Gulp - Watch - DVDs, Movies, TV Shows
WATCH is ThreeThousand's guide to movies in Melbourne. While we focus on art-house and independent releases, we never shun our secret pop-culture pleasures. WATCH also has its fingers on the pulse of film-festivals and specially programmed events and we give tickets away every week. We have also been known to organise special preview screenings, which we always chicken out of introducing on the microphone before the previews start playing.
Noise in My Head presents 'Suspiria'
I haven't seen this film because if I had I would tell you NOT to watch it. It's just too damn scary. People say it has the most horrific murder scene ever and its soundtrack is by a band named Goblin. Seriously.
I don't care if it was voted as one of the top 100 films of all time, or that the feature song has been sampled by Ghostface Killah, or that it was voted by Rolling Stone as one of the best musical releases of ‘77-‘79.
The Wolfman
This year, Valentine's Day falls on a new moon. But you'd still better watch out for the signs you may be dating a werewolf. Has your Valentine ever been into ripping villagers to shreds? Does he or she do a really good Chewbacca impression? If you look up a book called Lycanthropy and flip to chapter two, "Ancient Gypsy Lore", do you see a woodcut of your Valentine with a furry head and no pants?
The Wolfman is Universal's homage to its own classic 1941 monster flick.
Precious
Watching Precious is emotionally gruelling. This isn't a date movie or a Friday-night escapist flick. But it does that rare thing: introducing a character whose journey is hard but whose victories are small. Director Lee Daniels finds a compelling poetry in hyperrealistic close-ups, jump-cuts and R&B musical montages, although I was unimpressed by the heavy-handed fantasy sequences.
The Road
What foolio made that absurd, misleading trailer? The Road is no action-packed post-apocalyptic thriller. Readers of Cormac McCarthy's novel will be familiar with its episodic, elegiac and even allegorical tone, which John Hillcoat (The Proposition) has beautifully captured. I feel strongly that people who've read The Road will have a very different (but no less powerful) cinematic experience to those who haven't.
Paranormal Activity
Back in 1999, The Blair Witch Project was unleashed on what now seems a touchingly innocent public. Ten cynical years later, Big Brother has ground away the novelty of watching lo-res, observational footage of smart-arses. And studio pictures come pre-packaged with online viral campaigns. Now everyone's going bananas over microbudget horror flick Paranormal Activity as if those 10 years didn't happen.
Sauna
Packed with symbolism and almost unbearable tension, this Finnish horror film doesn't confuse atonement with redemption. In 1595, after a 25-year war between Russia and Sweden, two brothers, veteran soldier Eerik (Ville Virtanen) and sheltered geography professor Knut (Tommi Eronen), join a border delegation sent to divide Finland between the two nations.
Hello Darkness Horror Film Festival
It's scary even writing this. I hate horror. Or that's what I tell myself right up to the moment when I'm there in the cinema subjecting myself to it, sweating nervously and wondering if any of this stuff being brutally embedded into my unconscious will one day manifest itself in a way that will get me locked up forever and then people will say, 'Gee.
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