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Made in collaboration with the Hells Angels, Sandy Harbutt’s directorial feature debut is akin to watching celluloid soaked in LSD and set on fire

There is a scene early in director Sandy Harbutt’s inimitable 1974 road movie Stone in which a motorcycle, cruising down an ocean-hugging street on a bright sunny day, is nudged off the cliff by a car. Harbutt cuts to a long shot of the location (Lurline Bay in New South Wales), capturing the rider displaced from his bike and following his vehicle headfirst in a spectacular airborne trajectory off the steep rocky precipice into waters below.

The spirit of Harbutt’s film exists in that moment: a heady concoction of courage, recklessness and noodle-scratching bravado. Those attributes would come to define the “Ozploitation” genre, of which Stone was an early proponent. The storyline is uncomplicated, concerning a cop who goes undercover with a bunch of bikies called the Gravediggers,...

I've spent a lot of time telling you all about the different aspects of Severin Films' home video catalog and even their theatrical releases.  You would think that would be all, perhaps they'd found their niche and they'd be glad to hang out in their comfort zone, but you'd be wrong.  Having admirably tackled EuroSleaze, horror, the eternal works of D'amato, Borowczyk, and Franco, and dipped their toes into feature film distribution and production, you'd think they would be satisfied.  However, Severin Films has so much more to offer, their future is bright, and I predict that at least a couple of their upcoming releases will blow the minds of home viewers in the coming years.

I never got around to talking about one of Severin's best complete packages, the two disc special edition of Ozploitation biker classic, Stone.  A good five years before Mel Gibson hit the wide...

In 1974, a time when the Australian film industry seemed more concerned with creating whimsical Australian pictures, director Sandy Harbutt created one of the most uncompromising, violent and gritty portrayals of an Australian subculture with his bikie flick, Stone.   Revered by many as a watershed moment in Australian cinema, the film is currently in line for a contemporary adaptation by Richard Cartwright.   In adapting the film Cartwright wants to ensure he creates a film that will do the original justice. "We're going to stick with the gritty feeling that made the 1974 Stone such a powerful piece of cinema - it's going to be no-holds barred, that's for sure.

There are two essential books that celebrate region-specific horror films both well-known and obscure. One is Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA (with a companion volume planned). The other is They Came From Within, Caelum Vatnsdal’s history of Canadian horror movies. What these two books suggest is that the best of the cinema’s independent horror films are really regional works. Three of the most famous horror films of all time, Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are really regional films, independently financed and shot far from Hollywood with local actors and crew members. Thus they have a flavor not found in mainstream genre movies, spices of quirkiness, unpredictability, and rigorous bleakness that mainstream movies can’t or won’t allow themselves.

As far as I know there isn’t a book about Australian genre cinema yet, but now there is a film:...