Pink Flamingo Cinema: Face Melters

This October at the Pink Flamingo Cinema we're back with FACE MELTERS, four films designed to melt the face, off! Plus shorts!

Audience note: The films in this program contain strong themes of violence, at times of a sexual nature, that may be distressing for viewers.

THE BEYOND (1981)

dir. Lucio Fulci, 87 min. English language 

After Liza inherits a decrepit hotel in New Orleans and moves in to renovate and reopen it, a series of strange and deadly incidents lead her to discover that the hotel is one of the seven gates of hell that is now being opened. As chaos and destruction spread to the city, Liza and local doctor John struggle to uncover

the secrets of the ancient tomes and dark rituals that control the gate in an attempt to save the city and themselves from the forces of evil.

At once Italian horror legend Lucio Fulci’s densest and yet most approachable film, THE BEYOND is fever dream film-making of the highest magnitude. Plotting and structure are put to the side in favour of scene construction that is as high macabre and richly disgusting as it can be, supported by gorgeous low light photography and a bombastic score that ratchet the horror on screen up to the breaking point. Fulci makes you wait for the gore you want and then lets you have it until you feel bad for having wanted it in the first place.

THE BOXER’S OMEN (1983)

dir. Keu Chih-Hung, 105 min, Cantonese language w/English subs

Witnessing his brother being crippled in the ring by a cheating opponent, boxer Chan Hung goes to Thailand to seek his revenge. While there he joins a Buddhist monastery to train himself in to peak physical conditions so that he can defeat both his brother’s opponent and a group of black magicians using dark sorcery to seek immortality by harnessing the powers of demons. Adrift in a sea of blood feuds and ancient curses, Hung fights to stay alive and in control of himself as he pushes towards revenge and magical salvation.

One of the most startling and surreal films ever made by venerated Honk Kong studio Shaw Brothers, this film is a spiralling descent in to madness and effects driven sequences that will dazzle and delight in equal measure. The Hong Kong wuxia style martial sensibilities of the film combine exquisitely with the effects driven horror sequences, and everything eventually becomes so awash in colour and fluidity that all you can do is hold on and let the surrealism hit you in the face. A must watch for fans of Hot and Sweaty favourite MYSTICS IN BALI.

SWEET HOME (1989)

dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 103 min. Japanese language w/English subs

A straightforward haunted house movie that turns into depraved soup from one of the greatest directors of all time, SWEET HOME is infamously the inspiration for the Resident Evil games and a triumph of imaginative gore. A television crew are filming a documentary at the mansion of deceased painter Mamiya Ichiro, and naturally encounter all manner of melty ghouls in the process.

This early Kurosawa doesn’t have the restraint of his later masterpieces like Cure and Bright Future but fully demonstrates the wicked genius and cruelty that would come to define his work. Silly, excessive and featuring some genuinely inspired FX from the late great Dick Smith, Sweet Home is a delightful ghost-train ride of a movie.

DANDY DUST (1998)

dir. A. Hans Sheirl, 94 min. English language

DANDY DUST is a disorienting and overwhelming (positive) filmic experience that feels like a transmission from the future-past. Dust, a gender-hybrid cyborg with fragmented memories, travels from a world of permanent warfare to the Planet of Blood and Swelling, producing entities like Spidercuntboy and his/her own parents along the way.

The term “fever dream” is tossed around all-too casually but this movie does indeed access the limbic and ineffable in a uniquely German art school way. Mayhem and gender psychosis through a psychedelic lens, audience note: drill dick.