Monthly Archives: November 2022

MILL CREEK NIGHTMARE WORLDS: Evil Brain from Outer Space (1965)

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About the Author: Paul Andolina is one of my favorite people to talk movies with. If you like his stuff, check out his site Wrestling with Film. This was previously a part of two other Mill Creek months, the first on November 15, 2019 and the second appearance on November 24, 2020.

Evil Brain from Outer Space is a science fiction film from 1965. It happens to be a couple of the Japanese Super Giant films that have been hacked up and spliced together to make one English dubbed film. It’s an odd movie about a group of aliens who send one of their own to earth to stop the brain of the evil mutant Balazar from destroying humanity. 

Special effects films and television shows are big in Japan and they have been since Godzilla roared onto screens. The Super Giant series from the late 50’s is a bunch of stand-alone films that are about the deeds of a man named Giant of Steel or as he is known in EBfOS Star Man. Star Man is a superhero basically and he wears some pretty nifty lycra outfits, he looks like a luchador that forgot his mask at home.

Evil Brain sees Star Man coming to earth to stop a few evil doctor/scientists who are in league with the evil extraterrestrial brain of Balazar. There is a hawk that hangs out with one of these doctors and a one-legged man who serves the other. There are some pretty awesome mutants who fight Star Man in this film as well. One looks like a chupacabra from the black lagoon and has strange tendril-like fingers and makes some weird noises, if I had seen this a child I would have been scared of him immediately. I actually said out loud, “WTF is that?” while watching the movie. He is by far my favorite part of the film. The other mutant is a long-haired demon lady who doesn’t quite know how to put on her lipstick. She jumps around and scratches the air while making demonic cat noises. There are also some generic henchmen mutants as well.

I would love to see the Super Giant serials in Japanese with English subtitles but I’m not sure they can live up to the insanity that is this film. It seems longer than it is because there is too much jibber-jabber. Honestly would love to see Star Man just mess up some mutants and forgo the plot altogether. If you like psychotronic films this is definitely the one for you. I have no idea what they were thinking when they pieced this bad boy together. I’d like to believe there was some acid involved and a whole lotta pot. It is in black and white but it still is a lot of fun. 

If you have any interest in the Tokasatsu trend in Japan and want to see an earlier effort you can’t get much better than Evil Brain from Outer Space.

TUBI picks 25

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Better late than never, I guess, when it comes to this week’s Tubi picks.

You can catch up with all of the past weeks on this Letterboxd list.

1.  Midnight: TUBI LINK

Lynn Redgrave is Elvira in a movie made by the director of The Black Room in a murder mystery that has Frank Gorshin and Wolfman Jack.

2. Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters: TUBI LINK

Little Red Riding Hood (Maria Gracia) and Tom Thumb (Cesáreo Quezadas, also known as Pulgarcito) aren’t content to live out the fairy tales that we know them from (or in Tom Thumb’s case, being a member of P.T. Barnum’s circus). No, they seek out and battle the La Reina Bruja — the Queen Witch — who has an army full of monsters. This movie is going to destroy you.

3. Delirium: TUBI LINK

A vet is hired by right-wingers to clean up the streets from crooks and homeless people, but when he starts killing everyone, things get out of hand in this video nasty.

4. The Theater Bizarre: TUBI LINK

A co-production between Severin Films and Metaluna Productions, each director was given the same budget, schedule and narrative directive. Other than that, they were given free rein to create their own story. The results may not be even, but you can tell that this was made by filmmakers who understand that a horror anthology can be a very powerful movie.

5. Santa Claus: TUBI LINK

This movie has so many insane ideas, it’s difficult to summarize them. From learning that demons primarily eat hot coals to the fact that every child that works for Santa must wear a racist costume that denotes their country of origin (all Japanese children wear kimonos, all Americans are cowboys), this is a movie brimming with barely concealed menace. Watch it immediately.

6. Kristy: TUBI LINK

Thanksgiving may be over but this slasher is so good you can watch it any time of the year.

7. A Cat In the Brain: TUBI LINK

Lucio Fulci has made too many movies and has lost his mind, using the effects of the movies he lent his name to illustrate his psychosis. At the January 1996 Fangoria Horror Convention in New York City, he would appear on crutches with a bandaged foot, two months before death, and proclaim that Wes Craven stole this idea. You go, ranting crazy maestro.

8. The Living Dead Girl: TUBI LINK

Jess Franco presents a story of love, blood drinking, setting photographers on fire and mildew-ridden castles, all set in a world where everyone — even you — is on drugs.

9. Godmonster of Indian Flats: TUBI LINK

Frederic Hobbs was an artist who went from the traditional to a whole way of presenting art, creating parade sculptures that took art from the museum to the people. That’s when he figured it out — to get the people to see something as art, you should hide it in a film. He made this movie, Roseland and Alabama’s Ghost; I can definitely say each of those movies are fucking insane.

10. Nightbeast: TUBI LINK

At the same time John Waters was making people puke on one side of Baltimore, Don Doehler was doing the same. One made strange comedies; the other made low budget science fiction and horror. Both loved film. Get into this one!

 

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD FILM FESTIVAL 2022: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally was on the site on March 15, 2021.

It’s back because the Another Hole In the Head film festival will be playing it on Friday Dec 2nd, at 7:30 pm at the Roxie Cinema (3117 16th Street, San Francisco).

That said, it’s not just a regulae screening. It’s the world premiere performance of Sleepbomb’s new score for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead! Experience the terror and tension of the original zombie film that started it all with Sleepbomb’s unique blend of doomy drones and electronics filling the air. You’ll never see the film the same way again! Tickets are $25 and available here.

For almost two decades, Sleepbomb has been bringing innovative and exciting new scores for a wide variety of genre films. Atmospheric and heavy, ranging from doom and drone to electronic textures, Sleepbomb’s scores have re-contextualized films like Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Conan the Barbarian and Metropolis for mesmerized audiences in the Bay Area and beyond. Sleepbomb returns to Another Hole in the Head for the second time after their sold out Conan performance in 2019. 

I’ve debated writing about this film for the site for a long time. It’s beyond a seminal movie and it’s also from right where we call home. There’s probably no modern horror movie as important as this one for so many reasons and so many films have their inspiration right here.

I’ve spent a lifetime in advertising, so I can see how making television commercials and industrial films as part of The Latent Image pushed George Romero, John Russo and Russell Streiner to make their own movie.

And horror movies? Horror movies sell.

Shot between June and December 1967 in Evans City with friends, relatives, local actors and interested locals, this movie was made for around $114,000 but looks like so much more. The crew had been through the ringer — they did the original Calgon “Ancient Chinese Secret” commercial — and they knew how to get the most out of every shot.

You have no idea what it was like as a kid to drive past Evans City nearly every day, knowing that the dead lived there.

The movie was a huge success, obviously. That’s why we’re talking about it here. And yet, there’s so much that makes it a regional film, as it has local people like horror host Bill Cardille in it. And it feels, well, exactly like living in Western Pennsylvania. We’ve been preparing for the zombie uprising since before people knew there was such a thing.

The movie starts with Barbara (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Streiner) in a cemetery, arguing over visiting their parents. Their sibling games soon give way to terror when what looks like a homeless man murders Johnny and sends Barbara racing away, finally discovering what seems to be an abandoned farmhouse. There, she meets Ben* (Duane Jones), a black hero saving a white woman in a time that these things just weren’t done. But the true joy of Night of the Living Dead is that unlike modern elevated horror, this is no message movie. These are just the right people to tell the story.

It’s funny because Romero has often cited Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend as his inspiration, but that author has said that this movie was “kind of cornball.” What does he know?

The movie ups the tension when we discover that a married couple, Harry and Helen Cooper, and their daughter Karen have been hiding in the basement, The young girl has been bitten by a ghoul and Harry is obsessed with barricading himself and his family in the house while Ben wants to escape. In truth, no one is right and everyone pays the price. There is no happy ending in Evans City.

Perhaps the most astounding thing to me about Night of the Living Dead is its public domain status. Its original distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, never put a copyright on the prints. There was one under its original title, Night of the Flesh Eaters, but when the name change occurred, Walter Reade also removed that copyright notice.

That’s why when the VHS era started, you could actually buy this movie, as well as why it shows up in so many other movies and in DVD multipacks. There’s also the unfairly maligned Savini remake that this site needs to get to someday, which I love because Barbara is a more capable heroine and also because I saw it in a theater near Zelienople and when they said the name of the town, people lost their minds.

Roger Ebert’s review of this film has always stuck with me: “The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying … It’s hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that’s not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It’s just over, that’s all.”

That’s probably why I like it so much.

*According to an interview on Homepage of the Dead, Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman said, “Duane Jones was a very well educated man [and he] simply refused to do the role as it was written. As I recall, I believe that Duane himself upgraded his own dialogue to reflect how he felt the character should present himself.”

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD FILM FESTIVAL 2022: Shorts take one

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Here’s the first take on shorts at Another Hole In the Head that you should seek out:

7 Minutes In Hell (2022): Justin Reager and Shane Spiegel have worked on a lot of kid-friendly projects like Sci-Fi Test Lab and Junk Drawer Magic. They had to have done all of that to get to this, because this feels like a very passionate short film.

It’s a really basic story — a bunch of teenagers breaks into a vacant house just to play seven minutes in heaven — but the telling and the look of every scene — particularly the sound mixing by Katie Harbin and Carli Plute — just makes this work just right.

This feels like it is inspired by Creepshow while at the same time being way better than the recent reinvention of that show. That’s high praise.

You can learn about 7 Minutes In Hell on its official Facebook page.

Blood of the Dinosaurs (2021): Once, we went to a Mystery Spot and after we walked toward the center of the room, it kept pushing us into the walls and I was young and trying to hold my mother’s hand and it made me cry. Then, we all got on a train and it went through a forest and animatronic dinosaurs appeared and the driver told us to reach under our chairs for guns to kill the rampaging lizards and I yelled and ran up and down the length of the train begging for people to stop and that we needed to study the dinosaurs and not kill them. This was not a dream.

Another story. I was obsessed with dinosaurs and planned on studying them, combining my love of stories of dragons like the Lamprey Worm with real zoology, but then nine-year-old me learned that they were all dead and I had to face mortality at a very young age which meant I laid in bed and contemplated eternity all night and screamed and cried so much I puked. This is also a true story.

The Blood of DInosaurs has Uncle Bobbo (Vincent Stalba) and his assistant Purity (Stella Creel) explain how we got the oil in our cars that choke the planet but first, rubber dinosaurs being bombarded by fireworks and if you think the movie gets boring from here, you’re so wrong.

Can The Beverly Hillbillies become ecstatic religion? Should kids have sex education? Would the children like to learn about body horror and giallo? Is there a show within a show within an interview and which reality is real and why are none of them and all of them both the answer? Did a woman just give birth to the Antichrist on a PBS kids show?

This is all a preview of Joe Badon’s full film The Wheel of Heaven and when I read that he was influenced by the Unarius Cult, my brain climbs out of my nose and dances around before I slowly strain to open my mouth and beg for it to come back inside where it’s wet and safe.

Badon co-wrote this film’s score and screenplay with Jason Kruppa and I honestly can’t wait to see what happens next. Also: this was the Christmas episode of Uncle Bobbo so I can only imagine that this was him being toned down.

Buzzkill (2022): Let me tell you, when you start your animated short off with a logo that says Canon Pictures and looks like Cannon Films, I’m going to love what comes next.

That said, it’s easy to love this movie, which is the story of Becky (Kelly McCormack, who is Jess McCready in the A League of Their Own Series) and Rick (Peter Ahern, also the director and writer), who return to her house after a date and their moment of romance is interrupted by an insect crawling out of her eyeball.

The animation is gorgeous, the story is amusing and I just loved the way that it all pays off. Buzzkill gets in more gross-out and laugh-out-loud moments in its short running time than most movies get in two hours.

Checkpoint (2022): Man, what a ride! I loved this and it made me consider all of the many, many video game characters that I’ve led to grisly deaths over the years.

A man — that’s his name and he’s played by Brett Brooks — must navigate a hostile alien world, learning with each death — which moves him back to the beginning and later to the titular checkpoint — what he needs to do to get to the next level. And then the next. At the end, he realizes that it’s all for Victoria (Erin Ownbey), who he pushed away with his greed. Yet perhaps he’s not the only person — or sin — that has done so.

Directed by Jason Sheedy, who also did the sound, editing, effects and wrote and produced the film with director of photography Matthew Noonan, Checkpoint is filled with tons of gory deaths, as well as a message and heart within. I had an absolute blast watching it — the production design is also incredible — and you should check it out too!

Cruise (2022): I worked in a survey research telemarketing place before I got into advertising and it’s the kind of job that still gives me nightmares. We had a set script that we had to follow, a mysterious room had people listening to us and you didn’t even get to call the number. It would just ring, you’d ask someone if they got their sample of laundry detergent, then they would call you an asshole for ten seconds, then you’d start all over again for ten hours at a time. Often, one of those mystery people would tell you that you were off script and take over and show you how. The worst was if you made a human connection at any point, they would terminate your call. I still wake up thinking that I’m late for my job there, a room of cubicles and no windows and people plugged into headsets as blood for the machine.

Cruise, directed and written by Samuel Rudykoff, finds telemarketer after telemarketer trying to sell a cruise and failure means death.

These days, when scam likely comes up on my phone, I don’t get mad or rude to the people on the other line. I was once them. It was not fun. And, as this movie will show you, you may end up getting them shot right in the head.

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.

MILL CREEK NIGHTMARE WORLDS: The Lost City (1935)

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Kane Richmond went from being a football star at the University of Minnesota as Fred Bowditch to becoming a film salesman before testing and getting the lead in the boxing serial The Leather Pushers and becoming a fixture in serials like Spy Smasher and Brick Bradford as well as playing Lamont Cranston — otherwise known as The Shadow — in The Shadow Returns, Behind the Mask and The Missing Lady. His career moved on to playing supporting roles as well as TV work before retiring in 1966.

In The Lost City, he plays a scientist named Bruce Gordon who climbs the Magnetic Mountain and descends into the secret world of the Lemurians who are led by the evil Zolok. He’s played by William “Stage” Boyd, who was tired of being confused with actor William Boyd and added the middle name to somewhat haugtily proclaim that yes, he had stage experience. He also had a major drinking and drug problem that got so bad that — keep in mind this was during Prohibition — he started not only losing roles, but cost the other William Boyd his RKO contract because papers would print photos of the non “Stage” Boyd every time “Stage” Boyd got in trouble. This was his final role. As for his namesake, he changed his name to Bill Boyd and overcame being penniless in 1931 when RKO fired him and got the role that would change his life: Hopalong Cassidy.

When that film series ended up in 1948, Boyd had nearly bankrupted himself again by buying the rights to every film, something few actors did. He sold or mortgaged everything he owned, which didn’t pay off until he took one of his older pictures to the local NBC television station and offered it at a low rental cost, hoping that people would start talking. They did. He became one of the first national TV stars with every one of his films sold to NBC, got a new radio show and rebuilt his personal fortune.

Back to Lemuria.

Zolok has gone full Ming and created natural disasters to weaken the human race before his takeover. He’s also keeping Dr. Manyus (Josef Swickard) — and his daughter Natcha (Claudia Dell) — and forcing him to transform Lemurians into mindless giants as well as making his enemies, the spider loving Wangas, into weak slaves.

Back to Hopalong Cassidy. One of the other actors in this film, George “Gabby” Hayes, who plays the sidekick of Hopalong named Windy Halliday from 1935 to 1939. He quit that role when he felt he wasn’t being paid what he was worth and left for Republic Pictures. He had to change the name of his character to Gabby Whitaker and ended up being even more successful, appearing in 44 Roy Rogers movies, 14 Wild Bill Elliot films and 7 movies with Gene Autry. He also became a TV star once westerns became big on the new medium. While in the movies he was a gnarled up old man who spoke in strange gruff phrases, he was actually an intelligent and well-spoken man.

Gorzo, the dwarf bad guy in this, is played by Billy Bletcher, whose career is filled with nearly a hundred roles. He’s best known for playing the Big Bad Wolf and Mickey Mouse’s enemy Pete in the early Disney cartoons. He also worked with Pinto Colvig to do the ADR voices of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.

The Lost City is not all that different from The Phantom Empire, taking that Gene Autry serial and moving it from a cowboy-friendly locale into the jungle. Producer Sherman S. Krellberg would edit the twelve episodes into four movies and added new footage to create new endings for each movie. The character Queen Rama and the Wangas, butthen made another version that had all of those characters and called it City of Lost Men. He also made another version of this in the 70s that is full of continuity issues.

Director Harry Revier made several early Tarzan movies but I know him best for the truly berserk Lash of the Penitentes, an early exploitation film promising women whipping themselves and, yes, delivering while cashing in on a then-well-known controversy.

As for Lemuria, it was a major obsession for occultists at this time. Theosophy founder Madame Helena Blavatsky had written a system of magic that involved Lemuria as the place where humans came from originally. We can also tie the underground world to another popular mid-20th century myth, The Shavers. Checkout films like The Mole People and the sort-of-doc Beyond Lemuria to learn more. Or ask me. I can talk about this kind of weird stuff for days.

The Lost City looks dated today but was state-of-the-art in 1935. Check it out for yourself and see how far movies have come.

MILL CREEK NIGHTMARE WORLDS: House of the Living Dead (1974)

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Also known as Shadows over Bridge Farm, Curse of the Dead, Doctor Maniac and even Kill, Baby, Kill, this is a South African/British coproduction that mixes science fiction and horror. Yes, it did just straight up take that Bava title.

It’s also kind of House of Usher, as Lady Brattling wants her family to end, what with her son Michael running the house while his brother Breck (both roles are played by Mark Burns) hides in his room and tries to finish an experiment that creates a physical version of the soul outside the human body. Michael’s fiancée Mary then shows up and wants to start making heirs, all while the help engages in voodoo and a murderer is so close by, starting with animals and soon killing humans.

Director Ray Austin mainly worked in television and also directed Virgin Witch. The script is by Marc Marais (Crash!) from a story by John Brason. They made a movie in which a man operates on monkeys and traps souls in liquid, but put a title on it that promises zombies and does not deliver them. It’s kind of too mannered and needs the kind of director that allows everyone to go insane in the heat of the plantation and scream and wail and collapse into terror, but it never gets there.

 

MILL CREEK NIGHTMARE WORLDS: End of the World (1977)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on October 25, 2018.

Bill from Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum always jokes about movies where nothing happens as being his favorite movies. If that’s true, he must absolutely adore this movie.

Christopher Lee, the main selling point of this movie, said, “Some of the films I’ve been in I regret making. I got conned into making these pictures in almost every case by people who lied to me. Some years ago, I got a call from my producers saying that they were sending me a script and that five very distinguished American actors were also going to be in the film. Actors like José Ferrer, Dean Jagger, and John Carradine. So I thought “Well, that’s all right by me”. But it turned out it was a complete lie. Appropriately the film was called End Of The World.”

The film opens with a shaken Lee as a Catholic priest trying to get to a phone call. All hell breaks loose and a diner is destroyed, with the owner blinded by coffee before being killed and the pay phone being blown up. Turns out that Father Pergado is due to be replaced by the alien Zindar. Good start. And it was the trailer, filled with science fiction machines and evil nuns that got me interested in this picture!

Professor Andrew Boran discovers radio signals that predict natural disasters.   He and his wife investigate, discovering that they come from a convent where aliens have taken over. The aliens want him to join them, as the Earth is too diseased to exist.

The leads are wooden and only seem to want to have sex with one another, yet there are no love scenes. They’re utter failures at being heroic and simply move the plot along to its conclusion, where we learn that the Earth is filled with glitter. It blows up real good!

There are some ridiculous moments, such as Lee’s true form and seeing nuns operate supercomputers. Seriously, if I just read the description of this movie, it’d sound like everything I love. But seeing the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD FILM FESTIVAL 2022: Guiltless (2022)

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16-year-old Samantha (Alison Thornton) is using the fact that her parents are out of town to have a romantic evening with her girlfriend. Yet there’s an uninvited guest named Ron (Nemo Cartwright) who changes everything and Samantha will never be the same.

Unlike just about every slasher ever, the final girl ends up being the one in charge in director and writer Kevin Schultz’s film. While he doesn’t have a big budget to play with, he does have a talented actress in Thornton who gets to play just about every emotion in the book here and play it well.

While this isn’t perfect, this is a fun ride that proves that Schultz is going to do bigger things in the future. And oh yeah — not all modern slashers have to be horrible. Take notice.

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD FILM FESTIVAL 2022: Friday the 13th Vengeance 2: Bloodlines (2022)

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Even if there’s never a new Friday the 13th movie, director Jason Brooks — who stars as Jason and co-wrote this with Kim Terreson (who was also an assistant director and in charge of props) — have sidestepped the legal battles over who owns the franchise and have made a fan film that is honestly better than anything we’re going to get at this point.

This film and Friday the 13th Vengeance both are direct sequels to Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and add Jason’s father Elias Voorhees (C.J. Graham, who was Jason in that film) to the saga, as he uses his son to attempt to destroy the Jarvis family. Interestingly enough, his henchman Walt is played by Jason Lives‘ director and writer Tom McLaughlin.

His goal is to kill Angelica (Kelly Tappan) and Ashley (Sanae Loutsis), the daughters of Tommy Jarvis (yes, played by Thom Matthews), to bring his dead wife Pamela back from the beyond. Jason, for his part, will just destroy everyone and anyone who is in his way. This movie does not skip the blood and gore at all and if anything pushes way past anything you’ve seen in a Friday the 13th film.

This is packed with plenty of things fans of the series will go crazy for, such as the sack mask from the second film and the look from Jason Lives. The funniest line is when Lauren (Tamara Glynn, who played Samantha Thomas in Halloween 5) claims she’s never heard of Jason because she grew up in Haddonfield. You’ll also see Diana “Darcy” Prince show up for a bit, as well as Nikki (Darcy DeMoss) make her return, plus roles for Paul T. Taylor (Pinhead from Hellraiser: Judgment), Rob Mello (Happy Death Day) and Richie Ramone (who played drums for The Ramones from 1983 to 1987 replacing Marky).

This is the most fun I’ve had watching a movie in some time. Don’t look at the term fan film and look down on it. Be happy that this crew put their time and energy into something that they love and know they basically can’t make money from. People have looked down on slashers and the Friday the 13th series for so long that it’s so awesome to find others that love it this much.

Want to learn more? Check out the official Facebook and YouTube pages for the movie.

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD FILM FESTIVAL 2022: A Life On the Farm (2022)

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Get ready to watch something strange.

Filmmaker Oscar Harding grew up near farmer Charles Carson. Carson would give the family his homemade video tapes, which seem like he was hosting a TV program but he was all by himself. Or he was surrounded by cows giving birth. Or puppeteering his stuffed cats. Or wheeling his dead mother around so she could see the farm one more time before she went into the ground.

Carson was…well, the jury is out. Was he an outside artist? An early adopter of posting videos online before there was the internet? Or maybe someone with some deep mental issues?

Beyond getting to see the actual videos, the film also speaks to Karen Kilgariff (My Favorite Murder), Derrick Beckles (TV Carnage), Everything Is Terrible and Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher from The Found Footage Festival to learn why the videos are artistically important while also, yes, just odd.

“There we are, that’s life on a farm.” Carson says this several times and it makes me think about how he came from a world that is a constant circle of life and also so removed from the city that he may as well be an alien. He would keep giving these tapes, stories about life on the farm to his friends and neighbors. Were they entertained? Shocked? Upset?

Yet this movie never laughs at the man. It points out that he may have had issues, but he also saw death in a different way than we do. Perhaps by looking at it with a sense of humor, he was ahead of us, people who might look down on him and think him uneducated. I see him as a man with no guile, one with a sense of humor that could be surreal but he may have never encountered that art himself. He was, in a sense, a unique island of a man whose video output lived beyond him, made its way to people who could keep it alive and now, miles and decades away from a man long dead, we can appreciate what he left behind, even if it’s a video of him holding up a huge piece of afterbirth.

I got the opportunity to speak with Oscar Harding about this film and I’m excited to share the interview with you.

B&S About Movies: It’s interesting that within the film you had very different reactions to Carson himself, his mental state mostly.

Oscar Harding: I had someone seek me out that works in hospice care. Death positivity is a big angle to this and he was getting really excited and said, “People in my industry need to see this film.” That’s been a big reaction to Charles on that side. People who liked the film — even if they don’t like the documentary — they love him. The reviews say, “The documentary is OK, but I just want to see more of Charles.”

I completely agree, because if we had more footage, it would be a very different film, probably a stronger film. But as I’ve said before, we were interviewing his cousin Charlie who told us, “It’s a shame you didn’t come by a few years ago.” He had 200 of Charles’s tapes. He was moving and he didn’t think anyone wanted the tapes, so he threw them all out hundreds of tapes and they’re all gone. So for all I know, the little bit of footage we found in the film is all that exists of him. And I hope that’s not true. I hope someone in England sees this and realize there’s very clearly an appetite for more of his work and rightly so. I hope we find more because we spent months trying to track down as much as we could. There’s one guy who claimed he had a mixtape. He said, “I think it’s locked away in a shed somewhere.”

So every few days, we go into the shed and there was always an excuse. It was a busy weekend. The padlock is rusty. Call back a few days later. And then he just stopped answering our calls.

B&S: Was Charles literally making each person their own tape?

Oscar: You know, he’s in the middle of nowhere and he doesn’t have resources like you might in a big city. He’s doing all this at an advanced age in that place. But he’s doing it! Like it’s not easy to learn how to do this stuff. And then do custom edits for so many different people! He really took his craft seriously. And that was one of the things that really impressed us about it.

B&S: I’m obsessed with the Shot On Video era because the Cousins brothers who made Slaughter Day were making films beyond their technical abilities because they didn’t know they had those limits.

Oscar: I find that stuff so much more impressive than like a master filmmaker. You know, Scorsese was lucky he had the education. He worked with Corman and went to school but look — these guys are in London like Charles or the Uganda filmmakers that make action films like Who Killed Captain Alex? and people might make fun of the bad CGI of the helicopter crash, but that movie was directly influenced by him living through a civil war and seeing that happen for real. Those filmmakers are the most interesting to me.

B&S: They’re also pure and not in on the joke.

Oscar: It’s like the people who set out to make a bad movie thinking they’re going to make the next The Room. Meanwhile, Tommy Wiseau wasn’t trying to make a joke, he genuinely set out to make a masterpiece and it is raw, unfiltered vision. That’s why people love that. And that’s why a movie like Birdemic, well, it’s in on the joke. It just doesn’t land in the same way. It’s not authentic.

B&S: How much footage did you have to work through to find something great? The Found Footage Festival guys always bring up how much of this kind of stuff used to exist in thrift stores and it was just the work of going through boring footage to find something incredible.

Oscar: We got very lucky. And again, because we had the work of a filmmaker that he edited, he structured it intentionally. He’s got setups to gags and not all of them land. But, you know, once you get past that initial watch, I’ve said it a million times. It’s true. I think everyone who watched this for the first time and in the early section, they’re going to laugh at him and at what he made. It is bizarre and insane and you don’t get the context. But then once you start to learn more about why and how he was making these videos, you are laughing with it. Because you realize there are jokes in there that are intentional, that are meant to land.

This is the kind of filmmaking that won’t be taught in film school. This stuff is every bit as important as the French New Wave. You’ve got to learn about every aspect of filmmaking. Like you know your example. I feel like I would learn more talking to them or watching their stuff than being the millions guy watch Pulp Fiction. But you know, I really like Tarantino. (laughs)

B&S: The guys on The Cannon Canon podcast always say that most film students are going to make low budget genre film anyway. Why not study that? Study how the camera work and editing in Ninja 3: The Domination fakes a helicopter crash and doesn’t show it and you never realize it.

Oscar: We’ve all made our fair share of shit. I certainly have made some horrible stuff. But you know, they always forget to tell you that Scorsese and all these major directors all started out doing low budget crap for Roger Corman. But that’s important. They didn’t just come out of the box as master filmmakers. They made low budget trash.

I always think about the French New Wave. And I get the historical importance of it and the fact that they changed the form. I can respect all that. But I’m sorry, the auteur theory is a bunch of bullshit. Like my name is on the credits. I wasn’t present for at least half of the shoot because the pandemic, I didn’t edit the thing and I didn’t do the score. It’s an obvious humble thing to say of that everyone helps make the movie but it’s true. This is not my film. It’s a film I kind of brought to fruition with my two partners, but it sounds as good as it does and it’s got the empathy that it has because of the crew.

B&S: I love that at face value, you could just have made fun of Charles. Look at this weird farmer trying to make videos. But you allow him to be human and show that he’s actually an artist.

Oscar: We’ve found that the movie plays best at genre and horror festivals. The kind of people who get into trashy stuff and exploitation and horror, I feel they get it more because they’re more sympathetic to the context. It’s a harder sell in a festival with more conventional movies.

This is not like an award season movie. This is not a blockbuster. This is all the outsiders and the weirdos who get it because that you know, Charles is one of them. I’m one of them. You’re one and you know that the horror genre has always been a haven for black storytellers, queer storytellers and people like us It’s more accepting. And you can say more profound stuff, you know, like the political allegory in District Nine. It gets across better than just a conventional apartheid drama. You just do it in a more intelligent way.

B&S: Yet normal people will get upset and say, “They’re making Hellraiser too queer.”

Oscar: Go back and check out who wrote it and directed the first movie. (laughs)

B&S: How did you get all the big names within the found footage world?

Oscar: Back in 2019 when we started filming, we didn’t know Charles’s life story at this point. as we were working on it, COVID happened. It sucked because we sat here for months and couldn’t do anything. I thought, “This is found footage.” Let’s do some research. That’s when we found out there was the Found Footage Festival and Everything Is Terrible!

I met Nick and Joe backstage at a show and showed them footage of Charles and they didn’t know me, but they watched it and became such big supporters, introducing me to people like Karen Kilgariff and Davy Rothbart (FOUND Magazine) and backing the Kickstarter.

Koo Stark took about two years. Understandably, you know, she’s very, very careful about her image because the UK press treated her the same way they treated Princess Diana and Megan Markel. They made her life a living hell. So that took a lot of trust and developing that relationship. She’s wonderful and she got it almost instantly with Charles. She didn’t really understand that she was part of this guy’s story. She just hosted a show he won on. But she was the hardest person to get and the nicest surprise to get her right at the end.

B&S: What directors influence you?

Oscar: Kenneth Branagh, Guillermo del Toro, Edgar Wright — who grew up quite close to Charles — and Danny Boyle. Oh — Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, Sam Raimi, William Friedkin…

B&S: Raimi is the influence for every Shot On Video director I talk to.

Oscar: You know, he’s one of the weirdos who struck gold. I mean, honestly, compare any of the superhero movies now to what he’s doing with those first two Spider-Man movies where they’re just so wonderfully goofy, insincere and shot like a kinetic horror movie. I don’t want to be like yet another guy talking badly about Marvel movies, but I guess I’m just sad that they’re not making comic book movies. I miss the era of Hollywood that was trying to make stuff like The Shadow, The Phantom, Raimi made Darkman. Dick Tracy is one of my favorite films of all time. They’re just comic book movies. They’re great.

I don’t like when filmmakers try to directly copy the comic book look. You can try and recreate a panel but you don’t get the exact feel of it right. When you do it frame by frame, panel by panel, it’s an expensive experiment, but I’ll just read the comic book.

B&S: Have you had any extreme reactions or upset reactions to your film?

Oscar: I think once people find out that Charles was a human being behind it all and a family man and realize that he was a lot more profound than you might think, it’s not as shocking when you just watch the footage.

B&S: You don’t sledgehammer people over the head with it though. That’s why I loved the film so much.

Oscar: We had a remarkable editor, Hannah Christensen, who should be editing every film in Hollywood right now.

There was a scene in a British TV show called Cucumber and there’s a death sequence in that show that inspired me. I really wanted to go all out hopeless and relentlessly dark when Charles’ mother dies and when he gets close to death. Hannah came in and said, “He has to find peace at the end. You need like that moment of calm, because otherwise you’re going to lose people. It’s too relentlessly bleak and cruel.”

She was bang on the money. I trusted her. And it worked a lot better the way she edited it.

B&S: That’s awesome that you can give her that credit. I think that’s part of what makes you so talented that you realize that the team can all be creative and it’s their movie, not just yours.

Oscar: Thank you. It’s not even trying to be nicer and to be humble. I mean, it’s true. This is not my film. It is our film. And, you know, my hope is that, especially Sam Paul Toms and Hannah, the next Marvel movie that comes out they’re scoring and editing it.

B&S: Do you think Charles had any influences?

Oscar: I really do think a lot of his work was just pure Charles Carson. He may have watched The Goon Show or known about Monty Python. I couldn’t say that for sure. I just love the fact that this is a guy who didn’t grow up obsessed with film and then discovered it later in life because he’s bringing in life experiences compared to the rest of us who bring in all these pop culture references.

He wasn’t inspired by anyone, like the old Hollywood directors, because he didn’t grow up watching anyone else. I would argue he — a lot of those directors — is stronger because of that. If they’ve got any influences it’s from the theater or literature or radio plays.

B&S: There’s no nostalgia in his work.

Oscar: I think one of the problems right now is that there are incredibly talented creatives. More talented than me for sure. And it’s just this kind of slightly cannibalistic thing of, I grew up on nostalgia, I’m gonna do my take on nostalgia. And then you know, everyone steals and that’s fine. But it’s just I don’t know. I think it’s harder and harder to get like interesting stuff instead of people saying,”Let’s make another Ghostbusters.” Not to sound like an old man like yelling at the cloud. (laughs)

For example, in the new Hellraiser, it’s got its issues, but I really liked it. The smartest thing they did was someone asked at the q&a, “Why isn’t Pinhead wearing leather?” They had a really intelligent response. “Clive Barker was inspired by the BDSM clubs when he was making that and Hellraiser was his thing to start with. Now, we looked at what could be the new version of that and they looked at extreme body transformation and the Cenobites are wearing their own modifications.”

I thought that’s an interesting way to update something. I think that’s how you reinvent stuff and you do it in a clever way now.

This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.