Rob Spence, a Toronto based film-maker lost his eye in a shooting accident when he was a teenager.  Nearly twenty years later, Spence has replaced his eye with a miniature camera that records all that he sees.

The protoype eye was named by Time magazine as one of the best inventions of 2009.  Spence calls himself Eyeborg and blogs about his experiences. 

Spence uses the electronic eye not for sight, but to record and document what he sees.

This brings to mind Bertrand Tavernier‘s superior, 1980 film Death Watch (La Mort en Direct) based on the novel The Unsleeping Eye by David G Compton.

In the film, Harvey Keitel plays Roddy, a man who has a camera implanted in his eye, in order that he may film a documentary about a terminally ill woman, Romy Schneider, who he follows, for a top rated TV show called Death Watch, in her day-to-day existence as she prepares to die.

Shot on location in a grim and foreboding Glasgow, Death Watch has withstood its initial poor reviews to remain a highly relevant and important film for our age. Long before Ob Docs and Reality TV, this darkly moving and disturbing movie, has proved itself far more prescient in its criticism of media intrusion into our lives than most contemporary films.

Death Watch appears now and again on-line, but only a few fleeting shots are available on You Tube. There is, however, a French TV interview with Tavernier, which can be viewed here
 

 
Bonus clip of Eyeborg plus pix from ‘Death Watch’ after the jump…
 

 
The English upper class are notoriously barmy, and it is surprising that they have not featured more as villains in the realms of B-movie horror. Italian schlock masterpiece The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave has a rather whacky upper class killer in the form of Lord Alan Cunningham (played by Anthony Steffen), a man obsessed with the fidelity of his dead wife, which leads to murderous results.

For fans of Euro-Horror, this film has everything in it - murder, madness, torture, seances, and sex, and is a psychedelic slasher, in need of more drugs not less. One for Halloween - if you can find the uncut version.
 

 
Via Timothy Paxton
 

 
Stephin Merritt is one of my favorite songwriters and they’ve made a movie about him. Stephin embodies a part of New York City I love.

‘Strange Powers’, which surveys Mr. Merritt’s career and captures his uneasy relationship with fame (he wants it, but doesn’t want to be seen wanting it), sometimes feels like a cross between a standard rock biography and ‘Grey Gardens’.

Read the NY Times review of Strange Powers here.
 

 
Set in the cultish world of ballet and revolving around a performance of Swan Lake, Darren Aronofksy’s The Black Swan may be the best Dario Argento movie that Argento didn’t direct. It’s a psychological horror/thriller that recalls the finest of the Italian giallo films. Or imagine The Red Shoes directed by Hitchcock at his most demented and you’ll get a sense of the spinetingling creepiness and ravishing visuals served up by Aronofky’s wonderfully warped cinematic mindfucker.

It’s rare for a film these days to actually be scary. Most contemporary horror flicks are repulsive rather than frightening, assaulting the viewer instead of seducing them. The Black Swan is jump-out-of-your-seat scary and it achieves its scares honestly, through evocative storytelling and crafty film making. In addition, it’s sexy as hell, full of gothic atmosphere and genuine eroticism - a fairytale for adults.

Natalie Portman, Barbara Hershey, Wynona Ryder and the perpetually intriguing Vincent Cassel deliver terrific performances. Matthew Libatique’s cinematography is inverts the technicolor opulence of The Red Shoes, the dread shoes. The art direction by David Stein ( Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) evokes the German expressionism of The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari.  

Aronofsky, who directed one of the worst films ever made, the loathsome Requiem For A Dream, has now redeemed himself with two extraordinary films in a row: The Black Swan and 2008’s The Wrestler.

I’m rather certain my Argento comparison will hold up to careful scrutiny. I need to see Swan again but on a first viewing many of Argento’s stylistic flourishes, both psychological and visual, permeate The Black Swan like a cloud of intoxicating opium smoke: surrealistic dreamscapes, the lethal eroticism of sharp-edged objects, a virginal heroine in the thrall of suppressed sexuality, setting the action in a theater, windows and mirrors as portals into the subconscious, mother love, lesbianism, Catholic guilt, secret societies, occultism, the id on fire, blood, blood, blood….The Black Swan would make a great companion to Suspiria and Opera.

At the end of tonight’s screening of The Black Swan at the Austin Film Festival the audience cheered loudly in a spontaneous eruption of delight. We all felt the kind of giddiness one feels after being manhandled by a master filmmaker. Aronofsy may not quite be a master yet, but he’s getting there.

The Black Swan opens in the US on December 3.
 

 
Is it controversial to post an over half hour version of Dark Star by the Dead here on the DM? I guess I’ll find out. The Dead have grown on me over time. Hated ‘em as a kid, perhaps you have to be a decrepit old hippy to “get” them. Whatever, they sound great to me now, maaaaan. Here’s some footage of them at their exploratory best that I was never before aware of that I found whilst stumbling around the series of tubes (as you do). Some delightfully acid-fried “you are there” scenes and some Gilliam-esque animated interludes as well as the crystal clear sound coming off the stage. Evidently this is from a film that was considered even too lysergic by the band themselves to bother completing.
 

 
Much more after the jump…

 
Danny Boyle’s new film 127 Hours recreates the nightmarish events that led up to Aron Ralston (portrayed with immense charm by James Franco)  cutting off his own arm in a mountain rock climbing accident. Ralston was trapped for 127 hours in a canyon in Utah when a falling boulder pinned his right arm to the canyon wall. Facing certain death, Ralston decided to do the unimaginable: he cut thru his forearm using a dull pocket knife in order to set himself free. He survived and became an international hero, a symbol of man’s can do spirit, a human being with an almost superhuman will to live, inspiring.

It’s a rousing a tale, but not one that is particularly cinematic or filled with any surprises. How much drama and action can you generate when the story is limited to one cramped location and everyone watching the film most certainly know its outcome? Boyle does his best by using lots of flashbacks, dream sequences, technical wizardry and a pounding techno soundtrack.

For the most part it works. The movie is not boring. It has its moments of heartbreak, humor and some very trippy imagery. But the real reason most people will be buying tickets to see 127 Hours is not for its artistry, but for its money shot: the arm cutting sequence. And they will not be let down. Ralston amputating his arm is done in graphic detail, it’s genuinely shocking, and Boyle uses visual effects and sound to make the scene borderline unbearable. The snapping of bones, Ralston’s screams, a special effect in which the viewer sees the knife doing its work from a perspective inside the arm, combine to make the amputation a gore classic.

While the movie strains to make deep spiritual and philosophic points, most of its highmindedness is lost in the sheer audacity of the arm cutting scene. And there ain’t no doubt that people will be talking about it. As much as the film explores Ralston’s soulsearching while being trapped, most of us are on the edge of our seats waiting for the money shot. With that in mind, Boyle, who also wrote the screenplay, tries to pump up emotions using the dream sequences and flashbacks, none of which really amount to much. But they are flashy. The cinematography by Enrique Chediak and Anthony Dod Mantle is stunning and Bollywood music genius A.R. Rahman’s pulsating score gives the movie a heartbeat. But all the razzle dazzle is dwarfed by a cheap penknife puncturing and tearing at human skin. Flesh and blood is the ultimate special effect.

This is a much better film than torture porn like Saw, but despite its good intention, 127 Hours achieves its biggest thrills through the same formula as many graphic horror films: showing us the most disgusting thing possible. And Boyle is such a talented director he manages to show it to us in newly visceral ways. When bones snap, they snap in superamped Dolby surround sound, with a searing bright flash of subliminal light jumping from the screen. In an effort to give the audience a sense of Ralston’s ordeal,  Boyle has chosen to subject his audience to its own endurance test, to try to give them a real sense of what it felt like to be Ralston in that moment of self-surgery.

Tonight’s screening of 127 Hours at the Austin Film Festival had the hardy film freak audience gasping, hiding their eyes and squirming in their seats. Ralston was in that cave for 127 hours and as much as Boyle tries to compress all of that suffering, soulsearching and fear into 95 minutes, the movie only really comes alive in those few minutes when it literally cuts to the bone.

127 Hours opens November 5 in the USA.
 

 
The Burning Hell, produced by Baptist minister Estus Pirkle and directed by exploitation schlockmeister Ron Ormond, is one of the creepiest Christian scare films you’ll see. It was released in 1974 with a promotional campaign that included the ghastly catchphrase “20,000 degrees Fahrenheit and not a drop of water!”  The film was screened in churches, where it scared the living shit out of children. Ormond was the Hershell Gordon Lewis of religiosity.

The entire film is available on Youtube. Unfortunately, most of the film isn’t as freakishly over-the-top as this clip.
 

 
Another fiendish concoction by Pirkle and Ormond is the 1971 “red scare’ laff riot If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?. This flick imagines a world in which the Communists take over America. The only way to avert such a crisis is to believe in God and pray to Him daily. Okay?

In this scene, a little boy loses his head over Jesus. This would have totally freaked me out when I was a kid.  Looks like a scene out of 2000 Maniacs.
 

 
Thanks Ralph Carney

 
I wrote a version of this for Planet Paul, but as it’s getting near time for Halloween I thought I’d share. I love horror movies, and when I was younger I was a member of the Peter Cushing Fan Club. No seriously, it was cool. For your dollar a year you received a monthly newsletter, lots of free pix, and many other oddments. One such was a news clipping about the great actor and his longing for death, after his wife, Violet Helen Beck died. Helen gave Cushing purpose and meaning and although he was born in 1913, the world famous actor preferred to see the year of his actual birth as 1942 – the year he met Helen.

It was a love-at-first-sight thing, and the couple married in 1943, and thereafter, Helen, a former actress became the centre of Cushing’s life, encouraging him, and supporting him throughout the early, lean years of his career. As Cushing later said, “I owe it all to Helen.  She was an actress and gave up her career for me.  She made me what I am. She gave me a confidence, I could never have found on my own.”

If you look closely, you’ll see, in many of Cushing’s movies, a small silver framed portrait of Helen, placed as a prop on the desk of Baron Victor Frankenstein or in the study of Professor Van Helsing.

Cushing’s life with Helen was lived more on a mental plane than a physical one, as he told New Reveille in 1974, “We didn’t consider the physical aspect of marriage very important,” he explained. Yet, their love was so great that Cushing claimed his life ended the day Helen died in 1971.

That night, Cushing repeatedly ran up and down stairs in an attempt to induce a heart attack.  He failed and later claimed his actions had been caused by the trauma of his Helen’s death - “I had always hoped that we would depart this life together, but it was not to be.” 

From then on, Cushing had a death wish, and stated death was the only happy ending to his love affair with Helen.

“I am not a religious man, but I try to live by Christian ethics.  Helen has passed on but she is with me still.  She is all around. What I am doing is merely existing – longing for the day when I shall die and join her for ever.  We will be together again but time does not heal.”

Before she died, Helen wrote Peter a poem telling him “not to be hasty to leave” until he had lived the life he had been given.

“I could not take away my life, because that would be letting Helen down.  But I would be so happy if I could die tomorrow.”

But death did not come quickly for the great, good Gentleman of Horror, Cushing lived for a further 23 years, during which time he made some of his most memorable and successful films.
 

 
Bonus clips of Peter Cushing after the jump…
 

 
I had no clue Jim Henson made movies like this.

(via EPICponyz)

 
What do rich people do when they have too much money? Get wrecked. So it was for Conrad Rooks, who by the age of fifteen was a full-blown alcoholic. Money may give you many things, but apparently not self-control or a conscience.

Rooks’ pappy owned Avon. Ding-Dong, no need to worry about quitting the booze or getting a job. Instead Rooks started a new hobby - drugs. He jumped from booze to dope, to coke, to LSD, to peyote, to heroin, then decided to get clean. Off to Switzerland, where he was given a new treatment - the sleep cure.

This is what happened to Rooks. His story formed the basis for a 1966 movie Chappaqua, which Rooks produced, directed, wrote, and starred in. It is an interesting mess of a film. It picked up a Silver Medal at the Venice Film Festival, and became a “legendary” underground hit due to its association with drugs and the Beat Generation. This is where its importance lies today: in the appearance of William S. Burroughs as Opium Jones. Along with brief cameos from Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovksy, and the beautiful, quite stunning cinematography by Beat film-maker, Robert Frank, who made Pull My Daisy and went on to make Cocksucker Blues for The Rolling Stones. Add to this performances by Ravi Shankar, Ornette Coleman, The Fugs, and a score by Philip Glass. There is enough going on to keep interest, with perhaps the finger occasionally on Fast Forward.