Favorite films

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1985

★★ Watched 16 May 2025

Given all the talent involved on both sides of the camera, this is disappointingly (even frustratingly) flat. Feels like a leftover pitch for Smith and Jones’ series The Comic Strip Presents that got bloated into a feature. The premise is a clever one, but there’s not enough contrast between the alien and human characters for it to really work. 

As another oddity in the storied career of Mike Hodges, it’s worth a look, but it should have been so much sharper than what we got.

1979

★★ Rewatched 31 Jan 2025

The Italian Io, Caligola edit, this time. Closer in many ways to the recent Ultimate Cut, but far more sloppily edited.

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1987

★★★ Watched 16 Oct 2024

Two Melbourne cops (Ian Scott and writer/producer/director James Clayden), fed up with seeing criminals getting slaps on the wrist, take it upon themselves to wipe out the city’s underworld. Before long, paranoia and guilt causes the pair to turn on each other.

With Time to Kill is a very odd mix of crime thriller and experimental film. Shot on 8mm and edited on video, with the dialogue recorded in post (and some of the ing cast dubbed by other actors).…

1975

★★★ Watched 02 May 2024

If I took a drink every time proto-Jonathan Banks said the word “zodiacal”, I’d have been dead within 30 minutes. Peak seventies batshittery, just as earnest as that other film of the same title. Absolutely could have done without apparently real documentary footage of dead flood victims (including a child), though.

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