Tag: 1980s
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Alison’s Birthday (1981)
Alison’s Birthday (1981) lets you know it’s an Australian horror story through the shot of a Cold Chisel album on the floor when a seance goes haywire. At age 16, Alison (Joanne Samuel from Mad Max) is mucking around with a ouija board with a couple of school friends, and receives a warning from the… Read.
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The Oracle (1985)
After seeing the repulsive yet effective thriller, Tenement, I was interested to see more of director Roberta Findlay’s mainstream 1980s genre work, after a previous decade of working in exploitation and pornography. The Oracle (1985) is a low-budget supernatural horror movie that uses the planchette as its hook – a silver artificial hand in a… Read.
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Things (1989)
“He must have been hit by spontaneous combustion, I’ve read about that shit…” A long time ago, I remember being over at a friend’s house, and they were working on a low-budget horror short, and played it for me on a VCR. Watching Things (1989) feels like that experience but taken to a transcendent level.… Read.
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City On Fire (1987)
Saxophone is the weapon of choice for Teddy Robin’s score to City On Fire (1987). I couldn’t help but think of the David Sanborn sax sound to the Lethal Weapon soundtrack. What I love about Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s (and into the 1990s) is that circuit loop, of taking on influences from western… Read.
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The Empty Beach (1985)
Bogie in Bondi. The Empty Beach (1985) is a neo-noir shot in Sydney during the mid-1980s, and based on a novel by Peter Corris, one of a series of books devoted to his detective character, Cliff Hardy. A commercial failure at the Australian box office, this is a boilerplate mystery. But what was satisfying to… Read.
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