Pervert! - Interview with Jonathan Yudis and Mike Davis

Pervert! is an American indie movie for the fans of cult sexploitation films, made by the fans themselves. It is an homage to Russ Meyer films, but the producers call it rather a “love letter”. The movie can be defined as Russ Meyer meets H. G. Lewis meets The Hand and Kondom Des Grauens. It has been received with praise by the cult movie community and it won the Best Feature Award at the 2006 Coney Island Film Festival. I did an interview with the creators of the film in 2006 for Sonic Splendour# 5, which was unfortunately never published. So without further ado, here is a peek at the world of Pervert! through the eyes of the writer/co-producer Mike Davis and the director Jonathan Yudis.

Hello, Mike and Jonathan. First of all, can you tell us about your background on filmmaking? How did you decide to make “Pervert!”?

Mike Davis: I studied screenwriting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, optioned my first screenplay (it was never made) and have been writing scripts ever since. Jonathan and I have been working together creatively since I moved to Los Angeles in 2000 and had varying degrees of success trying to work within the Hollywood system, but weren't able to get our work produced. We did "Pervert!" outside the system, and it is my first experience with film production. For me, co-producing Pervert! was better than going to film school.

Jonathan Yudis: I've always loved movies. I grew up on 70's and 80's movies and TV. My directorial influences are all over the place, from Kubrick to Spike Lee to Ron Frike (Baraka) to Coppola to - of course Russ Meyer. Like Mike said- we really just wanted to MAKE a movie and stop developing and pitching ideas to other people. After nearly 10 years in the game and many award winning shorts and some TV gigs, I was still paying the bills working as an office PA at Paramount when we created the opportunity to direct PERVERT! The goal was to make something outrageous and funny for very little money.


Who and what are your influences?

M: I love classic directors and cult directors. I am inspired by the amazing work of Fellini, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Herschell Gordon Lewis, John Waters and Roger Corman. As for Pervert!, the most important influence was unquestionably the late Russ Meyer.

J: Russ Meyer catalogue/ 70's exploitation/ Outrageous Comedy in general

How was the movie received generally? And how was it received in terms of political (in)correctness?

M: The reception to Pervert! has been incredible. It was made for a specific audience which is outside of the mainstream, and that audience has embraced the movie as the 'modern cult classic' we wanted it to be. Fans of cult, exploitation, sexploitation can be very picky (including myself) about new movies, and the general reaction we get is "You guys got it right." That is a huge compliment. But above anything else, Pervert! is a comedy, and the laughter from the audience always warms our hearts. We did not take ourselves seriously in the creation of Pervert! (except on a technical production level) and I think the fans appreciate that. It's hard to hate and be offended by a movie that is meant as one big joke.

J: Mainstream Hollywood has completely dissed PERVERT! I have collegues that no longer return my phone calls and others that avoid talking about Pervert! completely. Still other producers and people I know say that if I had any sense at all or ever want to work in Hollywood- I should remove my name from Pervert!

On the other hand, the cult movie community (which is who we made Pervert! for) has completely embraced PERVERT! and seems to not only "Get it" but celebrate it for what it is- a silly sexploitation comedy that pays its respects to Russ Meyer, 70's Drive-In classics, the horror /exploitation genre and movies that are created to push some buttons and make you laugh. I think it's also safe to say that anyone who appreciates big boobs will dig Pervert!

What do you think about the rise of exploitation/trash movies during the recent years?

M: I love it. I'm happy to see these sickos coming out of the woodwork. I just hope the quality stays high (I mean low) and that the genre continues to evolve and be updated, not retreads of what's already been done.

J: It Rocks.

Mike also runs an independent film company called Stag Films. So, what is your motivation to produce and promote independent, cult, exploitation films?

M: Like any great underground movement, I feel like the twisted souls who get off on this kind of stuff need a venue to get themselves heard. It's very exciting to me whenever the existing system of power gets lazy and little punks come along and kick it in the ass. If enough of us do it, then things may actually change!

Can you talk a little bit about future Stag Films projects? Are you guys planning to make another movie together?

M: Stag Films/Infinite Entertainment is planning on making a follow up to Pervert entitled "The Corpse Corps." It is an homage to 60's biker flicks about an outlaw motorcycle gang that reunites only to find that someone is trying to wipe them out. It will be different from Pervert! but equally outrageous!

J: Yes- THE CORPSE CORPS which Mike described (and we also have several other scripts I'd like to see produced including an Alien Comedy )

“Pervert!” has an overt tongue-in-cheek attitude – one which is reminiscent of parody - which is another common characteristic among the new exploitation films. What do you think separates you from Scary Movie series?

M: Pervert! does not take itself seriously in any way, even as a 'parody.' We homage bits and pieces of many different types of movies and mix them together into a soup. This time the overriding flavor was Russ Meyer, the next movie will be biker gang movies. We don't recreate scenes of other films with a funny twist, we just want the audience to know who inspired us and make the whole damn thing twisted. I guess it's more like the Quentin Tarantino technique than Scary Movie. I like to think of Pervert! not as a parody or an homage, but as 'a love letter.'

J: I agree with Mike’s response on this.

The movie derives a lot from comic book aesthetics, especially at the beginning and at the end. Do you like comics? The style used in the comic book cover of “Pervert!” reminded me of the works of underground comix artists. Was this a conscious choice? Do you think you have anything in common with them?

M: I'll defer this to Jonathan since it was his idea. But I will say it helps establish that this movie is meant to be viewed like a cartoon.

J: I always thought of PERVERT! as a live action cartoon- so I thought the comic book opening and closing could be a simple but effective way of telling the audience - "Hey- this is just a COMIC world, none of this or these characters are meant to be taken too seriously". And yes, I am a comic fan myself and loved the techniques used in movies like American Splendour or all the Ralph Bakshi catalogue (which interconnects the live action and animated worlds on film)

What kind of equipment did you use while making the film?

J: We were committed to shooting PERVERT! on film. I thought that given the subject matter and nudity in the script, if we shot on any Video format, it would subconsciously connect the viewer to PORN as opposed to the 70's sexploitation movies which were all shot on film. Though I wanted to use 35MM, we could only afford super 16MM which turned out to look amazing. We were going for the BRIGHT Colors of the Russ Meyer films which also lend to the Cartoon aesthetic. we shot with a great 16MM ARRI camera.

What would you like to say to those who want to make their own films?

M: The technology exists now that almost anyone can make their own film (or at least video). I hope that everyone will, and that each person will attempt to do something that has never been done before.

J: Do it. Go for it. The world needs to see your visions and films. Don't let all the nay sayers or Hollywood nonsense get you down. You could never imagine ALL the people in this world that might really be moved, inspired, or transformed by your film (no matter how crazy or absurd it might be)- but they can only be inspired by it if you actually MAKE it.

Any last words?

M: Russ Meyer lives.

J: Thanks for the support. Live long, Laugh loud, and Embrace your inner Pervert!



PS: Check out http://www.pervertthemovie.com/ to order the DVD and for more information

Kondom Des Grauens (Killer Condom) - Michael Walz (1996)

!!SPOILERS!!

Moving on from castrating genitalia to castrating prophylactics. Kondom des Grauens was adapted from gay comics artist Ralf König’s graphic novel of the same title by Martin Walz. Set in New York with an all German cast, it tells the story of the Sicilian harboiled detective Luigi Mackeroni fighting against killer condoms with razor sharp teeth, and homophobia among other things.

New York Police Department’s attention is drawn to Hotel Quickie, a brothel in the most sleazy part of NY, when four incidents of castration take place in one night in its rooms. Detective Mackeroni, seemingly a frequenter of those parts, goes there to investigate the case, and meanwhile taking the opportunity to have sex with a male prostitute, Billy. As they are about to start, they realise the condom provided by the hotel is moving around the room. Mackeroni loses one of his testicles trying unsuccessfully to catch it and opens his eyes in the hospital, where he swears vengeance on the killer condom. Billy comes to visit him in his apartment and implies he’s in love with him, to which the cynical detective replies by saying he doesn’t believe in love any more.

Aided by former-cop-turned-transvestite Bob/Babette, who has a crush on Mackeroni, they catch the killer condom and kill it by using a hose as a bait whose other end is connected to the gas pipe. However, their troubles don’t end as more killer condoms emerge from the sewers and go on a castration spree, chopping the republican presidential candidate’s penis off on the way. Mackeroni & co follow the clues to the chapel hospital where Mackeroni was treated, where Frau Dr Riffleson, aided by the mad scientist Dr Smirnoff and a Chinese man, produces the genetically engineered killer condoms to fight pre-marital sex and homosexuality, which are, according to her, against the Lord’s intentions for mankind. After beating her, and killing the giant killer condom intended for Mackeroni’s 32 centimetre (12.5 inches) penis, Mackeroni gives his ‘sermon on the mount’, preaching love regardless of gender. He, then, walks off to the sunset with Billy promising to take him to Sicily to meet his family.

This film is wonderful in so many ways, it is hard to decide where to start. It satirises certain aspects of American society, like the ever present conservatism in Republicanism and fundamental Christianity, which deem homosexuality unnatural and dirty. Frau Dr Riffleson is an exaggerated version of the homophobic frenzy among the conservative segments of the society in her crazed attempt to end the sins of the ‘depraved’ by setting loose monster condoms in the gay and sleazy districts of the city. Ironically, one of the killer condoms find its way to the Republican presidential candidate’s bathtub, after his speech against sexual deviance in the city – as he is about to have sex with a prostitute.

Kondom des Grauens parodies the American hardboiled detective genre by replacing the straight macho detective with a charming ‘bear’, complete with trench coat, unshaven face, chain smoking and a voice over. His femme fatale is an ‘homme fatale’ and he fights for gay rights, thus reversing the gender roles perpetrated in many detective films. It is also a camp, and at times carnivalesque, celebration of gay culture. The transvestite Bob/Babette, with her lip-synching to “Killing me Softly” and insistence on Mackeroni’s seeing her as his mother - thus finding her sexy - is lovable in every scene she’s featured. The homophobic detective Sam is punished for his ignorance of the gay culture by being urinated on, but after a fist fight with Mackeroni, he bonds with his gay colleague, and becomes more accepting of homosexuality. The short, fat, hairy detective Mackeroni, with his big penis, is clearly a carnivalesque figure, who fights against the orthodoxy of the Church, which wants to end life based on pleasure, and promote abstinence outside of being fruitful and multiplying.

I have been able to get my hands on the graphic novel to compare it with the film. The copy I have is in German, but as the first part of the film is more or less the same with the graphic novel, which is not surprising as König seems to have created the book as a "horror film" as indicated on the cover. It wasn’t difficult to understand what was going on. The film also makes use of the sequel of Kondom des Grauens, titled Bis auf die Knochen (To the Bones), but is not entirely faithful to the script, which features a gay alien/monster who eats men with his penis and spits their skeletons out. The graphic novels are definitely more pornographic than the film, and look worthwhile to get a hold of for underground comix fans.

(PS: Above, you see the cover of the Dutch version, courtesy of Lambiek.net).

Shaun of the Dead – Edgar Wright (2004)

“A romantic comedy... With zombies” The tagline says it all. I’d heard good things about this movie and when I saw the DVD at a rather cheap price at an airport, I thought “well, it might worth giving it a try” and worth it, it was. British cinema, since the nineties, have put forth some really cool films that are bound to be classics. This one ranks among the best of them. Simon Pegg, as Shaun and Nick Frost as Ed are hilarious. Clever observations on the lifestyle of the English, ups and downs of a romantic relationship and zombies snatching the intestines of people out. Basically, it’s a parody of zombie movies, winking here and there to all the zombie fans out there. However, its style of parody is not as 'disturbing' as Scary Movie series' is. It is only a movie that does not take itself too seriously. If I had watched it before I saw Undead, I would have liked it much more than I did. But see both of them if you are into zombie movies and watch out for that cricket bat, we might have a new Ash coming our way.

From Sonic Splendour # 4

Pig – Nico B. (1999)

23-minute-long, 16 mm, b&w underground film by the Dutch filmmaker Nico B. This is also the latest project of Rozz Williams, the late frontman of Christian Death and several other bands, and a source of inspiration for the likes of Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson. Written by Williams, Pig depicts the relationship between a killer (Williams himself) and his victim (James Hollan). It does not contain any dialogues. Just bizarre imagery, coming right out of the killer’s mind... We see him reading from a book called Why God Permits Evil, full of swastikas all over, and applying several different torture techniques on his victim, including sewing his penis and nipples together. The uncanny soundtrack, also by Williams, adds up to the irritating atmosphere of the film. It says “Rozz Williams spoke of the film as a form of exorcism and transition of his personal demons” at the back of the DVD. What an exorcism... definitely not for the squeamish.

From Sonic Splendour # 4

B for Bad Cinema Conference Diary, Entry #3

7 in the morning on Friday April 17, I woke up with a hangover the size of Yarra River. Nothing a quick shower and a couple of painkillers couldn’t cure, as it turned out. This was the day I was presenting my paper. In some cases, I’ve found hangovers help me with my performance in presentations and the like. Fortunately, this was one of those cases.

I was a bit late to the morning plenary session, where Ernest Mathijs argued bad cinema presents a different experience of time in his paper “Discontinuity and Lack of Progress: Time in Bad Cinema”. He asserted that bad cinema either refuses to or is unable to represent a logical progression of time, and therefore challenges the way we are used to perceive time in modern society.

After the morning tea, there were four parallel sessions, which were called “Dirt(y) TV”, “Films no-one likes”, “More Horror”, and “Eroto-cinema”. I was presenting at the “More Horror” panel, and thinking about how the organizers made our panel sound more boring than it actually is: “Yeah, more horror, nothing special there” – which definitely wasn’t the case, and not because I thought my paper was interesting, either. I think creativity for panel titles was the one thing lacking in this conference, in general. First in our panel was Jason Bainbridge with his paper “When Big Budgets Go Bad: Fraternizing with Flash Gordon and Going down The Black Hole or Why Don’t More People write papers on Inseminoid (1981) anyway?” Bainbridge, accompanied by a Flash Gordon action figure, looked at the cases of The Black Hole (1979) and Flash Gordon (1980) to talk about films that aim to be blockbusters but fail, and compared the bad blockbusters and the cultural value that is attached to them with that of the low budget bad film, embodied by The Inseminoid. Next up, Dominic Lennard, whose paper’s title was quoted in an article published in The Age on April 16, did something that’s rarely done in horror film studies, and took the male body and its horrors in focus in his paper “‘Somehow the indentities, they get all Mixed Up’: Fatherhood, Science and Semen in Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (1974)”. He analysed the patriarchal discourses in the film, which poses reproduction “as a male technological process”, as the male character’s sperm is identified as the cause of a mutant baby’s birth. My paper, being the only one that does not mention sperm anywhere throughout – and therefore probably not as much fun – was titled “Exorcising Hollywood?: Turkish Islamic Horror Cinema”. I focused on five recent Turkish horror films with Islamic themes or overtones, in the light of Yuri Lotman’s model of cultural transfer. My final argument was that these films represent more the return of the bad film than the horror film. I received quite a few questions, some of which were about whether it was possible to get these films with English subtitles. It made me feel good to see a few people, who weren’t at our panel, come up to me and say “Are you Can Y.? I heard about your paper. That sounds really interesting. Could you send it to me?”. Ego-boosting, to say the least!

The afternoon session with the panels “Stars”, “Australia II”, “Bad Boys”, and “Value” was when most of my conference buddies were presenting their papers. I started with the “Value” panel, where Phil Betts was presenting his paper “The Gentrification of Bad Cinema”. Phil, who in numerous occasions confessed to be “not a horror film person”, was more than able to blend in with us zombie crowd by his industry analysis of Fox Searchlight distributed 28 Days Later, where he questioned the lines that blur between the independent and the commercial, bad cinema, and the mainstream. After Phil’s presentation, I moved on to the “Bad Boys” panel to listen to Karen Mauri talking about the New Zealand animated series Bro’ Town in her “B For Bro’ town: ‘Im goin 2 da pub I may be some time”. Karen looked at the way in which this “minority” TV series employ strategies of self-mockery and stereotyping, along with more “commercial” elements to address a broader audience. The last paper of the session was Mario Rodriguez’s “Horror-Ritual: Horror Movie Villains as Re-Presentational Sacrifice”. He argued that villains in horror movies are ritual construct and the reason for their existence is to transgress boundaries. He gave examples from films like There Will be Blood, No Country for Old Men as well as Saw and Hostel, to show the function of villains as receptors of re-presentational punishment.

The last plenary session of the conference was Jamie Sexton’s “Cult Film: From Bad to Good and Back to ‘Bad’ Again?”. Sexton’s paper was an archaeological investigation of the term ‘cult’ and outlined the changes the term has undergone since the early twentieth century, when it had a negative meaning. Identifying ‘cult’ as a generic term, he differentiated it from other generic terms, as its connotations are mostly reception-based. After Sexton’s talk, Con Verevis made the closing remarks in “Close: A Bad Ending”, and implied a possible sequel to “B for Bad Cinema”.

We went to Lygon Street for some nice Italian Pizza and then to Brunswick Street for a couple of celebratory beers. The conference was over, but Melbourne still had some attractions to offer: the Queen Victoria Markets, a meeting with a fellow Melancholy scholar, the Comedy Festival, hanging out with people who gave us A Dark Day’s Knight, Setting the Scene exhibition at ACMI, and “world’s freakiest bookstore”, Polyester Books!

B for Bad Cinema Conference Diary, Entry #2

We were told the day before that one of the plenary speakers, Jeffrey Sconce – writer of the legendary article “Trashing the Academy” – had notified the organizers, 48 hours before the conference, that he would not be able to make it, which gave us an extra hour of sleep at the expense of getting the chance to see a celebrity academic.

The first parallel session of Thursday April 16 had “Pedagogy”, “Australian”, “Perversion”, “Eighties” and “Politics” to choose from. I decided to follow my friends to the 80s session, but I still think the Perversion one might have been more suitable to my taste, much as the 80s session was good fun. It started with Tim Groves’ paper “Bad Affects, A/sociality and St Elmo’s Fire”. He looked at Joel Schumacher’s 1985 film St Elmo’s Fire using group psychology theory, particularly using writing that deconstructs Freud’s work on sociality, such as Mikkel Borch-Jocobsen’s. Next, Matt Sini gave us a taste of best of Arnie’s one-liners in “‘I Eat Green Berets For Breakfast’: Schwarzenegger, Cheesy Lines & 80s Action Film”. Instead of measuring the size of the governator’s legendary biceps, he focused on his Austrian accent and “poor acting ability” (his acting talents weren’t poor, he was a visionary deconstructing the notion of the serious action film star!) and how these made it possible for his fans to enjoy his films through recognizing their artificiality. Here’s one of the clips Matt showed. Third, Suzanne Woodward talked about the 2007 Hairspray remake in her “‘Moral Turpentine’ – The Recuperation of Hairspray”, comparing it to the original version by John Waters. She maintained there’s a move to the mainstream, but there is still counterculture, bad taste, and ickiness and it still satirises the shallowness of the American Dream.

The next parallel session of the day brought us such panels as “Russian”, “Horror”. “Revisions”, “Hyper-bad Theory” and “Bursting the Frame”. My ‘panel crawl’ started with the first paper of the Hyper-bad Theory, with John Scannel’s “Why ‘Bad’ Cinema is Often Rather ‘Good’”. John used Deleuze’s theory from his Cinema books and said the power of bad cinema comes from its repetition of difference, which is unlike good cinema’s repetitions of preconceived clichés, and ever ready to extend into chaos. I sneaked out of the panel to go to my supervisor Catherine Simpson’s talk on Aussie Eco-Horror. In “Ozploitation and Gaia’s Revenge”, she talked about such great Ozploitation films as Long Weekend, Razorback, Howling III: the Marsupials and Rogue, which all feature animals wreaking havoc on people who do not respect nature. As the panel ended with Catherine’s paper, I went back to the Hyper-bad Theory panel to listen to Alan Cholodenko’s “B for Baudrillard (Hyper)cinema”, which blurred the lines between a conference paper and rap poetry as Choldenko recited lines as “the logic of paracinema as hypercinema is: at once bad more and less good than good and at the same time good more and less bad than bad” with the speed of a machine gun.

Following the afternoon tea, we all went to Angela Ndalianis plenary session titled “Corpse Contagion and Aesthetics of Disgust”, which was an homage to zombies. Ndalianis showed examples of the zombie subgenre across a variety of media – cinema, comics, computer games, and literature (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Encompassed by scenes of consumption of human flesh, zombie cultural products evoke a sensation of disgust, which pushes audiences into a dilemma of whether to look or not to look. This is probably best exemplified in the “splinter-in-the-eye” scene of Zombi 2.

The last parallel session offered “Music”, “Japanese”, “Women”, “Visionary Bad” and “Exploitation”. I first went to the Japanese panel to listen to Brady Hammond’s “Haunted Girls, Bad Girls, and Mothra: Charting Feminism in Post-War Japanese B Movies”. Brady (who is thinking of making a film about werewolves on the moon), questioned the presence of feminism in Japanese cinema and culture, in films and subgenres such as Mothra, which presents the first female monster to destroy Japan; Pink films, which objectified women, and J-Horror, with its avenging female spirits. I then moved to the Exploitation panel and listened to Scott Knight and Alison Taylor’s account Seduction Cinema and Retro-Seduction production and distribution companies in “ Sexploitation Paracinema & DVD: The Case of Retro-Seduction Cinema”. Mostly known by their softcore parody films such as Lord of the G-Strings and their house star Misty Mundae, Seduction – a branch of the company Pop Cinema – has a sister company called Retro-Seduction, which distributes sexploitation classics from the 60s and 70s, along with their remakes. The last paper of the day was Beth Toren’s “Jager Shots: Quentin Tarantino Exploits B-Movies in Death Proof”, which summarises what the paper was about. Toren, gave examples from films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween to show how Tarantino borrows extensively from old B-Movies, also focusing on the shifting roles of the female characters in B horror cinema, as well as in Death Proof.

We went to have some Thai food in the city with my conference buddies before the Conference party at The Order of Melbourne started. The place was quite suitable to the theme of the conference, with stuffed animals here and there, and old 45s of B films playing in the background. Considering I had a paper to present the following day, I had way more drinks than I should.

B for Bad Cinema Conference Diary, Entry #1

After immersing myself into the delights of A Night of Horror a few weeks ago, it was now time to go to Melbourne for a Conference devoted to splatter, zombie, Euro-trash, Ozploitation, exploitation, and erotic cinema among other things!

The incredibly cool titled conference B for Bad Cinema started on April 15th. I missed the opening night, which was on the 14th, as I arrived in Melbourne around the time it finished and got to my hotel around 9 pm. But I was able to find my way to Monash University, Menzies Building on Wednesday, just in time to get registered and attend the first plenary session.

The organizers did a really nice job of putting together an awesomely designed folder, containing the Conference programme, abstracts, and two badges along with the name tag. I kind of wish they did souvenir conference t-shirts and bags, too, but oh well…

The first plenary speaker was Murray Pomerance from Ryerson University and his paper was titled “The Villain We Love: Notes on the Dramaturgy of Screen Evil”. Pomerance first talked about how “the elimination of embodiments of evil has been a spectacle and a source of intense pleasure for audiences for hundreds of years”. Then he moved on to the representations of evil on the screen, saying no dramatic film will seem successful if it shows the demise of the villain too early. He looked at the case of Brian Singer’s Valkyrie, asked what would happen when the evil represented on the screen is based on a historical figure like Hitler, and showed how Hitler was divorced from historical facts for the sake of filmic narrative and catharsis.

After the plenary session I decided to go to the Splatter session (the other parallel sessions were “B-Auteurs”, “Boredom”, “Video”, and “Gender”). The first speaker was Phoebe Fletcher from the University of Auckland. Her paper “‘Fucking Americans’: Postmodern Nationalisms in the Contemporary Splatter Film” focused on dystopian representations of capitalism in recent films such as Hostel and Turistas, and emphasized the orientalist tendencies in these films as the image of the east is distorted. She also analysed this trend as a result of global anti-Americanism after the invasion of Iraq. Next, Craig Frost talked about remakes of old horror films in his “When Bad Cinema Goes Bad”. He particularly looked at the Michael Bay produced The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, and underlined how bad this version was compared to the original, stripped of any cultural context, and just striving to be commercially viable. The last talk of the session was Naomi Merritt’s “‘A Vile Little Piece of Sick Crap’: Battaillean Transgressions and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, and analysed Tobe Hooper’s classic film within Battaille’s concepts of Taboo and transgression, drawing on the idea of extreme seductiveness of horror.

The afternoon session had such titles as “Ozploitation”, “Television”, “Reception”, “Imaging” and “Capitalism” and I chose to go to the last one. The first speaker, Manish Priyadarshi didn’t show up, which gave the second speaker, Brendan Murphy from Central Queensland University plenty of time to show us a lot of sweded films on youtube in preparation for his paper “B Grade 2.0: Gondry, ‘Sweding’ and B Movie Tropes in Emerging Social Media Culture”, and looked at how newly emerging media technologies reshaping media production, with a case study of Be Kind Rewind fuelled sweded films. Next, Mark Steven, a self-confessed nerd, presented his paper on The Revenge of the Nerds titled “Their Time Has Come: Bad Cinema Nerds as Late-Capitalist Paradigm”. His argument was that the nerds versus jocks paradigm could be read as the 21st century vs 20th century capitalism, where nerds stood for the late capitalist paradigm.

The second plenary session was conducted by Adrian Martin, who delivered a paper titled “My Bad (Part 1) – The Risible, or; On With the Adventure!”. His paper started with an account of how, as a child, he enjoyed watching films without any judgment, which turned even the worst films into a thrilling adventure. He stated how he rebelled against the standards set by rationalized and intellectual frames of mind for ‘good cinema’, which prevents audiences to enjoy not only B-grade films but also more avant-garde and experimental works. A big chunk of the paper dealt with films of the French director Jean Claude Brisseau, with accompanying clips, which seemed to blur the boundaries between arthouse cinema and exploitation films, and presented a revolutionary worldview, not unlike Jean Luc Godard’s in The Week End. Instead of despising or loving these films for the same reasons: because they are ridiculous and silly, we should return to that fundamental pleasure of watching them we experienced as children, Martin suggested.

The last parallel session of the day presented such panels as “Zombies”, “Realism”, “Indonesian”, “Euro-Trash”, and “Hollywood”. I was really torn between Indonesian, Euro-Trash and Zombies, but then I couldn’t resist the charm of the living dead, those rock stars of horror cinema. The first speaker was Allan Cameron, who talked about the sense of contingency in zombie films and horror cinephilia, drawing examples from Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 - a.k.a Zombie Flesh Eaters(especially the notorious shark vs zombie scene) and Romero’s Diary of the Dead, in his paper “Zombie Media: Resolution, Reproduction and the Digital Dead”. Next, John Edmond did a presentation on zombie fandom. His paper “Zombie Fans, Zombie Walks, and Everyday Life” focused on cultural productions of zombie fans, which, due to the speechless nature of zombies, is usually visual and performance based, showing photos from Brisbane Zombie Walk 2008. Lastly, Lindsay Hallam looked at Lucio Fulci’s zombie films in the light of texts of Marquis de Sade and the concept of transgression, and underlined Fulci’s fascination with the limitations and possibilities of the body, and how they can be destroyed. This session was also one of the best in terms of discussion, as it was where different opinions on the speed of zombies (John Edmond said he would feel cheated if he saw fast zombies, in the same way as he would feel cheated if he saw a UFO in a Western) and when the best time to watch a Fulci is (one audience member suggested it should be the morning after a big night out) were articulated.

My conference buddies and I finished the night at an Indian place called Gaylord, where I feasted on a plate of Gaylord special! Awesome ending to an awesome first day at the conference.