Horror does not always need to reinvent the machinery of the genre to be effective. Sometimes the value lies in how cleanly the familiar pieces are assembled: a confined location, a vulnerable group of characters, an increasingly hostile environment and the creeping suspicion that something is profoundly wrong. Goody Goody, the feature debut from writer-director Raymond Creamer, operates firmly within those parameters. It is not a film of radical invention, but it is a tightly constructed and consistently watchable piece of genre filmmaking, held together by a small cast capable of making its increasingly nightmarish circumstances feel immediate.
The premise is deceptively simple. An expectant couple and their midwife find themselves trapped inside an isolated home during a blizzard as a seemingly routine home birth begins to go badly wrong. What initially appears to be a matter of medical complications gradually develops into something more sinister, with the weather outside turning the house into a sealed environment and the suggestion of an unwanted presence transforming an already stressful situation into outright horror. Creamer understands the fundamental advantage of this setup: childbirth is already an experience built around vulnerability, uncertainty and the loss of control. The supernatural elements therefore have fertile ground in which to take root.
The film’s greatest strength is its economy. With a modest cast and essentially one primary location, Goody Goody has little opportunity to disguise structural weaknesses through spectacle. Instead, Creamer puts his faith in the performers and in the gradual tightening of the narrative. Samantha Robinson and Colleen Foy provide the film with its principal dramatic engine, their characters occupying opposing positions within the increasingly unstable birth. Robinson brings an unsettling ambiguity to Goody, while Foy gives the midwife a practical, grounded presence that provides the audience with someone to trust as the situation deteriorates.
That relationship is particularly important because Goody Goody works best when it treats its supernatural threat as an extension of the characters’ circumstances rather than simply an excuse for conventional scares. The medical reality of the situation provides the initial source of anxiety; the horror grows from the realisation that rational explanations may no longer be sufficient. It is a familiar progression, certainly, but the film understands that horror often derives less from discovering something entirely new than from placing recognisable fears into increasingly hostile configurations.
Creamer’s direction is similarly restrained. There is a welcome absence of unnecessary visual grandstanding, with the claustrophobic setting doing much of the atmospheric work. The house becomes progressively less like a place of safety and more like a trap, while the blizzard surrounding it removes the possibility of easy escape. This is classic contained horror architecture: the outside world remains visible but inaccessible, leaving the characters isolated with whatever is happening inside.
And yet this is also where the film’s limitations become apparent. Goody Goody is solidly made, but rarely feels as though it is pushing against the boundaries of its influences. Its ideas are familiar, its escalation follows recognisable genre pathways and there are few moments where Creamer radically reconfigures the material. The film knows precisely what kind of horror movie it wants to be, but it does not always demonstrate the appetite to become something more unusual.
That does not make it unsuccessful. In fact, there is something refreshing about a film that understands its scale and works within it rather than attempting to manufacture importance. The relatively small cast gives the story an intimacy that larger horror productions often struggle to achieve, while the contained setting allows the performances to remain central. The result is a film that feels assembled with care rather than inflated beyond its means.
There is also a pleasing tension between the title’s almost aggressively innocent suggestion and the increasingly unpleasant reality contained within it. Goody Goody sounds like something benign, even twee; the film itself is considerably less interested in sweetness. That contrast gives the title a darkly playful quality, even if the movie surrounding it remains comparatively straight-faced.
Ultimately, Goody Goody is perhaps best appreciated for what it is rather than what it might have been. It lacks the formal invention or conceptual audacity that might elevate it into genuinely distinctive horror, but it is competently written, tightly woven and supported by a cast that understands the importance of selling the circumstances. Creamer demonstrates a solid command of contained genre filmmaking, even if the film occasionally feels content to walk paths that other horror movies have already travelled.
There is enough here to recommend it, particularly for viewers who appreciate slow-building, character-driven horror and the pressure-cooker mechanics of a contained setting. It may not leave a particularly radical mark on the genre, but it doesn’t need to. Goody Goody is a sturdy piece of horror craftsmanship: modest in ambition, dependable in execution and ultimately an enjoyable watch.
The Prognosis:
Goody Goody is not going to redefine supernatural horror, but it doesn’t collapse under the weight of its familiar ingredients either. Raymond Creamer’s film succeeds through construction, atmosphere and a small ensemble that gives its contained premise credibility. Solid rather than spectacular, familiar rather than inventive, but thoroughly watchable.
Kane Parsons has built Backrooms around a wonderfully simple cinematic proposition: what if you could walk through the wrong wall and discover that the world behind it was infinitely larger than the world you thought you knew? It is the kind of premise that sounds almost childish when reduced to a sentence yet becomes profoundly unsettling once given physical space. A doorway appears where no doorway should exist. A basement gives way to an impossible architecture. Rooms lead to rooms, corridors fold into corridors and the familiar becomes subtly, irrevocably wrong.
For a filmmaker barely out of his teens, Parsons demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of why such spaces disturb us. His feature debut, adapted from the online phenomenon he helped develop through his Kane Pixels YouTube series, does not treat the Backrooms simply as a monster’s playground. Instead, it approaches them as a psychological landscape, a physical manifestation of memory, regret, failure and the human need to impose meaning upon spaces that refuse to provide it. The result is an ambitious piece of conceptual horror that absolutely lived up to the enormous expectations surrounding its transition from internet phenomenon to feature film — and yet, somewhat paradoxically, not always in the ways one might expect.
The mythology of the Backrooms began with an image rather than a narrative: an apparently empty, yellow-walled interior illuminated by fluorescent lighting, a space that seemed both completely mundane and profoundly unnatural. Parsons understood the potential of that image early, transforming it into a series of increasingly elaborate short films before expanding the concept into this feature. The achievement of Backrooms is that it retains the essential strangeness of the original idea while giving it human beings to inhabit.
That distinction is crucial.
Because an empty room can be unsettling, but an empty room inhabited by someone carrying the weight of a broken life becomes something else entirely.
At the centre of the film is Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a failed architect whose professional and personal lives have both collapsed into a kind of stagnant middle age. Separated from his wife, drinking heavily and working in a furniture showroom that feels almost comically disconnected from the life he once imagined for himself, Clark is already living in a psychological backroom before he ever discovers the literal one.
That is one of Parsons’ smartest ideas.
Clark is an architect who has failed to construct the life he wanted, and he subsequently finds himself trapped inside an impossible architecture. The metaphor could easily have been unbearably obvious, but Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik understand that the Backrooms do not need to function as a simple allegory. Their power comes from existing simultaneously as a physical impossibility and a psychological possibility.
Clark’s first encounter with the Backrooms therefore carries an unusual mixture of fear and fascination. The space is terrifying, but it is also liberating. Its infinite corridors offer something that the world above cannot: possibility. Here is a place without conventional boundaries, a space where the rules of reality have become negotiable. For a man whose existence has narrowed into disappointment, the infinite can initially look like freedom.
That makes Chiwetel Ejiofor such an inspired choice.
Ejiofor has always possessed an ability to communicate enormous amounts of emotional information without appearing to perform it. Here, that quality becomes essential. Clark is not simply frightened by the Backrooms. He is fascinated by them, frustrated by them, angry with them and, at times, almost seduced by them. Ejiofor allows those contradictory responses to coexist.
There is a weariness to his performance that makes Clark’s predicament feel much larger than the mechanics of the horror story. He is a man who has already become trapped before the film begins. The Backrooms merely give that condition architectural form.
It is one of the film’s most impressive pieces of psychological construction.
Renate Reinsve is equally effective as Dr Mary Kline, Clark’s therapist, and her presence gives the film another layer of psychological inquiry. If Clark represents someone trapped inside his own resentments, Mary represents someone who has built a professional life around helping other people navigate theirs. Her decision to enter the Backrooms after Clark therefore becomes more than a conventional rescue mission.
The therapist enters the patient’s nightmare.
And once she does, the distinction between observer and participant begins to collapse.
This is where Backrooms becomes particularly inventive. The film repeatedly toys with the idea that the environment may not simply be an external supernatural space but something connected to the characters’ memories and emotional histories. The rooms appear to contain fragments of lived experience, distorted approximations of reality that resemble memories reconstructed by someone who cannot quite remember them correctly.
The result is architecture behaving like trauma.
A corridor does not necessarily lead somewhere.
A room does not necessarily contain anything.
A familiar object may have no explanation.
And the deeper the characters travel, the less useful conventional geography becomes.
Parsons is exceptionally good at this kind of spatial uncertainty. He understands that horror does not always require darkness. In fact, Backrooms demonstrates how effectively a filmmaker can make fluorescent lighting frightening. The sickly yellow interiors and endless artificial illumination create a world that is permanently exposed and yet somehow impossible to see clearly.
There is nowhere to hide because there is nowhere that feels safe.
The cinematography and production design deserve enormous credit for creating this sensation. Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox transform the supposedly mundane language of commercial interiors into something oppressive and almost cosmic. Walls, carpets, ceiling panels and furniture become components of an endlessly repeating visual vocabulary. The repetition is essential because it gradually erodes the audience’s confidence in their own spatial memory.
We have seen this room before.
Haven’t we?
That corridor looks familiar.
Or perhaps it doesn’t.
The film understands that the human brain is constantly trying to map its surroundings, and Backrooms weaponises that instinct against us.
This is where the film’s connection to liminal-space horror becomes more than a fashionable aesthetic. The liminal space is frightening because it is a location without a clear purpose. It is the hotel corridor after everyone has gone home. The office after the workers have disappeared. The shopping centre before opening. The school after the final bell.
These spaces are recognisable but stripped of their social function.
Backrooms takes that idea and removes the endpoint entirely.
There is no closing time.
There is no final corridor.
There is no obvious outside.
There is simply more.
And more.
And more.
That is conceptually brilliant.
It is also where the film begins to reveal its greatest weakness.
Because once the audience understands the central conceit, the question becomes what Parsons can actually do with it for almost two hours.
The answer is frequently impressive.
But not always frightening.
Backrooms is an exceptionally inventive film, yet its inventiveness does not consistently translate into shock appeal. Parsons is more interested in unease than conventional scares, and that decision is understandable given the material. The original Backrooms concept was never particularly dependent upon jump scares. Its power came from suggestion, emptiness and the sense that something might be waiting just outside the limits of the frame.
The problem is that a feature-length film eventually has to provide some escalation.
And the middle section occasionally feels as though it is wandering through the very architecture it has created.
The endless rooms are fascinating to explore, but fascination and fear are not identical emotions. The film’s central conceit is sufficiently compelling that simply moving through the Backrooms can remain interesting for quite some time. Yet there comes a point where the viewer begins to anticipate the rhythm: another corridor, another room, another strange object, another distant sound.
The film starts to experience its own version of spatial fatigue.
This is not a failure of imagination. Quite the opposite.
There is almost too much imagination and not quite enough dramatic propulsion.
The film’s psychological ideas are considerably more successful. The Backrooms become a kind of externalised interiority, a landscape in which characters confront versions of themselves that have been distorted by memory and regret. Parsons is interested in the way people become trapped inside narratives about their own lives, particularly the stories they tell themselves about why they failed.
Clark is an especially compelling example because his professional identity has collapsed alongside his personal one. He was supposed to design spaces. Instead, he finds himself working in a furniture showroom, surrounded by representations of homes that he no longer possesses.
The irony is beautifully constructed.
He sells people the fantasy of domestic stability while sleeping in the store himself.
Then he discovers an infinite series of spaces that seem to exist behind reality.
The Backrooms therefore become both escape and punishment.
That duality gives the film its emotional weight.
And it is why Ejiofor’s performance matters so much. Without him, Backrooms could easily become an elaborate exercise in production design. With him, the corridors acquire emotional significance.
He makes the film human.
There is something particularly impressive about watching an actor of Ejiofor’s calibre respond to a premise that could so easily have remained trapped within internet horror. He doesn’t treat the Backrooms as an excuse to perform fear. He treats them as a psychological event.
That difference elevates the material.
The supporting performances contribute to the same effect, particularly as the film moves away from Clark’s solitary exploration and begins introducing other characters into the labyrinth. The Backrooms become more threatening when they are shared because their presence introduces conflicting interpretations of what the space actually represents.
Is it a supernatural dimension?
A psychological projection?
A manifestation of memory?
A place that exists outside conventional reality?
Parsons wisely refuses to provide a completely comfortable answer.
That ambiguity is one of the film’s strengths.
Yet it also contributes to the sense that the horror never quite lands with the force it could.
There are certainly disturbing images. Parsons has an excellent eye for grotesque shapes and unnatural movement, and when the film finally reveals some of the entities inhabiting the Backrooms, they are strikingly designed. But there is something almost academic about the horror. We observe it. We analyse it. We wonder what it means.
We don’t necessarily recoil from it.
And that distinction is perhaps the key to my response to the film.
Did Backrooms live up to expectations?
Yes and no.
It absolutely lives up to the expectation that Kane Parsons would bring something inventive and visually distinctive to the big screen. It demonstrates a remarkable understanding of atmosphere, spatial design and psychological horror. The performances are considerably stronger than one might expect from a film originating in internet creepypasta culture, with Ejiofor providing the emotional centre and Reinsve offering an equally compelling counterpoint.
But it does not always live up to the expectation of being genuinely frightening.
There are moments of terror, but the film is ultimately more interested in the uncanny than the shocking.
That is not necessarily a criticism.
In fact, some audiences will consider it the film’s greatest virtue.
But for a horror film built around such an inherently disturbing concept, there is a nagging feeling that Parsons could have pushed the material further into genuine nightmare territory.
The middle section in particular could have benefited from greater narrative urgency. The Backrooms are fascinating, but the film occasionally mistakes movement through an interesting environment for dramatic progression. The characters continue exploring, the mythology expands and the psychological dimensions deepen, but the narrative momentum periodically stalls.
When the film finally accelerates towards its conclusion, it becomes considerably more effective. The space suddenly feels smaller, despite remaining physically enormous. The threat becomes more immediate. The characters’ movement through the environment gains urgency.
And for a brief period, the film achieves the perfect marriage between its conceptual and visceral qualities.
This is what makes Backrooms so frustratingly close to greatness.
You can see what Parsons is capable of.
There are sequences where the film stops feeling like an adaptation of an internet horror phenomenon and starts feeling like the emergence of a genuinely distinctive cinematic voice. The imagery, sound, performances and psychological ideas converge into something that feels strange and original.
Kane Parsons has clearly spent years thinking about how spaces can frighten us.
Now he has to learn how to make stories frighten us just as effectively.
That is an exciting prospect.
Because Backrooms may ultimately be less significant as a fully realised horror movie than as a statement of intent from an extraordinarily promising filmmaker. At just twenty, Parsons has taken an idea born from internet folklore and translated it into a feature that possesses a visual and conceptual identity of its own. That achievement alone is considerable.
The film’s greatest success is perhaps that it makes the Backrooms feel cinematic rather than merely viral.
The internet created the mythology.
Parsons has created a world.
And it is a world worth getting lost in.
Even if, occasionally, the journey takes a little too long.
The Prognosis:
Backrooms is an inventive, psychologically rich and beautifully performed piece of liminal horror that proves Kane Parsons has far more to offer than an expansion of his viral YouTube phenomenon. Its middle section occasionally loses momentum, and its strange, unsettling imagery rarely delivers the visceral shock one might expect from its premise. But the intelligence of its ideas, the extraordinary production design and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s superb central performance make it an intriguing and often hypnotic debut. It may not always frighten as much as it fascinates, but there is no question that Kane Parsons is a filmmaker worth watching.
There are filmmakers who make films, and then there are filmmakers who seem to have wandered into a film laboratory, knocked over several shelves of chemicals and decided to see what happened.
Yoshihiro Nishimura was very much the latter.
With Geisha War, the Japanese cult filmmaker delivers one final eruption of blood, absurdity, political provocation and gloriously impractical visual effects. It is a film that frequently appears less interested in whether its story makes sense than in whether the next image can possibly be more outrageous than the last.
The answer, more often than not, is yes.
Set in the historic pleasure district of Yoshiwara, Geisha War pits an American gangster and his associates against the local community, led by Kiki, a ramen vendor who finds herself caught up in the struggle to protect the district from outside control. The basic premise provides Nishimura with an excuse to stage a collision between American gangster mythology, Japanese popular culture and his own particular brand of cinematic insanity.
And insanity is certainly the operative word.
Nishimura’s cinema has never been particularly interested in restraint. From Tokyo Gore Police to Helldriver, his films transform bodies into weapons, flesh into sculpture and practical effects into a kind of gleeful visual assault. Geisha War carries that tradition forward with an arsenal of bizarre weaponry, outrageous transformations and fountains of artificial blood. FilmInk describes the film’s visual approach as a combination of solid practical gore and cartoonish digital effects, with everything from chainsaw weaponry to giant scissors entering the fray.
It is less a film than a fever dream with a production budget.
Yet beneath the carnage is something considerably more pointed.
The conflict between Carmine and the residents of Yoshiwara is essentially a battle over cultural ownership. The American gangster sees the district as something to acquire, exploit and reshape for his own purposes. Nishimura responds by turning that clash into an exaggerated piece of exploitation spectacle, where cultural imperialism is answered with severed limbs, weaponised geisha and enough blood to repaint the streets.
Subtle it isn’t.
But subtlety was never particularly high on Nishimura’s list of priorities.
The film’s greatest strength is its willingness to embrace the ridiculous. A conventional action film might introduce a weapon and expect us to accept it as part of the world. Nishimura introduces something completely absurd and then seems determined to make it even more absurd. The result is a cinematic universe in which rickshaws become vehicles of lunacy, weapons emerge from unexpected places and characters can transform into things that would be difficult to describe without sounding like the result of a particularly feverish drinking session.
This is Gallows Horror stripped of the gallows and given a flamethrower.
There is also something strangely poignant about watching Geisha War as Nishimura’s final film. The director died in May 2026, making this an unintentional farewell from one of Japanese genre cinema’s great visual anarchists.
It is certainly an appropriate final statement.
Nishimura never seemed particularly interested in behaving himself. His cinema was messy, confrontational, juvenile, political, horny, grotesque and frequently hilarious. He understood that practical effects could be more than technical achievements: they could be jokes, provocations and punctuation marks. A severed limb wasn’t merely a piece of gore. It was a punchline.
Geisha War occasionally struggles beneath the weight of its own excess. The narrative is skeletal, characterisation is largely functional and the film’s relentless barrage of ideas can become exhausting. For all the visual invention, there are moments when it feels as though Nishimura has several films fighting for space inside the same one.
But perhaps that is part of its charm.
This isn’t polished underground cinema. It isn’t attempting to disguise its seams or convince us that its world is realistic. It is handmade, excessive and proudly artificial. The practical effects have weight; the digital effects deliberately flirt with cartoonishness; the action seems designed around the question of what could possibly make an audience yell what the hell was that?
And then, just when the film seems incapable of slowing down, it finds an unexpectedly reflective note beneath all the bloodshed.
That contradiction is what makes Geisha War work.
For all its ridiculousness, there is a genuine sense of resistance running through the film. Its grotesque spectacle becomes a weapon against the forces attempting to commodify and control its world. Nishimura takes the familiar machinery of exploitation cinema and turns it back upon itself, producing something that is simultaneously crude, playful and politically mischievous.
It is not his most accomplished film.
It may not even be his most outrageous.
But it is unmistakably his.
And as the final film from a director who spent decades proving that there was still room for strange, handmade, bloody and completely unclassifiable cinema, Geisha War makes for one hell of a final curtain call.
Underground Horrors is a series of reviews exploring the strange, confrontational and boundary-pushing films emerging from the underground of contemporary horror cinema.
There is something wonderfully rebellious about a film that seems to have been assembled from equal parts heavy metal, grindhouse cinema, 1990s music videos and a complete disregard for good taste.
Donnie Hobbie’s Jump Scare is that film.
The feature debut from Hobbie follows the all-female metal band Jump Scare as they retreat to a remote cabin to work on their new album. It’s supposed to be an opportunity to escape the pressures of everyday life and find some creative inspiration.
Unfortunately, their neighbours are cannibals.
It is, admittedly, a familiar horror premise.
But Jump Scare has absolutely no interest in behaving like a familiar horror film.
Instead, Hobbie takes the cabin-in-the-woods template and runs it through a neon-soaked, blood-splattered analogue nightmare. The result is a deliberately scrappy collision of comedy, gore, animation, psychedelia and heavy metal attitude.
It looks like a horror movie that escaped from a late-night music-video block.
And that’s a compliment.
There is a tremendous amount of visual personality here. Grainy imagery, saturated colours, stylised lighting, graphic overlays, practical effects and bursts of animation give Jump Scare the feeling of something excavated from a particularly deranged corner of the VHS era.
The film wears its influences proudly.
There are obvious echoes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, grindhouse cinema and the splatter-comedy tradition, but Hobbie isn’t particularly interested in disguising those influences. Jump Scare is closer to a mixtape than a traditional horror film: take something from here, something from there, turn the volume up and see what happens.
And, for considerable stretches, it is a hell of a lot of fun.
The band themselves are one of the film’s strongest assets. Their camaraderie gives the early sections a loose, lived-in quality, and the chemistry between the performers provides a welcome sense that these characters actually enjoy being around one another.
That matters.
Because once the cannibals arrive, the film could easily have become another disposable exercise in slaughterhouse horror.
Instead, the personalities keep it moving.
Hobbie also demonstrates an obvious affection for practical filmmaking. There is a joyous physicality to the violence, with blood, guts, creatures and assorted bodily misfortune given an appropriately handmade quality. Some of the effects are deliberately rough around the edges, but that imperfection is part of the film’s aesthetic.
Jump Scare isn’t trying to convince us that we’re watching reality.
It wants us to enjoy the artifice.
That gives the film a particularly punk-rock quality. It is less concerned with polish than with energy.
The problem is that energy can only carry a film so far.
At 102 minutes, Jump Scare occasionally feels as though it has run out of ideas before it has run out of runtime. The same jokes, stylistic flourishes and conversations can begin to repeat themselves, while the middle section lacks some of the momentum generated by the film’s opening.
There are moments when you can almost see the more tightly edited version of Jump Scare hiding inside the finished film.
And that’s frustrating because there is so much here to admire.
Hobbie clearly has an eye.
There are sequences that burst with invention, and the film’s visual confidence is remarkable for a feature debut. It understands that horror doesn’t always need to be dark, grim or self-serious. Sometimes it can be loud, colourful, stupid, funny and covered in blood.
In that sense, Jump Scare feels like something of a corrective to the more restrained tendencies of contemporary horror.
It wants to have fun.
Even when that fun becomes excessive.
The film also gets something right about its metal-band protagonists. Their world isn’t simply used as an excuse for a soundtrack. Music is woven into the film’s identity, with the aesthetic of heavy metal becoming part of its visual and comic language.
The result is less Texas Chain Saw filtered through a conventional horror-comedy structure than Texas Chain Saw dropped into a particularly unhinged music video.
And then somebody added puppets.
And animation.
And considerably more blood.
For all its rough edges, there is something admirable about a filmmaker arriving with this much personality. Jump Scare isn’t afraid to be ugly, ridiculous or excessive. It isn’t interested in sanding down its eccentricities in the pursuit of conventional genre polish.
Sometimes that works beautifully.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
But I’d take an occasionally overstuffed film with this much personality over something technically accomplished and completely anonymous.
Jump Scare doesn’t reinvent the cabin-in-the-woods horror movie.
It throws the old model into a blender, adds a metal soundtrack, pours in a bucket of fake blood and hits the switch.
The result is messy.
Loud.
Occasionally exhausting.
But undeniably alive.
SUFF #20
Jump Scare screens at 9:45pm on Friday 11 September in Cinema 2, with a second screening at 8:00pm on Saturday 12 September in Cinema 4, as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20 at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There are few things more immediately relatable than stepping on a rusty nail.
The sudden stab of pain. The instinctive inspection of the offending piece of metal. The brief mental calculation of just how bad this might be.
Then there is Carroll.
When Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm introduces its protagonist, he is already a man seemingly determined to make his own life as unpleasant as possible. A sexually frustrated hammer salesman, conspiracy-minded malcontent and habitual misanthrope, Carroll has developed an elaborate worldview in which the world is broken, society is collapsing and everyone else seems to be conspiring against him.
Then he steps on a rusty nail.
It is, perhaps, the least surprising turning point in cinema history.
What follows is a grimy, grotesque and frequently darkly funny descent into paranoia, physical deterioration and self-destruction. Carroll’s body begins to break down, but so too does his already precarious grip on reality. The question becomes increasingly difficult to answer: is the world genuinely falling apart around him, or is Carroll simply becoming incapable of seeing anything beyond his own increasingly distorted perspective?
Bagworm is at its most effective when it refuses to provide an easy answer.
There is certainly a straightforward body-horror film lurking underneath all the grime. The rusty nail becomes the gateway to an infection that gradually consumes Carroll, providing Bernsen with ample opportunities for increasingly revolting practical effects. His deteriorating body becomes a physical manifestation of the rot already present in his life.
But the film isn’t really interested in asking whether Carroll is sick.
He’s obviously sick.
The more interesting question is whether the infection is responsible for his behaviour or merely giving physical form to everything that was already there.
Carroll is not an easy protagonist to spend ninety-six minutes with. That seems entirely deliberate.
He is petty, suspicious, angry and convinced of his own righteousness. His relationships with women, friends and strangers become increasingly disastrous, yet he repeatedly interprets the resulting hostility as evidence that there is something wrong with everyone else.
It is a particularly contemporary form of horror.
The world hasn’t necessarily turned against Carroll.
Carroll has simply constructed a worldview in which it must have.
This is where Bagworm finds its sharpest satirical edge. Its protagonist’s paranoia and resentment place him within the orbit of the modern manosphere, where personal failure can be transformed into political grievance and loneliness becomes evidence of a conspiracy rather than an invitation to self-reflection. Critics have similarly read the film as an exploration of toxic masculinity, male isolation and the tendency to externalise personal misery.
Bernsen’s achievement is that he doesn’t make this entirely miserable to watch.
Bagworm is often very funny.
Not necessarily comfortable funny, and certainly not always “laugh with the character” funny. Much of the humour comes from watching Carroll’s increasingly bizarre attempts to navigate ordinary social situations while apparently possessing no ability to recognise how thoroughly he is sabotaging himself.
The comedy works because there is something painfully recognisable beneath the grotesquerie.
We’ve all encountered some version of Carroll.
Perhaps not quite this version.
Hopefully.
Peter Falls gives the film an important centre of gravity. Carroll is repellent without becoming entirely abstract. There are flashes of vulnerability beneath the hostility, moments where the character seems less like a cartoon of internet-age masculinity and more like a desperately unhappy man who has spent so long blaming everyone else that he no longer knows how to examine himself.
That distinction matters.
Because Bagworm isn’t particularly interested in redemption.
It isn’t a story about a troubled man discovering the error of his ways and becoming a better person. Instead, it watches him continue digging, apparently oblivious to the fact that he is holding the shovel.
And then it makes the shovel increasingly disgusting.
The physical deterioration is where Bernsen’s filmmaking becomes particularly effective. The film’s grubby aesthetic gives the horror a distinctly tactile quality, while Carroll’s deteriorating body increasingly resembles the physical embodiment of his internal state. The world around him feels just as diseased as he is.
His house is decaying.
His relationships are decaying.
His body is decaying.
And somehow Carroll remains convinced that the problem is everybody else.
That is the joke.
And the tragedy.
Bagworm isn’t always as controlled as its best moments suggest. Its deliberately abrasive tone can become exhausting, and its third act doesn’t quite sustain the same combination of psychological unease and dark comedy that makes the earlier sections so compelling. Even critics who responded strongly to the film have noted that its various stylistic and thematic ambitions don’t always land with equal force.
But there is something admirable about the sheer unpleasantness of it.
Bernsen isn’t attempting to make Carroll conventionally sympathetic. Instead, he asks us to look at a particularly ugly form of contemporary loneliness and watch what happens when isolation, resentment and paranoia are allowed to feed one another.
The result is body horror with a distinctly social infection.
The rusty nail gets into Carroll’s foot.
The paranoia gets into his head.
And before long, it becomes difficult to tell where the disease ends and the man begins.
That is what makes Bagworm considerably more than another gross-out horror film.
It is a portrait of a man rotting from the inside out — and a world that may not be quite as responsible for the smell as he thinks.
SUFF #20
Bagworm screens as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20, celebrating the festival’s 20th anniversary at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There are few expressions more insidious than “the daily grind.”
It suggests something mundane. Something repetitive. A little unpleasant, perhaps, but ultimately survivable. Get up. Go to work. Put in the hours. Do it again tomorrow.
In Species, the daily grind becomes something considerably more literal.
Marion Le Corroller’s electrifying debut takes the familiar anxieties of professional burnout and pushes them through the meat grinder of body horror, imagining a generation so thoroughly consumed by work that exhaustion becomes a physical transformation.
Margot wants to be a doctor.
For an ambitious young intern working in one of France’s most competitive emergency rooms, however, the dream is rapidly becoming a nightmare. The pressure is relentless, the hours punishing and the stream of young patients arriving with mysterious symptoms linked to extreme burnout is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Then Margot begins experiencing changes of her own.
The harder she works, the more her body begins to betray her.
It is an appropriately grotesque premise for a film about workplace exhaustion. Rather than depicting burnout as a vague psychological malaise, Species gives it flesh, blood and plenty of opportunities for it to tear itself apart.
Le Corroller is clearly interested in the traditions of body horror, but Species isn’t simply an exercise in mutation for mutation’s sake. The transformations are an extension of the film’s social commentary. Margot’s body becomes the ultimate workplace casualty — an organism pushed beyond its limits by a system that expects productivity regardless of the consequences.
The horror is that nobody seems particularly surprised.
There is something darkly comic in the way Species treats this environment. The absurdity of professional expectations gradually becomes indistinguishable from the grotesque. The emergency room is already a pressure cooker before Margot’s physical transformation begins, and the film finds humour in the bureaucratic machinery surrounding people who are quite literally falling apart.
It is social satire with a viscous coating.
Le Corroller also demonstrates a clear affection for practical effects. When Species gets its hands dirty, it doesn’t hold back. Flesh stretches, ruptures and mutates with the kind of tactile unpleasantness that reminds us why practical body horror remains so effective. There is an immediacy to seeing physical matter behave in ways it absolutely shouldn’t.
The influence of contemporary French body horror is certainly apparent. There are echoes of Titane in its collision of identity, flesh and societal expectation, while the workplace anxieties inevitably invite comparison with The Substance. Yet Species is less interested in abstraction than in taking a very recognisable contemporary problem — exhaustion — and asking what it might look like if we could actually see it happening to the human body.
The answer is not pretty.
Nor is it subtle.
But subtlety isn’t necessarily the point.
Species operates at the intersection of visceral horror and social satire, and its best moments understand that the two can amplify one another. The more grotesque Margot’s transformation becomes, the more ridiculous the expectations placed upon her begin to seem.
The film’s central conceit also taps into something particularly recognisable about contemporary working life: the idea that exhaustion is not necessarily regarded as a warning sign, but as evidence of commitment.
You’re tired?
Work harder.
You’re struggling?
Push through.
Your body is changing?
There are patients waiting.
It is here that Species finds its most uncomfortable joke. The system doesn’t necessarily need to destroy you deliberately. It simply needs to keep demanding more until there is nothing left to give.
And Margot is very much a product of that system.
Le Corroller’s direction is energetic and visually confident, particularly for a debut feature. There is an infectious willingness to push the material into increasingly strange territory, and the film’s mixture of blood-soaked practical effects, absurd humour and social commentary gives it an identity of its own.
At times, however, Species can feel as though it is operating at maximum intensity when a little restraint might have made its sharper ideas hit harder. Its satirical targets are rarely difficult to identify, and the film occasionally favours escalation over deeper exploration.
But there is something refreshing about a debut that would rather overreach than play it safe.
And Species certainly overreaches.
Thankfully, it does so with enthusiasm.
The result is an exhilarating piece of contemporary body horror that understands the grotesque potential of modern working life. Its monsters aren’t simply lurking in the shadows. They are sitting in fluorescent-lit offices, hospital corridors and examination rooms, smiling politely while asking you to work another shift.
Because that’s the real horror of the daily grind.
Eventually, something has to give.
In Species, it’s the flesh.
SUFF #20
Species screens Friday 11 September at 9:45pm in Cinema 1 as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There is something inherently unsettling about a dream.
Not necessarily because of what happens within it, but because of the strange rules governing the experience. Familiar places become alien. People we know acquire unfamiliar faces. Memories surface without invitation. Cause and effect become slippery. And beneath it all is the uncomfortable knowledge that the nightmare is coming from somewhere inside us.
Lucid, the surreal art-punk horror film from Canadian filmmakers Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall, takes that premise and runs headlong into the subconscious.
Set in the 1990s, the film follows Mia Sunshine Jones (Caitlin Acken Taylor), an art student whose creative ambitions are beginning to collapse beneath the weight of a seemingly insurmountable block. With her place at art school under threat, Mia turns to a mysterious lucid-dreaming elixir in the hope that she can unlock the creativity she feels slipping away.
Instead, she opens a door that perhaps should have remained closed.
The resulting descent into dreams, memories and increasingly monstrous manifestations makes Lucid less interested in conventional nightmare mechanics than in the uncomfortable connection between creation and self-examination.
For Mia, the problem isn’t simply that she can’t make art.
It is that she may not yet understand what she is trying to express.
Milligan and Fendall approach this psychological territory with an appropriately handmade aesthetic. Shot on 35mm and Super 8, Lucid has a tactile quality that distinguishes it from the increasingly polished digital language of contemporary genre cinema. The imagery feels deliberately unstable, as though the film itself is slipping between waking reality and the fragmented visual language of a dream.
That is where Lucid becomes most compelling.
Rather than treating lucid dreaming as a convenient supernatural gimmick, the film uses it as a mechanism for peeling away the layers Mia has constructed around herself. The deeper she travels into this increasingly fractured reality, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between imagination, memory and emotional trauma.
The monsters, consequently, are more than things to be feared.
They are things to be confronted.
One of the film’s most striking ideas is that artistic expression cannot necessarily be separated from the experiences that produce it. Creativity may be liberating, but it can also be invasive. To create something genuinely personal may require confronting the parts of yourself that you would rather leave buried.
That makes Lucid an interesting companion piece to some of the more traditional forms of body and psychological horror appearing at SUFF this year. Where films such as Bagworm externalise transformation through the physical body, Lucid turns inward. Its battleground is the imagination itself.
And imagination proves to be a particularly dangerous place.
There is an undeniable influence of 1990s alternative and underground culture running through the film, but Lucid isn’t simply nostalgic window dressing. Its period setting becomes part of the film’s identity: a world of handmade art, subcultures and analogue imagery that feels particularly appropriate for a story about an artist struggling to discover her own voice. The filmmakers’ use of 35mm and Super 8 reinforces that connection, giving the film an aesthetic that feels deliberately tactile and imperfect.
It is also a film willing to take risks.
At times, those risks work against it. Lucid isn’t particularly interested in holding the audience’s hand, and its narrative can become as fragmented as the dreamscape through which Mia is travelling. There are moments when the symbolism threatens to overwhelm the story itself.
But that is also part of the film’s appeal.
Lucid isn’t particularly interested in behaving itself.
It wants to be strange.
It wants to be messy.
It wants to crawl inside the head of its protagonist and rummage around in the places where memory, fear and creativity become indistinguishable.
And for a film about an artist desperately searching for inspiration, there is something wonderfully appropriate about that approach.
The result is an ambitious piece of independent horror that feels less concerned with delivering a neatly constructed nightmare than with asking what happens when we deliberately surrender control of our own minds.
Sometimes the things we discover there are frightening.
Sometimes they’re grotesque.
And sometimes they are the very things we need to confront before we can create anything worth showing the world.
Lucid may occasionally lose its way inside its own dreamscape, but its willingness to embrace uncertainty is precisely what makes it such an intriguing piece of underground cinema.
SUFF #20
Lucid screens Friday 11 September at 7:45pm in Cinema 3 as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There is a peculiar pleasure in watching a cinematic disaster being taken seriously. Not excused, exactly, but examined with enough curiosity to discover what might have been buried beneath the wreckage.
Few films arrive with quite the baggage of Exorcist II: The Heretic. John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist has spent decades occupying that strange territory reserved for movies that are discussed almost as much for their failure as for their contents. A notorious sequel. A critical punching bag. A cinematic oddity. A film so frequently invoked as an example of Hollywood hubris that its actual ambitions can become almost incidental.
David Kittredge’s Boorman and the Devil is interested in those ambitions.
Rather than constructing another gleeful autopsy of one of cinema’s most infamous misfires, Kittredge approaches The Heretic with something considerably more valuable: curiosity. The result is a documentary about a much-maligned horror sequel that gradually reveals itself to be less interested in proving that everyone was wrong than in asking why anyone would attempt something so strange in the first place.
On paper, the sequel looked almost impossibly well positioned. Boorman arrived having already established himself as a filmmaker of considerable ambition, while The Exorcist had become a cultural phenomenon. Yet instead of attempting to reproduce Friedkin’s approach, Boorman took the material somewhere considerably more abstract.
And that, perhaps, was the original sin.
The Exorcist II: The Heretic isn’t particularly interested in being The Exorcist II in the conventional sense. It is stranger, more metaphysical and more concerned with ideas than the straightforward continuation audiences might reasonably have expected. The result is a film that can feel less like a conventional horror sequel than a fever dream constructed from fragments of mythology, psychology and spiritual inquiry.
Kittredge understands that contradiction is precisely where the story becomes interesting.
The documentary’s greatest strength is its refusal to reduce The Heretic to either of the two easiest interpretations: misunderstood masterpiece or unmitigated disaster. Instead, Boorman and the Devil allows both possibilities to coexist.
There is plenty here to remind us why the film was so violently rejected. The production was troubled, the tonal shifts were substantial and the distance between what audiences expected and what Boorman attempted was enormous. Yet alongside those failures sits an extraordinary amount of artistic ambition.
That ambition is what Kittredge wants us to reconsider.
The documentary benefits enormously from access to Boorman himself. His presence gives the film an immediacy that no amount of archival reconstruction could quite replicate. Alongside him are recollections from Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, while contemporary filmmakers including Mike Flanagan and Karyn Kusama offer their own perspectives on the film’s peculiar legacy.
What emerges is less a conventional making-of documentary than a meditation on artistic risk.
That distinction matters.
There is something increasingly unusual about the idea of a major studio giving an established filmmaker the resources to make something genuinely eccentric. Contemporary filmmaking is hardly devoid of experimentation, but the scale at which The Heretic was allowed to pursue its particular vision feels increasingly alien.
Kittredge consequently finds something unexpectedly contemporary in a film that was once dismissed as an embarrassing relic.
Boorman and the Devil asks us to consider whether failure itself has become too threatening to contemporary filmmaking. A film that takes no risks can be competent, polished and entirely forgettable. A film that takes enormous risks can collapse spectacularly — but it can also produce images, ideas and artistic possibilities that would never have existed had everyone involved simply played it safe.
That makes The Heretic a fascinating subject not merely because it failed, but because it failed while attempting something.
And there is a difference.
Kittredge’s documentary is at its most compelling when it recognises that the history of cinema is littered with films whose reputations have changed because the cultural conversation around them changed. Sometimes reassessment reveals a genuine masterpiece. Sometimes it merely makes a fascinating failure more fascinating.
Boorman and the Devil doesn’t necessarily need to convince you that The Exorcist II: The Heretic is secretly a great film.
It only needs to make you curious enough to watch it again.
That is a considerably more interesting proposition.
For horror audiences, there is another reason the documentary resonates. Genre cinema has always been particularly susceptible to critical dismissal when it refuses to behave according to expectation. The horror sequel is expected to deliver familiar pleasures with familiar machinery. Boorman instead delivered something dreamlike, philosophical and formally eccentric.
The question isn’t whether that decision worked.
The question is whether we still value filmmakers enough to allow them to make that decision.
In an era increasingly dominated by intellectual property, established formulas and the gravitational pull of audience expectation, Boorman and the Devil becomes an accidental argument for artistic recklessness. Not recklessness without consequence, but the kind that accepts that failure is occasionally the admission price for originality.
There is something rather fitting about a documentary examining one of Hollywood’s great cinematic disasters arriving at that conclusion.
Perhaps The Heretic wasn’t a failure because John Boorman reached too far.
Perhaps its real failure was that audiences weren’t prepared for where he reached.
Boorman and the Devil doesn’t erase the film’s flaws, nor should it. Instead, it digs through the wreckage and finds something considerably more valuable than a verdict: the evidence of ambition.
And sometimes that is enough reason to look again.
SUFF #20
Boorman and the Devil screens Friday 11 September at 7:45pm as part of the 20th Sydney Underground Film Festival at Factory Theatre.
Sleep is supposed to be the great surrender. We close our eyes, relinquish control and allow consciousness to dissolve into whatever strange machinery waits on the other side. Horror has long understood the vulnerability of that state, from the nightmare logic of A Nightmare on Elm Street to the psychological labyrinths of contemporary supernatural cinema. Parasomnia takes that familiar anxiety and gives it a promising contemporary framework: what happens when the thing haunting your dreams stops respecting the border between sleep and waking life?
Directed by James Ross II, the Shudder Original places Jasmine Mathews’ Riley at the centre of a story shaped by night terrors, unresolved trauma and disappearance. When her best friend becomes the latest person to vanish, Riley begins to suspect that the demonic presence stalking her dreams may have found a way into the waking world. It is an immediately attractive premise, one that offers the possibility of psychological horror, supernatural mystery and nightmare imagery existing simultaneously, with Riley’s own fractured perception leaving us uncertain about where one state ends and another begins.
Unfortunately, Parasomnia never quite manages to turn that intriguing foundation into the film it initially promises to be.
There is plenty here to admire. The central concept has genuine potential, particularly in the way it connects Riley’s trauma with the supernatural threat. Rather than simply introducing a demon and allowing it to run amok, the film attempts to make the creature part of a larger psychological landscape. Riley’s night terrors are not merely convenient vehicles for scares; they are connected to grief, memory and the unresolved events that have shaped her life. That gives the supernatural elements an emotional foundation, even if the eventual story struggles to build upon it.
Jasmine Mathews is particularly strong in the lead. Riley could easily have become a conventional horror protagonist — traumatised, frightened and increasingly convinced that nobody believes her — but Mathews gives the character a more complicated interior life. There is a convincing fragility to her performance, but also a determination that prevents Riley from becoming passive. She carries the film through some of its weaker narrative stretches, grounding the more fantastical material in recognisable human emotion.
That becomes increasingly important as the storyline begins to show its limitations.
The problem with a horror film built around dreams is that the possibilities are virtually limitless. Once the audience understands that reality itself may be unreliable, the filmmaker has access to a wonderfully unstable cinematic space. A bedroom can become a trap. A familiar face can become threatening. A mundane location can suddenly acquire the logic of a nightmare. The rules of reality can be stretched, distorted or discarded entirely.
Parasomnia occasionally understands this, but too often it seems reluctant to fully embrace the possibilities of its own premise.
The film’s strongest moments are those in which uncertainty takes precedence over explanation. When Riley is caught between sleep and waking, the question isn’t necessarily whether what she is experiencing is real, but whether reality still provides a useful distinction. Those sequences possess an unnerving ambiguity, allowing the horror to operate somewhere between psychological breakdown and supernatural intrusion.
Yet the more the film attempts to explain its mythology, the less compelling that ambiguity becomes.
This is a recurring problem with supernatural horror. The unknown is often considerably more frightening than the known, particularly when the unknown exists inside something as personal and uncontrollable as a nightmare. Once the film begins establishing the mechanics behind its demonic presence, some of the mystery starts to evaporate. The audience is no longer trapped inside Riley’s uncertainty; we are increasingly being given the answers.
And unfortunately, those answers aren’t always particularly satisfying.
The storyline feels serviceable rather than revelatory. There are ideas here that could have produced something considerably more psychologically intricate, particularly around trauma and the persistence of grief, but the screenplay frequently settles for conventional supernatural-horror machinery. Characters move towards revelations because the narrative requires them to, discoveries arrive with an increasingly familiar rhythm and the mystery ultimately feels less substantial than the concept that initially introduced it.
This is where Parasomnia becomes frustrating rather than outright disappointing.
Because there is clearly a better film lurking inside it.
The concept is strong. The performances are strong. The atmosphere is often effective. There are moments where the film creates precisely the kind of disorientation it needs, leaving Riley — and the audience — uncertain about whether they are experiencing a nightmare or something considerably more tangible.
But those ingredients don’t quite coalesce into a satisfying whole.
The supernatural entity itself is another example of this imbalance. As an idea, a demonic figure capable of moving between dreams and reality is an excellent horror proposition. It weaponises one of humanity’s most universal vulnerabilities: sleep. There is something deeply unsettling about the possibility that closing your eyes doesn’t protect you from the monster, but actually gives it access to you.
Yet the creature ultimately feels more effective as an idea than as a fully realised antagonist.
The film is strongest when the demon remains at the periphery of Riley’s experience, when its presence is suggested through fragments and disturbances rather than presented as something that needs to be completely understood. Once it becomes a more conventional supernatural threat, Parasomnia loses some of the psychological unease that made its premise so attractive.
There is also a noticeable tension between the film’s ambitions and its storytelling. It wants to explore trauma, grief, friendship and the lingering consequences of tragedy while simultaneously delivering supernatural thrills. Those elements are not incompatible — horror has been doing exactly that for decades — but they require a narrative capable of allowing the emotional and genre components to reinforce one another.
Here, they sometimes feel like separate tracks running alongside each other.
Riley’s emotional history gives the horror meaning, but the horror doesn’t always deepen our understanding of Riley.
That distinction matters.
The best psychological horror makes the monster inseparable from the character confronting it. The supernatural threat becomes an external expression of something internal, allowing every encounter with the creature to reveal something about the protagonist. Parasomnia gestures towards that territory without quite committing to it.
As a result, the film’s emotional material can feel somewhat underdeveloped just when it should be reaching its greatest intensity.
That is particularly evident in the final act.
Without venturing into spoilers, the conclusion struggles to deliver the catharsis that the preceding story seems to be building towards. The film has established a compelling relationship between Riley’s trauma and the supernatural threat, but the eventual resolution doesn’t quite capitalise on that connection. Instead of transforming the earlier ideas into something thematically resonant, the ending largely feels like the narrative arriving at its required destination.
It isn’t disastrous.
It simply isn’t enough.
And that distinction is important because Parasomnia is never a bad film. It is an intermittently effective one that repeatedly demonstrates what it could have been. There are enough strong ideas and performances here to make the experience worthwhile, but also enough conventional storytelling to prevent it from becoming the psychologically disquieting nightmare its premise suggests.
Mathews remains the film’s greatest asset. Her performance gives Riley emotional credibility even when the screenplay becomes predictable, and she brings enough vulnerability and resolve to make the character worth following. The supporting performances similarly help maintain the film’s human dimension, preventing the supernatural material from becoming entirely detached from the people experiencing it.
Ultimately, however, Parasomnia is caught between two versions of itself.
One is a strange, unsettling psychological horror about trauma invading dreams and nightmares crossing into reality. That film is genuinely intriguing. It understands that the most frightening aspect of sleep is not necessarily what we dream about, but the surrender of control that makes dreaming possible in the first place.
The other is a more conventional supernatural thriller that needs to explain its mythology, organise its scares and eventually provide answers.
The first film is considerably more interesting than the second.
When Parasomnia embraces uncertainty, it works. When it allows Riley’s perception to become unstable and makes us question whether the nightmare has crossed over or whether Riley is simply losing her grip on reality, the film finds its unsettling centre. But whenever it retreats into familiar supernatural storytelling, the tension dissipates.
There is a good horror movie buried somewhere within Parasomnia. At times, you can almost see it clawing its way to the surface.
What ultimately holds it back is not a lack of ideas, atmosphere or talent. It is that the story doesn’t quite know what to do with all three.
The Prognosis:
Parasomnia is a film with a genuinely strong horror concept and committed performances, particularly from Jasmine Mathews, but its mediocre storyline prevents the material from reaching its full potential. It is worth entering the nightmare for the atmosphere and ideas; just don’t expect the waking world to provide quite the payoff you’re hoping for.
There are Australian films that attempt to explain Australia. There are Australian films that attempt to romanticise it. Then there is Dead-End Drive-In, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s magnificent, deranged vision of a country that has looked at its own future, shrugged, and decided the best thing to do is throw everyone into a drive-in, feed them cheeseburgers, give them drugs and make sure they never leave.
Forty years on, Dead-End Drive-In remains one of the strangest and most exhilarating films to emerge from the great Australian exploitation boom. Released in 1986, it is ostensibly a dystopian science-fiction thriller, but that description hardly begins to contain the thing. It is a car movie, a punk movie, a prison movie, a satire of consumer culture, a portrait of youth alienation, a social nightmare and, inevitably for a Brian Trenchard-Smith film, an excuse to launch increasingly large pieces of machinery through the air.
It is also one of those rare films that becomes more interesting the more seriously you take it.
Because beneath the outrageous costumes, the spectacular stunt work, the burnt-out cars and the general sensation that someone has spiked the national cinema with amphetamines, Dead-End Drive-In is asking an unnervingly serious question: what happens when a society decides that its unwanted people are easier to contain than to help?
The answer, according to Trenchard-Smith, is apparently to build a prison that looks exactly like a Saturday night at the movies.
THE MAN WHO NEVER KNEW HOW TO BEHAVE
To understand Dead-End Drive-In, you have to understand Brian Trenchard-Smith. Not because the film is some carefully controlled expression of auteurist intent, but because his career represents almost the exact opposite of the respectable model of Australian filmmaking. Trenchard-Smith has always seemed happiest when genre conventions are being thrown into the air and collided together at considerable velocity.
He could make martial-arts exploitation, horror, science fiction, children’s adventure, action cinema and television, often with the same gleeful disregard for the boundaries separating them. The Man from Hong Kong, Turkey Shoot, BMX Bandits and Dead-End Drive-In may appear to belong to entirely different cinematic universes, yet they share an unmistakable physicality. Trenchard-Smith likes movement. He likes spectacle. He likes bodies being thrown around spaces. He likes machinery being pushed beyond its sensible limits. Most importantly, he understands that exploitation cinema does not have to choose between being entertaining and being about something.
Dead-End Drive-In might be the clearest expression of that philosophy.
It is ridiculous, but it is not stupid. It is politically charged without ever becoming a lecture. It is visually extravagant despite its relatively modest resources. It is adolescent, lurid and occasionally uncomfortable, but beneath all that noise is a remarkably clear understanding of the social anxieties of the Australia that produced it.
Trenchard-Smith simply refuses to deliver those ideas politely.
He gives them a chainsaw.
WELCOME TO THE STAR
The premise is brutally simple. Jimmy “Crabs” Rossini and his girlfriend Carmen arrive at the Star Drive-In after suffering car trouble. They expect an evening at the movies. Instead, they discover that the drive-in has effectively become a detention centre for unemployed and socially unwanted young people.
The government does not need to execute them. It does not even need to rehabilitate them. It simply needs to remove them from the functioning parts of society and make their confinement sufficiently comfortable that they stop asking questions.
The Star provides food, entertainment, drugs and companionship. It becomes a world within a world, a brightly illuminated enclosure where the inmates are encouraged to consume themselves into submission.
This is where Dead-End Drive-In becomes considerably more sophisticated than its lurid surface suggests. The prison does not look like a prison. There are no obvious dungeon walls or endless corridors of concrete. There is a snack bar. There are cars. There is music. There are movies playing on a huge screen.
The inmates are not simply denied freedom. They are given enough distractions that freedom begins to seem unnecessary.
THE PERFECT PRISON IS ONE YOU DON’T WANT TO ESCAPE
That remains the film’s most disturbing idea.
The authorities have not created a traditional authoritarian nightmare. They have created a lifestyle. The inmates are surrounded by the very things that a consumer society tells them should make them happy. Food, television, entertainment, drugs, sex and material possessions become substitutes for employment, purpose and political agency.
The genius of the Star is that it doesn’t have to convince its inhabitants that they are free. It only has to convince them that freedom is inconvenient.
Why leave when there is food?
Why work when there is television?
Why build a future when the present is entertaining?
Why protest when you can get high?
The film’s dystopia therefore operates through distraction as much as repression. The system has discovered that the easiest way to control a population is not necessarily to terrify it, but to keep it occupied.
That makes Dead-End Drive-In feel remarkably prescient. Its junk food, consumerism and endless entertainment are not simply background details. They are the architecture of the prison.
THE DRIVE-IN AS AUSTRALIA
The choice of the drive-in is particularly inspired because the drive-in was itself such a recognisable part of Australian popular culture. It was a place associated with freedom, leisure, adolescence and the ability to temporarily escape the routines of everyday life.
Trenchard-Smith takes that cultural memory and turns it inside out.
The drive-in is no longer somewhere you visit to escape society.
It is somewhere society sends you when it has decided that you are no longer useful.
That reversal gives the film’s central location a strange melancholy. The Star feels simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic, like a discarded piece of Australian culture that has been repurposed as a holding pen for the future.
The cars remain. The screen remains. The food remains. The entertainment continues.
Only the audience has become the prisoner.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE CARS
Of course, this is Brian Trenchard-Smith, so the automobile cannot merely be symbolic.
The car in Dead-End Drive-In is a status symbol, a shelter, a weapon, an object of desire and, most importantly, an expression of mobility. Yet the film takes particular pleasure in turning that symbolism against itself. Cars are everywhere, but nobody is actually going anywhere.
The inhabitants of the Star sleep in their vehicles. They decorate them. They identify with them. They use them to establish status within the enclosed society. The automobile, traditionally one of the great symbols of freedom, has become another part of the prison.
That contradiction is everywhere in the film. The people have cars but no roads to freedom. They have entertainment but no meaningful future. They have food but no purpose. They have choices, provided those choices remain within the boundaries established for them.
The whole film can almost be understood as a gigantic metaphor for having the accelerator pressed firmly against the floor while the vehicle remains stationary.
Naturally, Trenchard-Smith eventually decides that the metaphor requires an actual vehicle to fly through the air.
THE GONZO AUSTRALIA OF BRIAN TRENCHARD-SMITH
There is something gloriously Australian about the film’s refusal to be subtle. Economic collapse becomes a wasteland of burnt-out vehicles. Youth alienation becomes a sea of punk costumes and leather. Government oppression becomes an electrified fence around a drive-in. Consumerism becomes junk food and television. Social exclusion becomes a population of young people deliberately abandoned inside a recreational complex.
The apocalypse is not presented as some distant future catastrophe.
It is the present turned up to eleven.
This is one of Trenchard-Smith’s great gifts. He understands that exploitation cinema can exaggerate reality until the exaggeration becomes a form of truth. Dead-End Drive-In does not seriously attempt to predict what Australia will look like. Instead, it takes the anxieties already present in Australian society and magnifies them until they become almost absurd.
The result is a kind of gonzo social realism.
Everything is too loud. Everything is too colourful. Everyone is slightly too grotesque. The cars are too damaged. The violence is too spectacular. The costumes are too outrageous.
And yet you can recognise the world underneath it.
That is where the satire bites.
A WORLD BUILT FROM JUNK
The Star itself looks as though civilisation has been put through a meat grinder and then handed over to a gang of teenagers with a spray can. Burnt-out cars, graffiti, concrete, rubbish, punk fashion and industrial decay transform the location into a junkyard version of the future.
The film’s production design is crucial because Trenchard-Smith does not need to build some enormous futuristic metropolis. He can find the apocalypse in the Australian landscape that already exists.
The apocalypse is a car park.
The apocalypse is a takeaway counter.
The apocalypse is an abandoned industrial space.
The apocalypse is a generation of young people who have been told that there is no future and have consequently stopped behaving as though one exists.
Most disturbingly, the apocalypse is brightly lit.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE POLITICS OF THE STAR
It would be easy to celebrate Dead-End Drive-In entirely on the basis of its aesthetic pleasures, but doing so would ignore some of the film’s more uncomfortable dimensions.
Its treatment of race, immigration and Australian identity deserves scrutiny. The film emerges from a period when anxieties surrounding immigration, economic decline and the changing nature of Australian society were deeply embedded in political and popular culture. Those anxieties find their way into the Star, where displaced populations are effectively contained and removed from the mainstream.
This is one of the reasons Dead-End Drive-In is more interesting than simply being an anarchic Ozploitation spectacle. The film does not merely show us a dystopian Australia. It shows us what that Australia is afraid of.
It is afraid of unemployment.
It is afraid of youth.
It is afraid of social disorder.
It is afraid of outsiders.
It is afraid of economic collapse.
It is afraid that the institutions supposedly responsible for maintaining order might themselves be incapable of solving the problems they have created.
Those fears do not necessarily make the film politically progressive. Some of its imagery remains troubling. But that does not make it irrelevant. Quite the opposite. The discomfort is part of what makes the film worth revisiting.
Dystopian cinema can reveal a culture’s anxieties as clearly as it reveals its aspirations.
JIMMY CRABS AND THE REFUSAL TO STAY PUT
Ned Manning’s Jimmy is therefore crucial because he refuses the bargain.
Everyone else has adapted to the Star. Jimmy hasn’t.
His rebellion is not particularly intellectual. He doesn’t deliver great political speeches. He simply refuses to accept that this is all there is.
That makes him strangely radical.
In a world where the system has convinced people to accept captivity as comfort, the simple desire to leave becomes an act of resistance.
Jimmy still believes that there is something beyond the fence.
That belief is the most dangerous thing about him.
CARMEN AND THE HORROR OF ADAPTATION
Natalie McCurry’s Carmen complicates the film’s simplistic notion of resistance. She begins to adapt to the Star, and that adaptation is both understandable and disturbing.
Because people do adapt.
They adapt to poverty. They adapt to confinement. They adapt to political instability. They adapt to bad conditions. They adapt because sometimes adaptation is the only available survival mechanism.
The Star does not need everyone to love it.
It simply needs people to stop imagining anything else.
Jimmy wants to escape.
Carmen learns how to survive inside.
Neither response is entirely comfortable.
THE MOVIES WITHIN THE MOVIE
The films being screened inside the Star provide another layer to Trenchard-Smith’s satire. The inmates watch exploitation movies while simultaneously living inside one.
Violence is entertainment.
Violence is fantasy.
Violence is spectacle.
Then violence spills beyond the screen.
The audience watches people watching movies, and those people are themselves watching images that reflect the world they inhabit. It creates an endless feedback loop between screen violence and social violence.
Trenchard-Smith’s answer to this complicated observation is, naturally, not to stop making violent movies.
He makes the violence bigger.
That is part of the joke.
Dead-End Drive-In is itself an exploitation movie critiquing a culture of exploitation.
It knows exactly what it is doing.
THE TRUCK JUMP
Eventually, all of this social commentary has to give way to the inevitable.
The truck jumps.
The climactic stunt remains one of the film’s great moments because it encapsulates Trenchard-Smith’s entire filmmaking philosophy. The film has spent all this time talking about captivity, consumerism, social control and the collapse of Australian society, and then suddenly a vehicle is flying through the air.
There is something almost philosophically perfect about that.
The truck is not merely escaping the Star.
It is escaping the limitations of the film itself.
After all the political anxiety, the satire and the symbolism, Trenchard-Smith simply says: enough.
Make it bigger.
Make it faster.
Make it fly.
That is not a failure of seriousness.
It is Trenchard-Smith’s definition of seriousness.
OZPLOITATION WITH A BRAIN
This is perhaps the mistake people make when discussing Australian exploitation cinema. They assume a film must either be trash or a masterpiece.
Dead-End Drive-In is both.
It is trashy.
It is intelligent.
It is adolescent.
It is politically loaded.
It is visually sophisticated.
It is exploitative.
It is genuinely interested in Australian society.
The contradiction is precisely what makes it work.
Trenchard-Smith understands that audiences might come for the cars, the punk costumes, the violence and the dystopian spectacle. So he gives them all of it.
Then he hides the political argument inside the popcorn.
A FILM THAT ARRIVED TOO EARLY
Perhaps Dead-End Drive-In was simply released at the wrong moment.
Australian audiences were still being encouraged to think of Australian genre cinema as something inferior to Hollywood. A film this strange, this aggressively Australian and this unwilling to behave itself was never going to fit comfortably into the mainstream.
Its initial commercial failure is therefore one of cinema’s more satisfying ironies.
The film depicts a society that has failed to recognise the value of its own discarded population.
Australian cinema subsequently spent years doing something similar to Dead-End Drive-In itself.
It was sitting there.
Covered in graffiti.
Surrounded by wrecked cars.
Waiting for someone to realise what they were looking at.
Eventually, the audience arrived.
THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN ANARCHIST
Forty years later, perhaps the best way to celebrate Dead-End Drive-In is not to pretend that it is perfect.
It isn’t.
Some of its politics are uncomfortable. Some of its ideas are more fully developed than others. Its aesthetic is unmistakably tied to the decade that produced it.
But perfection would almost miss the point.
Brian Trenchard-Smith has never been a filmmaker of polite surfaces. His cinema is physical. It is interested in impact, movement and spectacle. The machinery matters. The bodies matter. The stunt matters.
His films want you to feel the physicality of cinema.
The car hits the barrier.
The engine screams.
The body flies.
The gate electrifies.
The world collapses.
And Dead-End Drive-In might be his purest expression of that sensibility.
It is a dystopian science-fiction film, a punk film, a car movie, a prison movie, a social satire, a romance, an exploitation picture and an Australian nightmare.
And somehow, against all reason, it is also enormous fun.
THE PRICE OF ADMISSION
The title is perfect.
Dead-End Drive-In is not merely a description of the place in which Jimmy finds himself trapped. It is a description of the society surrounding him.
Everyone has arrived at the end of the road.
There is no future.
So consume.
There is no meaningful employment.
So entertain yourself.
There is no escape.
So decorate the prison.
There is no hope.
So turn the music up.
And if anyone complains, give them another cheeseburger.
That is the genius of Trenchard-Smith’s dystopia. It is not controlled by some grand totalitarian mastermind. It is maintained by administrative indifference and the quiet acceptance of everyone who has decided that resistance is too much trouble.
The system does not need to explain itself.
It simply keeps operating.
People disappear into the Star.
The movies continue playing.
The food keeps coming.
The cars keep burning.
And outside the fence, everybody else carries on.
FORTY YEARS IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR
Forty years later, Dead-End Drive-In feels less like a relic than a warning that has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
Its anxieties about unemployment, consumerism, youth alienation, social exclusion and institutional neglect remain remarkably potent. Its punk aesthetic has become retro. Its cars have become objects of affection. Its drive-in has disappeared.
Its future, meanwhile, has arrived in fragments.
Perhaps that is why the film has endured.
It never really predicted Australia.
It exaggerated Australia.
It took existing anxieties and turned the volume knob until the speakers exploded.
That is what Brian Trenchard-Smith does.
He does not whisper.
He does not gently suggest.
He kicks the door in, sets the car on fire, throws the television through the window and then asks whether you’ve noticed what is happening.
THE GATES ARE STILL CLOSED
There is a moment in Dead-End Drive-In when the absurdity finally becomes clear. The prison isn’t simply the electrified fence. It isn’t the guards. It isn’t the government. It isn’t even the Star.
The prison is the idea that there is nowhere else to go.
That is why Jimmy has to escape. Not simply because he wants freedom, but because he still believes freedom exists.
And perhaps that is the film’s most enduring act of rebellion.
In a genre packed with nihilism, Dead-End Drive-In still believes that someone can look at the wreckage and say no. No, I don’t want this. No, I don’t accept this. No, this isn’t the future.
I’m getting in the car.
I’m hitting the accelerator.
I’m going through the fence.
And if Brian Trenchard-Smith is directing, there will probably be a truck flying overhead when you do it.
That is Dead-End Drive-In at 40: a film about a country staring into the abyss and deciding to install a snack bar; a film about capitalism, captivity and consumption disguised as a car chase; a film about a generation being told that the future has already been cancelled.
And a filmmaker who responded to that bleak proposition with the only reasonable answer he could think of.
Surgeons of Horror 