All Hallows Eve

I’ll be spending most of the 31st airborne, watching out for broomsticks. Here are some images with a spooky seasonal flavour, except that none of them were intended that way. But that’s OK, they’re culled from Gustav Deutsch’s FILM IST: A GIRL AND A GUN, a movie entirely composed of repurposed footage culled from archives around the world — scientific films, pornography, and drama (including Gustav Machaty’s EROTIKON, the only movie I recognized at once). Can YOU tell the porn stars from the hysterics?

Portrait in Black

HENRY, PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER — finally available uncut in the UK — is reviewed here, at Electric Sheep. By me.

Recommended to any fans of TV’s The Walking Dead who may have been asking themselves, “Where did they FIND that guy???” and to anybody who saw MAD DOG AND GLORY and wondered how that director managed to get work. Because he showed startling early promise, it seems. I’m not 100% convinced about HENRY, but is IS an ambitious departure from the kind of cheapjack exploiter the production company was asking for. On the other hand, Victor Erice was asked for a cheap Frankenstein knock-off and he gave them SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE. Now that’s ambition.

The Sunday Intertitle: Califoreign

From SOUL OF THE CYPRESS.

Time to go home, almost. SHADOWPLAY — Live from Hollywood will continue, in defiance of all good sense, from Edinburgh for one week, as I post my snapshots and attempt to spin off them into interesting byways of film history. And I’ll try and post something more substantial later today to cover my 24hrs traveling. Write me lots of interesting comments to read when I get home!