News

Just a few days ago I was talking to our writer Michael Haffner’s father about the films in his heyday of horror, exploitation and basic genre cinema. We talked about westerns, Hammer horror and about personal experiences. Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil came up and I proceeded to verbially profess my love for Bava. Gore fans have Fulci and while the fantastical seem to favor Argento, I lean towards Bava more as he has always had more substance in his films than Argento. Don’t get me wrong, I love Argento but in my opinion, Argento is best experienced with musical accompaniment by Goblin. Network Awesome seems to think Mario Bava is a big deal as well as they have dedicated a whole week in video programming to the man. Check out the details beyond the break.

First off, let’s start with a little info from...

Plastic Paper is Winnipeg’s celebration of animation, illustration and puppet films, organized by the Big Smash! filmmaking collective. Their second annual event will be held on May 4-8 at the Park Theatre.

The big score for this year’s edition is a special screening of Ralph Bakshi’s 1981 feature-length musical opus American Pop with the filmmaker in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. For this groundbreaking work, Bakshi utilized the innovative technique of mixing rotoscoping, water colors, computer graphics, live action shots, and archival footage. This screening and discussion will be a real treat for animation junkies.

But that’s not to say that the rest of the festival isn’t also filled with other amazing films.

Because, speaking of groundbreaking work, the fest kicks off with Brent Green’s simply astounding film Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, the first full-length film utilizing real-life actors in amazing stop-motion animation.

Tomorrow might be Valentine’s Day, but how about showing these great sites some love today?

To start things off on an inappropriately sleazy note: The Phantom of Pulp has several awesome — and one extra incredible — poster for one of my favorite horror movies, Maniac. “Underground film” means different things all over the world. In China, it just means government-repressed artists just trying to express themselves. Candlelight Stories has the full documentary Digital Underground in the People’s Republic by Rachel Tejada. Kimberly Chun as a lengthy dip into the current San Francisco experimental film scene on the site Bold Italic. Not sure what it is recently, but I keep digging up classic Chicago Underground Film Festival info. This week it’s the poster from their 4th edition designed by acclaimed graphic novelist Chris Ware. That’s from 1997 when the special guests were John Waters and Beth B. Also from...