Man is best), The Incredible Shrinking Man, A Stir of Echoes, The Legend of Hell House, Duel (Dennis Weaver has never been better), Button, Button (read the story, forget the film version The Box) and of course Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

I’m a big fan of Matheson’s writing and firmly believe that if ever the Nobel Prize committee should think about reflecting talent rather than paying political lip service to short term causes, then they should seriously consider giving Richard Matheson the award for literature, as few writers, other than say Ray Bradbury or Stephen King,  have inspired so many young people to write, and more importantly, so many to read.

Happy Birthday Mr Matheson! And to celebrate, here is the classic Twilight Zone episode of Mr Matheson’s superb short story Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Enjoy!
 

 
With thanks to Tim Lucas
 

 
Here’s a mix that’ll mess with your mind. NSFW.

01. “God On The Tongue” - Executive Slacks
02. “After Dark” - Seraphim Shock
03. “Riot Rhythm” - Sleigh Bells
04. “Commando” - The Ramones
05. “Slap Slap Slap Pound Up Down Snap” - Death Set
06. “You Can’t Sit Down” - Phil Upchurch Combo
07. “Ghost Power” - The Cords
08. “Heathen” - Temple
09. “Asmodoi” - Tac Poum Systeme
10. “Rabies Is A Killer” Agony Bag
11. “Ship On Fire” - Temple
12. “Tough As Nails” - Shiver
13. “You’re Pretty Face Is Going To Hell” - Iggy Pop
14. “LSD” - The Pretty Things
15. “Cantique 1” - Die Form
 

Tim League, the new face of the film industry.
 
One of the highlights of last year’s Fantastic Fest was Michaël R. Roskam’s Bullhead, a riveting thriller that combines some of the real life nitty grittiness of the Dardennes brothers, the violent poetry of Martin Scorsese and Roskam’s own unique vision where evil intent lurks in chiaroscuro landscapes and behind locked metaphorical doors. Bullhead’s plot is a multi-layered psychological thriller, rich in detail and riveting in execution.

Young cattle farmer Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) is approached by an unscrupulous veterinarian to make a shady deal with a notorious beef trader. But the assassination of a federal policeman and an unexpected confrontation with a mysterious secret from Jacky’s past set in motion a chain of events with far-reaching consequences.

Bullhead is an emotionally driven tale of revenge, redemption and fate set against the backdrop of the Belgian bovine hormone mafia. It is an exciting tragedy about fate, lost innocence and friendship, about crime and punishment, but also about conflicting desires and the irreversibility of a man’s destiny.

Opening in selected cities on February 17, Bullhead, which has been nominated for a 2012 Academy Award for best foreign film, is the second release from Drafthouse Films, the distribution wing of Tim League’s expanding Alamo Drafthouse film community. Their first release was the critically acclaimed Four Lions and upcoming Drafthouse Films include…

[...] documentarian Mark Harley’s comprehensive feature on perhaps the most infamous ‘80s production outfit Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, Mikkel Nørgaard’s internationally acclaimed comedy Clown, and SXSW ‘11 favorite The FP and The ABC’s Of Death - an anthology film featuring segments by 26 different directors that Fangoria calls, “a stunning roll call of some of the most exciting names in horror across the world.”

In addition to heading Drafthouse Films and America’s hippest film chain, League owns The Highball restaurant and bowling alley and is the founder of the preeminent genre film festival in the world, Fantastic Fest. The guy’s passion for film knows no bounds and, as his mini-empire grows like the unstoppable vegetation in The Triffids, this CEO is having a shitload of fun while keeping it real.

In the following interview conducted on February 17 at The Alamo Drafthouse’s South Lamar location in Austin, League discusses Bullhead, his plans for the future and the infamous Youtube video that made Alamo Drafthouse’s cell phone policy (turn em off during screenings) a viral sensation.

And please refrain from talking or text messaging during the video or we’ll kick your ass out!
 

 
Nic Cage is a meme stream and here’s the proof - 100 memorably surreal Cageisms.

“100 Greatest Nicolas Cage Quotes.”  Featuring scenes from (in order of first appearance): Gone In 60 Seconds, Wild At Heart, The Rock, Deadfall, Con Air, The Wicker Man, Leaving Las Vegas, Drive Angry, Face/Off, Wings Of The Apache (aka Fire Birds), Kick Ass, Honeymoon In Vegas, National Treasure: Book Of Secrets, Snake Eyes, Trapped In Paradise, The Family Man, Matchstick Men, Moonstruck, World Trade Center, Vampire’s Kiss, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 8MM, Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans, Kiss Of Death, G-Force, Season Of The Witch, Lord Of War, National Treasure, Red Rock West.”