This rocks on so many levels I can’t even begin to list them all. So, let’s forget about the multiple dimensions of pop culture bliss unfolding before our eyes and ears and just bask in the glow of Neil Sedaka doing a ska tune while bikini clad girls go-go to the latest dance craze, The Jellyfish (no vertebrae required), in the viciously seductive Sting Of Death from 1966.
 

 
For this one, I bow at the feet of PCL Linkdump.

 
Rob Ager has no academic credentials in the realms of psychology or film making, but he clearly doesn’t need them. He has an incredible intuitive grasp of the links between celluloid and the subconscious mind. He’s not only a brilliant thinker, he’s a tenacious researcher. In this fascinating study of Stanley Kubrick’s disruption of spatial logic in order to create a sense of unease in his film The Shining, Ager gets at the heart of what makes the movie so spooky - the fact that it’s so fucking disorienting, an Escher-like maze of endless corridors drifting into infinity. A terrifying dream folding into itself. Jung would have loved this movie and Ager’s take on it.

Ager wrote, narrated and edited this outstanding analysis of Kubrick’s much-maligned vertiginous masterpiece.
 

 
Via Mister Honk

 
If this out-of-control trailer is any indication, then Kevin Smith’s new independently-produced horror film, Red State, really takes the whole Deliverance , crazy Christian, Westoboro Baptist, David Koresh-thing to a whole new level. The title alone piqued my curiosity and for sure, this trailer had the intended effect (on me at least). If horror films function as some sort of pop culture marker or indicator of mass fears and nightmares, it’s fascinating to consider how fanatical Christians are rapidly becoming archetypal Hollywood bad guys in the new century. (Of course Red State’s release is rather well-timed with the recent tragedy in Norway…)

Kevin Smith has been self-distributing Red State in a traveling roadshow, appearing himself as part of the attraction before the film premieres on pay-per-view on September 1. Smith will be attending a slate of screenings next month Los Angeles:

Kevin Smith and SModcast Pictures are proud to announce a one week exclusive Academy Award qualifying run of Red State beginning Friday, August 19th at Quentin Tarantino’s legendary New Beverly Cinema. Each screening of Red State will be followed by a live Q&A with writer - director Kevin Smith.

Red State had its controversial and much talked about debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, where Smith bought the distribution rights for $20.

Smith decided to self distribute the film and immediately set up 15 special screenings throughout the U.S. as part of the “Red State U.S.A. Tour”. The tour began at the historic Radio City Music Hall in New York on March 5th and finished one month later at the infamous Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.

More information at the Red State website
 

 
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory will always be one of my most-cherished childhood movies. The scene that stands out the most (at least in my mind) is Wonka’s psychedelic and slightly demonic trip through the “Tunnel of Hell.” Some clever YouTuber decided to take the notorious scene and reverse it. Guess what? It’s even more disturbing. 

 
Thanks, Billy Burbank!

 
This Guinness commercial is a decade old but I just discovered it. I don’t think it ever aired on television outside of the United Kingdom. It may be new to some of you as well.

It’s brilliantly directed by Jonathan Glazer who has also done outstanding videos for Nick Cave, Radiohead and Massive Attack. His feature length film Birth is a hugely underrated film released in 2004. Fans of Stanley Kubrick should view it immediately.

Film footage of surfers riding waves in Waimei Bay in Hawaii were digitally combined, using the blue screen effect, with footage of specially trained Lippizaner stallions jumping over hurdles in large pools of water. The images together create magic.
 

 
“After Eden,” the latest video from Oakland, CA’s druidic spacerockers, Lumerians. This hypnotic, trance-inducing clip is an homage to Alain Robbe-Grillet and borrows footage from his 1970 film, L’Eden et Après.
 

 
“If it goes any further it might as well be rock and roll”

Kevin Saunderson on the the mutation of house and techno into “rave”.

Here’s an interesting little adjunct to the rave documentaries I have been posting recently - this is not a full length doc like the others, but a much shorter news-type item for what was presumably a youth culture show. It is interesting for a number of reasons - it’s cataloging the emergence of “rave” as a defined type of music as represented by acts such as SL2 and The Prodigy, and that kind of music’s growing popularity. In fact, the clip features an interview with a 19 year old (!) Liam Howlett, bemoaning the lack of radio play of rave music, despite it regularly reaching the upper reaches of the British charts. Ironically, it was The Prodigy who were charged with killing rave music by turning it into novelty records of the likes of “Charly Says”. In this clip rave-based dance music is referred to as “techno”, even as a Detroit-based techno pioneer such as Inner City’s Kevin Saunderson criticise the new music for lack of “soul”. At a time when dance culture in the UK was moving from the overground to the underground it is interesting to see the schisms opening up that would split it into many different categories:
 

 
“I never learned anything at all in school and didn’t read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”

Kubrick took film into realms that altered the chemistry in our brains. He wasn’t the first, but he may have been the most diabolical…and spiritual. A master of the left hand school, excavating the darkness to find the shards of light glittering in the muck.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: An Examination of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’

 
There are few actors who have exploited their accent as successfully as Sir Sean Connery.

No matter the role, Sir Sean’s always sounds the same, whether he’s an Egyptian immortal in Highlander, an English King, in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, or a New York beatnik in A Fine Madness, he never alters his lispy Scotch accent.

Here’s a quick trip around the world according to Sir Sean.
 

Egypt: Who can forget Connery’s wonderful Egyptian Tak Ne (aka Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez), who teaches Christopher Lambert’s Connor MacLeod all he needs to know to be the only one in Highlander (1986)
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
More vocal riches from Sean after the jump…
 

 
Looking like a cross between Max Frost (Wild In The Streets) and Jim Morrison, Jordan Christopher plays evil cult leader Bogart Peter Stuyvesant in Angel Angel, Down We Go (aka Cult Of The Damned).

In this clip, Christopher sings the title song which was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil who wrote dozens of rock hits including “Kicks,” “Shapes Of Things To Come,” and “We Got To Get Out Of This Place.”