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The Venice Film Festival will fete Australian director and screenwriter Peter Weir with its honorary Golden Lion at its forthcoming 80th edition.

Accepting the honor, Weir said: “The Venice Film Festival and its Golden Lion are part of the folklore of our craft. To be singled out as a recipient for a lifetime’s work as a director is a considerable honor.”

Born in August 1944, Weir was one of the pivotal figures in the Australian New Wave cinema of the 70s. He began his career in 1969 when he took a job with the government-funded Commonwealth Film Unit as a director. Weir struck out on his own in 1973 and directed his first feature film, the comic-horror The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), which he also wrote. He won an international audience with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), followed by The Last Wave (1977), for which he also co-wrote the screenplay.

The Venice Film Festival will honor Australian director and screenwriter Peter Weir – whose body of work comprises “Dead Poets Society,” “The Truman Show,” and “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” – with its 2024 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

“With a total of only thirteen movies directed over the course of forty years, Peter Weir has secured a place in the firmament of the great directors of modern cinema,” Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera said in a statement.

Barbera added that Weir made a name for himself at the end of the 1970s as the leading figure behind the rebirth of Australian cinema thanks to two movies: “The Cars That Ate Paris” (1974) and cult classic “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975). The international success of his following two films, “Gallipoli” and “The Year of Living Dangerously” then “opened Hollywood’s doors.”

“Weir combines reflections on personal themes and a need to...

Australian director George Miller made his first feature film, "Mad Max," in 1979. It was a very low-budget affair costing about $200,000. The film takes place in the near future when the Earth is running low on oil and civilization is just beginning to crumble. "Mad" Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) is a road cop tasked with reigning in the chaos. "Mad Max" was decidedly low-fi, but it struck a chord with audiences, ultimately earning almost $100 million worldwide. It remains one of the most profitable movies of all time, comparable only to "The Blair Witch Project," "Paranormal Activity," and "Deep Throat." Miller would go on to make several sequels to "Mad Max" in 1981, 1985, and 2015. The fifth film in the series, "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga," is hitting theaters this month, with a potential sixth entry, "Mad Max: The Wasteland," in the early planning stages.

Miller recently participated in a "Furiosa" screening and Q&a event,...

Last year, Australian filmmaker Peter Weir was given an honorary Oscar for having “illuminated the human experience with his unique and expansive body of work.” Sadly, it’s now official that his filmography is complete, as Weir confirmed during an appearance at the Festival de la Cinémathèque in Paris that he has retired from directing.

Télérama reported (and IndieWire was kind enough to translate their report) that Weir was asked why 14 years have gone by since his last movie. Weir replied, “I am retired. Why did I stop cinema? Because, quite simply, I have no more energy.“

Born in 1944, Weir got his career started in television back in the 1960s, working on the TV projects The Life and Times of the Reverend Buck Shotte and Man on a Green Bike. After contributing a segment to the anthology film Three to Go, he made the 50 minute movie Homesdale and the documentary Whatever Happened to Green Valley?...

Terry Camilleri Photo: Terry Camilleri Joaquin Phoenix may be the latest actor to play Napoleon Bonaparte, but he certainly isn’t the first (nor will he be the last). Of all the people who’ve played the French emperor, from Marlon Brando to Verne Troyer, one looms large in our collective memories: The water slide-loving,...

Terry Camilleri Photo: Terry Camilleri, Screenshot: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Joaquin Phoenix may be the latest actor to play Napoleon Bonaparte, but he certainly isn’t the first (nor will he be the last). Of all the people who’ve played the French emperor, from Marlon Brando to Verne Troyer,...

Writer/Director Joe Cornish discusses a few of his favorite movies with Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Attack The Block (2011)

Rocks (2019)

Poltergeist (1982)

Gremlins (1984)

Avanti! (1972)

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)

The Last Wave (1977)

Witness (1985)

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Fearless (1993)

Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World (2003)

Gallipoli (1981)

The Year Of Living Dangerously (1982)

The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)

The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985)

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)

The Rescuers (1977)

Bedknobs And Broomsticks (1971)

The Rescuers Down Under (1990)

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Moonraker (1979)

The Adventures Of Tintin (2011)

Bambi (1942)

Dumbo (1941)

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)

Forbidden Planet (1956)

This Island Earth (1955)

Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956)

The Thing From Another World (1951)

Matinee (1993)

The Lord Of The Rings (1978)

The Omen (1976)

Damien: Omen II (1978)

Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981)

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

The Exorcist (1973)

The Exterminator (1980)

Friday The 13th...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

An American Pickle (Brandon Trost)

Seth Rogen plays dual roles in his latest comedy, American Pickle follows Seth Rogen both as Herschel Greenbaum, an immigrant who falls in a vat of pickled is brined for 100 years, and his great-grandson Ben Greenbaum, who is a computer coder and lives a very different life, to say the least. While there are certainly humorous sequences (a Brooklyn hipster couple’s first impressions of Greenbaum’s pickle stand comes foremost to mind), Rogen is far more interested in the definitions of family and loyalty, themes that are not explored with a great deal of emotional impact, but do add some heart to what...

Can anything sum up the bold optimism and doomed romance of the American dream more fully than the open road? It began with the western, the image of a lone man on a horse gazing at an empty horizon, and a culture in which riding into the unknown was often the only way to survive. Originating in the 1940s, reaching its apex in the Sixties and still contributing a distinctive language to today’s cinema, the car movie speaks to that same desire for freedom, taken to an extreme. You can find it expressed in almost every genre, from the farce of the Smokey And The Bandit films to the strangeness of The Cars That Ate Paris, the starry-eyed meta fiction of True Romance and Wild At Heart and the death fetishism of Crash. Although not all the classics can be found online, it was still a challenge whittling...

Kaarin Fairfax and Chris Haywood in ‘Skewwhiff.’

Chris Haywood is so committed to making a thriller based on the Australian novel The Crossing he has agreed to produce as well as star in the feature film.

First-time feature director James Khehtie sent the novel by B. Michael Radburn to the actor, who loved the premise: Taylor Bridges flees from Victoria to an isolated Tasmanian town to work as a park ranger after his daughter disappeared, triggering the breakdown of his marriage.

When a young girl who was the same age as his daughter vanishes, Bridges, a chronic sleepwalker, begins to wonder what happens when he sleepwalks.

“I did not want to produce but James insisted,” Haywood tells If, recalling that he has served as a producer only once before, on writer-director Peter Watkins’ 1991 feature doc The Media Project, which critiqued Australian media coverage of the first Gulf war.

Radburn has...

Welcome back for Day 9 of Daily Dead’s fourth annual Holiday Gift Guide, readers! Once again, our goal is to help you navigate through the horrors of the 2016 shopping season with our tips on unique gift ideas, and we’ll hopefully help you save a few bucks over the next few weeks, too. For today’s gift guide, we’re showcasing several of the amazing Arrow Video releases of 2016, and we're also featuring the work of IBTrav Illustration & Design, the Mondo soundtrack release for Deathgasm, more enamel pins, a book celebrating Marvel’s Doctor Strange, Horror LEGOs, recent Monster High releases, and so much more!

This year’s Holiday Gift Guide is sponsored by several amazing companies, including Mondo, Anchor Bay Entertainment, DC Entertainment, and Magnolia Home Entertainment, who have all donated an assortment of goodies to help get you into the spirit of the season. Daily Dead also recently...

The third week of September has a lot of fantastic horror and sci-fi home entertainment offerings coming our way, including an incredible pair of Criterion Blu-ray releases—Cat People (1942) and Blood Simple—as well as the 30th Anniversary Edition of Labyrinth and the Special Edition of Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In. Other notable titles being released on September 20th include the horror doc The Blackout Experiments (which premiered earlier this year at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival), Sacrifice, The Rift (1990), Beware! The Blob, and a Blu-ray set featuring all kinds of Twin Peaks goodness.

Beware! The Blob (Kino Lorber, Blu-ray & DVD)

Newly Re-mastered in HD! The Blob returns... more outrageous than ever in this 1972 sequel to the popular sci-fi classic! Plenty of familiar faces, including Robert Walker Jr. (Ensign Pulver), Larry Hagman (Dallas), Sid Haig (Busting), Burgess Meredith (Rocky), Dick Van Patten (Eight is Enough), Godfrey Cambridge...

There’s something refreshingly unpredictable about this time-travel format, a particularly pleasing virtue in these dark days of superhero this and sequel that

In the 1970s, Australian film-makers cranked up the gas and pumped out a slate of crazy-memorable petrolhead movies. Stone embraced acid-soaked biker funerals, The Cars That Ate Paris combined grease monkeys with freaky medical procedures, and Mad Max unleashed a certain crotchety road warrior on to a vast dystopian landscape.

Perhaps the current decade will come to be regarded as a peak period for kooky Australian time travel flicks. The criminally under-watched, joyously screwy The Infinite Man doled out headwear Doc Brown would be proud of, while Predestination answered the hypothetical question nobody asked: what would happen if you went back in time and slept with yourself?

Continue reading...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

Spend “A Weekend with Amy Heckerling” when Johnny Dangerously and Fast Times at Ridgemont High screen this Saturday, while Look Who’s Talking and Clueless show on Sunday. All are on 35mm.

For “Welcome to Metrograph: A-z,” see a print of Philippe Garrel‘s The Inner Scar on Friday and Sunday; André de Toth‘s...

By Doug Oswald

I had no idea what to expect when I placed the DVD for “Scobie Malone” in my player. Scobie, played by Jack Thompson, makes his way through traffic on a sunny day in Sydney Australia as the movie credits begin. An Olivia Newton-John sound-alike sings the Scobie Malone title song. Scobie breaks the third wall by looking directly at the viewer as the title appears on-screen during his drive as an invitation to join him on his adventure. Scobie gives the thumbs up to a motorcycle cop during his drive. He winks, nods and flirts with pretty girls on the way to his swinging bachelor pad.

Scobie lives at “Sunrise Patios” and the entry sign proclaims Singles Only with a placard stating: No Vacancies. His bachelor pad is reached through the central courtyard containing a large patio and pool. A pretty girl in a bikini is changing...

Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron lead the charge across a post-apocalyptic desert in Mad Max: Fury Road. Here's why you should watch it...

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Mad Max - and the director who created him, George Miller - might have mellowed with age. Not a bit of it.

In the late 1970s, Miller trudged off into the remote outskirts of Melbourne with a film crew, a bunch of old cars and a then-unknown Mel Gibson, and came back with a ramshackle, raw sci-fi revenge movie that felt like the cinematic equivalent of punk rock. Decades later, Miller's back with Mad Max: Fury Road, a film that feels like both a continuation of the original and its two sequels - Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) - and a modern revitalisation of their characters and ideas.

If the first Mad Max was a rough,...

All week long our writers will debate: Which was the greatest film year of the past half century.  Click here for a complete list of our essays. I was one of the first to select years for this particular exercise, which probably allowed me to select the correct year. The answer is, of course, 1974 and all other answers are wrong. No matter what your criteria happens to be, 1974 is going to come out on top. Again, this is not ambiguous or open to debate. We have to start, of course, with the best of the best. "Chinatown" is one of the greatest movies ever made. You can't structure a thriller better than Robert Towne and Roman Polanski do, nor shoot a Los Angeles movie better than John Alonzo has done. Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway give the best performances of their careers, which is no small achievement. If you ask...

Australia... it's a vast, beautiful, welcoming country. It's also full to bursting with things that can kill you, if the big screen is to be believed. Inspired by Mia Wasikowska's plucky 1,700-mile trek across the Outback in Tracks, we flag up the traps and tropes she should watch out for.

(Un)Natural Phenomena

Exotic wildlife proliferates Down Under, most of it deceptively lethal. Witness the baby stolen by a dingo in horrifying Meryl Streep-starrer A Cry In The Dark (1988). The same – real – tragedy loosely inspired Razorback, a mullet-tastic 1984 horror about a giant marauding pig, directed by Highlander's Russell Mulcahy (mooted tagline: 'There Can Only Be Oink'). The less said about the ballet-dancing were-roos of The Marsupials: The Howling III (1987), the better.

Much more convincing is the giant CG crocodile munching Radha Mitchell's boat tour group (ex-Neighbours actors constitute an Outback peril all of their own) in 2007's Rogue,...

Lon Chaney didn't speak during early childhood, as his parents were deaf and mute, and he communicated with them via sign language. When silent movies came along, he was a natural. And at the end of his life, stricken with throat cancer, he lost his voice and again relied on pantomime to make himself understood. He came from silence and went back to silence.

Chaney was a unique kind of movie star, in that his success rested more on variety than reliability: if his audiences had any expectations going into a Chaney film, surely they must have been expectations of surprise, perhaps of an encounter with the unfamiliar and bizarre.

Outside the Law (1920) was Chaney's second film for director Tod Browning, whose concerns seemed to merge with his own in a particularly conducive way: separately and apart, both men pursued stories of humiliation, disfigurement, and revenge, featuring bizarre, displaced menageries and elaborate and uncomfortable disguises.

For those out there who think that Mad Max was a work of fiction think again. As a relatively young nation, Australians grasp hold of anything that gives them a skerrick of identity. With the first Mad Max film now 33 years old (not to mention The Cars That Ate Paris and Stone coming before it in the mid-1970s, and all that Ozploitation) the badass apocalyptic car culture has seeped right into the identity of an entire generation of young men. This generation is now making movies.One of the most exciting movies of this bunch is Wyrmwood, an audacious feature film that is shaping up to be both the most patriotic but irreverently Australian horror movie in ages. The team behind Wyrmwood have basically cut...

Apocalyptic science fiction or movies set in a dystopian future have been a staple of Australian cinema since 1970s classics Mad Max and The Cars That Ate Paris - and even arguably as far back as the 1959 Gregory Peck post-apocalyptic drama On The Beach. We're starting to see a resurgence in this genre now with two high-class projects, Zak Hilditch's These Final Hours and David Michôd's The Rover, set to start filming in Australia in the coming months. These Final Hours is especially exciting as it's the first major feature from writer/director Zak Hilditch, who has been building up to this for years with a string of indie features and - significantly - the festival-acclaimed short film Transmission, which was made as a dystopian companion piece...

Snowtown and The Eye of the Storm are the latest in a new wave of Australian films that rely less on rugged exteriors and more on contained emotional drama

From a controversial horror featuring a sadistic bushranger, to a Melbourne-set gangster saga, to a raucous documentary on 70s Ozploitation flicks, you'd have to have your head buried in the outback to have not noticed the sterling work going on in Australian cinema. And in case you thought Wolf Creek, Animal Kingdom and Not Quite Hollywood were some sort of fleeting mirage, check out the impressive directorial debuts from Patrick Hughes (the suspenseful neo-western Red Hill), Leon Ford (Griff the Invisible – a remarkable romantic ode to superhero flicks) or Ben C Lucas (Wasted on the Young – a nightmarish social networking thriller). They're all evidence of fine Aussie film-making talent that proves you don't need special effects nor mega bucks to make intelligent,...

Anchor Bay will release the 2010 action horror-thriller Super Hybrid—a killer car movie!!—on Blu-ray and DVD on August 23 for the list prices of $29.99 and $22.98, respectively.

Shannon Beckner takes to her bike to avoid being flattened by the Super Hybrid.

Lovely Shannon Beckner (You Are Here) stars as Tilda, a mechanic in a Chicago police impound garage who is introduced to a strange car that’s been brought in following a deadly traffic accident. It seems that the car has a murderous mind of its own, as well as the ability to transform into different vehicles. So in order to survive the car’s inevitable killing rampage, prospective human victims must not only outrun the venomous vehicle, but be able to outwit it as well!

Directed by Eric Valette, originally entitled Hybrid and initially presented in 3D when it rolled out to European film festivals last year, Super Hybrid arrives on U.

'Twice I've had to tell major actors that I was letting them go after only two days of shooting. It was hideous'

What first drew you to film-making?

I started as an entertainer, then wrote TV scripts, then I started applying for grants for short films, then features. There's the folklore about the kid with the 60mm camera, dreaming of directing, but I wasn't like that: at that age, I wanted to be a tram driver or a pilot.

What was your big breakthrough?

Getting a good review for my first film, The Cars That Ate Paris, from [the critic] Dilys Powell. I positively glowed.

How has the process of film-making changed in the course of your career?

The major change is something we can't assess yet: it's the effect of playing video games from a very young age. Games emphasise scenes, rather than stories, and characterisation suffers dramatically. It may mean...

Content creators heading to Miptv, Cannes and any other international markets must plan their activities carefully if they want to stand out at these extremely competitive events. Miguel Gonzalez reports.

Every year hundreds of content creators from all over the world travel to Europe, Asia and the Us to do business at the big festivals – Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Sundance – because they feature a market component for buying, selling, screening and financing films. Television creators have Miptv and Mipcom; documentary filmmakers have Idfa and HotDocs. There are, of course, many more markets – old and new – taking place in different territories and filmmakers, whether they’re financing their next project or looking for a sales agent or distributor, must identify the one that is right for each film, documentary and TV program.

While the idea of warm spring nights in Cannes, in designer outfits and sipping drinks while selling/ buying the...

It's difficult to find a common thread among Peter Weir's films. The Australia native's first feature, "The Cars That Ate Paris," was a gritty black comedy about residents of a small town who deliberately cause car crashes. But he followed that cult classic with the lyrical and haunting "Picnic at Hanging Rock," which tells the "true" story of the disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher in 1900. Weir eventually began making films in America, and was just as difficult to ascribe him to a particular genre. After heavy dramas like "Witness" and "The Mosquito Coast," Weir proved impressive at comedy with the lighthearted romance "Green Card." His last film was 2003's high seas epic "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." But there is at least one thing a viewer can expect from a Peter Weir film: The director is known for drawing terrific performances from actors,...

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

It’s true: Peter Weir hasn’t made a bad film. From his early lesser known triumphs that include perplexing car carnage horror debut The Cars that Ate Paris and claustrophobic thriller The Plummer, through to the award winning likes of Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously and Witness and on to more recent modern classics including Dead Poet’s Society and The Truman Show this is a director, not unlike David Cronenberg, who is incapable of churning out a disaster. Even his financial film failings (The Mosquito Coast and Fearless) are intelligent instantly likable affairs. So it’s fare to say when walking into a Weir film one’s expectations are lifted above the norm.

The Way Back, Weir’s first film in seven years, is based on the audacious (but probably fictitious) account of the Russian prison escape and subsequent 4,500 trek – from Siberia via...

Peter Weir is a man who likes to take his time between movie projects. He’s also an incredibly versatile film-maker. If you goe back to the very start of his career with The Cars That Ate Paris – a brilliant black comedy – you wouldn’t really have guessed his direction suddenly change into lyrical, poetic type of cinema.

Weir returns to the director’s chair with an epic saga of escaped convicts in 1940s Russia. Starring Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess and Ed Harris, a brand new UK trailer is online for you to get the lowdown on what might be an Oscar contender.

In some respects, Weir, when focusing on the natural elements and man’s place in them, he’s like a more commercially-minded Terrence Malick. And I still maintain The Mosquito Coast is an underrated film and Weir got a superbly manic performance from Harrison Ford.

Will The Way Back...

Fango has learned that IFC Films has grabbed another pair of fear features from overseas, to premiere on the company’s video-on-demand platforms ahead of eventual DVD release. These titles join IFC’s growing lineup of upcoming genre titles, which also includes such recent acquisitions as Nicolas Winding Refn’s brutal Viking film Valhalla Rising and Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher’s zombie opus La Horde.

New to the IFC roster are the Australian chiller Coffin Rock (pictured) and the Spanish production Paintball. Coffin Rock, written and directed by Rupert Glasson, is about a young married woman (Lisa Chappell) who drunkenly sleeps with a stranger; when she becomes pregnant, the one-night stand begins a psychopathic campaign to prove the baby is his. Robert Taylor, Sam Parsonson and The Cars That Ate Paris’ Terry Camilleri co-star. In Paintball, directed by Daniel Benmayor from a Mario Schoendorff script, a group of contestants...

Peter Weir's comprehensive profile at Senses of Cinema begins with:

Peter Weir helped to define the rebirth of Australian cinema, while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of the nation in the 1970s and 1980s. His intriguing images of Australia, evocative and transcendent, made an impact in the international art house scene, eager for compelling visions of geo-political areas and cultures overlooked by mainstream cinema. After achieving international recognition as an emblematic Australian filmmaker, Weir made his transition to Hollywood while maintaining a sense of experimentation and artistic exploration . . .[ read more ]

I have to say, Peter Weir's films are so diverse, it's hard to pinpoint exactly his focus as a filmmaker. That is, if he has any intention to focus on certain themes. He has done such an impressive list of movies in many genres - dramatic mystery-thrillers (Picnic at Hanging Rock), comedy-romance (Green Card), action-adventure (Master and Commander...

Peter Weir's comprehensive profile at Senses of Cinema begins with:

Peter Weir helped to define the rebirth of Australian cinema, while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of the nation in the 1970s and 1980s. His intriguing images of Australia, evocative and transcendent, made an impact in the international art house scene, eager for compelling visions of geo-political areas and cultures overlooked by mainstream cinema. After achieving international recognition as an emblematic Australian filmmaker, Weir made his transition to Hollywood while maintaining a sense of experimentation and artistic exploration . . .[ read more ]

I have to say, Peter Weir's films are so diverse, it's hard to pinpoint exactly his focus as a filmmaker. That is, if he has any intention to focus on certain themes. He has done such an impressive list of movies in many genres - dramatic mystery-thrillers (Picnic at Hanging Rock), comedy-romance (Green Card), action-adventure (Master and Commander...

Peter Weir's comprehensive profile at Senses of Cinema begins with:

Peter Weir helped to define the rebirth of Australian cinema, while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of the nation in the 1970s and 1980s. His intriguing images of Australia, evocative and transcendent, made an impact in the international art house scene, eager for compelling visions of geo-political areas and cultures overlooked by mainstream cinema. After achieving international recognition as an emblematic Australian filmmaker, Weir made his transition to Hollywood while maintaining a sense of experimentation and artistic exploration . . .[ read more ]

I have to say, Peter Weir's films are so diverse, it's hard to pinpoint exactly his focus as a filmmaker. That is, if he has any intention to focus on certain themes. He has done such an impressive list of movies in many genres - dramatic mystery-thrillers (Picnic at Hanging Rock), comedy-romance (Green Card), action-adventure (Master and Commander...

Peter Weir's comprehensive profile at Senses of Cinema begins with:

Peter Weir helped to define the rebirth of Australian cinema, while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of the nation in the 1970s and 1980s. His intriguing images of Australia, evocative and transcendent, made an impact in the international art house scene, eager for compelling visions of geo-political areas and cultures overlooked by mainstream cinema. After achieving international recognition as an emblematic Australian filmmaker, Weir made his transition to Hollywood while maintaining a sense of experimentation and artistic exploration . . .[ read more ]

I have to say, Peter Weir's films are so diverse, it's hard to pinpoint exactly his focus as a filmmaker. That is, if he has any intention to focus on certain themes. He has done such an impressive list of movies in many genres - dramatic mystery-thrillers (Picnic at Hanging Rock), comedy-romance (Green Card), action-adventure (Master and Commander...

The best part about this unfettered access to Fangoria’s Files is being able to track down those films Academy Award Nominated directors would rather forget. Sure Peter Weir made us all tear up in front of our girlfriends with such films as Gallipoli, The Truman Show and Witness, but what kind of emotion was he trying to evoke with one of his earlier films, The Cars That Ate Paris from 1974?

The film was released in the Us as The Cars That Eat People. I guess they figured American audiences wouldn’t be that sympathetic to the French. It took me a good twenty minutes of viewing and language deciphering to realize that the Paris they were referring to was actually a small town in Australia. At first glance, it looks like Maximum Overdrive meets Herbie The Love Bug with sadly no Emilio or Lindsey. However, it shares more in...

Welcome to the first installment of a new column here at Fangoria.com, Back Catalogue. Sometimes the Catalogue will cover new releases of older films, and sometimes it will feature exactly what the title implies, back catalogue items. These will normally be from smaller specialty labels that have formed the backbone of the horror fans ability to build a truly representative collection of their favorite films. I'm proud to start this column back up after a two year hiatus and promise to work hard to recommend films that you're in danger of forgetting about, have maybe never heard of, or that might be ready to go out of print.

I'm also proud that the first edition of Catalogue is all about Synapse Films. Anybody who goes to conventions and has stopped by the Synapse table has not only seen first hand the amazing array of labor of love releases and Special Editions they produce,...

You can’t beat late night television to catch some of the oddities of the film world. Series’ like Moviedrome and Mondo Macabro presented some weird and wonderful films, but sheer scheduling alone would bring the occasional strange delight our way. The only bonus of insomnia was that I’d never miss these films when they were on and it’s how I got into loving film, the veritable B-movie banquet that was the early hours So, here are my choices of five late night TV gems:

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (1973) Now you see them, now you don’t…now you die

Be afraid, be very afraid in this very effective made-for-tv movie which has already made an entry in fistinface’s ‘Five: TV Movies Not About Eating Disorders’. I love cheesy TV movies but this is the rare thing of a darker, more original film and...