Presenting 11 movies over two weeks, the festival will showcase a handpicked selection of science fiction, horror, action, and questionable family films from the 50s through to the 90s, all featuring the kind of electricity special effects that mean some weird shit is about to happen.
“Running a film festival has always been a dream for both myself and my festival co-director, who is also named Ben,” says Ben McLeay, co-director of the Brisbane Only Rotoscoped Lightning Film Festival. “Growing up, animated lightning effects were pretty much the sickest thing you could see in a movie and tended to indicate that the movie as a whole was going to be very cool. This has so far held true into adulthood.
“We’ve got two weeks worth of very good and very not-so-good movies, all of which we think are worth getting a chance to see on the big screen with a bunch of like-minded movie enthusiasts who also think weird stuff is cool.”
The festival will begin with the opening gala on Friday, July 29th, featuring a screening of David Lynch’s Dune, accompanied by a tribute to the film’s score performed by The Steady As She Goes and an art show from local and international artists interpreting films from the festival as Australian daybill posters, curated by Feature Presentation.
THE FESTIVAL
The full roster of films is as follows:
Friday, July 29: Dune (1984)
Saturday, July 30th: Big Trouble in Little China (1986) + The Last Dragon (1985)
Sunday, July 31st: Forbidden Planet (1956) + Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)
Friday, August 5th: The Addams Family (1991) + The Addams Family Values (1993)
Saturday, August 6th: Howard the Duck (1986) + Super Mario Bros (1993)
Sunday, August 7th: Lifeforce (1985) + Hellraiser (1987)
Questions, queries and requests for media passes can be sent to: info@borlff.com
That’s all the important stuff, but more specific details can be found below. Attached you’ll find our teaser video, plus several images with some examples of just what the hell we are talking about.
THE MOVIES
DUNE (1984)
Join us for the BORLFF opening gala as we celebrate a movie that its director would rather forget, David Lynch’s Dune. Sometimes derided as a poorly thought out attempt to recapture the magic of Star Wars, this odd, very loose adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel nevertheless holds up as a display of weird and wonderful production design with a cast of David Lynch regulars and a profoundly 80s score from none other than Toto.
ADDAMS FAMILY DOUBLE (1991 + 1993)
The only thing better than one 1990s Barry Sonnenfeld Addams Family movie is two of them, so we’re doing both. Deeply imprinted on the brains of aspiring goth children of a specific age, this incarnation of the cartoon-turned-television family is dark, funny and, at times, disconcertingly horny — the perfect tonal combination for a series of family films.
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)
Strange characters wield even stranger powers as a bewildered truck driver descends into a fantastical and quite literal San Francisco underworld. A visually arresting supernatural martial arts adventure film about a mostly useless, brash man in the company of his more competent friends, Big Trouble in Little China is the poster child film for rotoscoped lightning effects.
THE LAST DRAGON (1985)
The product of the narrow band of time in which having one of your main characters be a “video jockey” not only made sense but seemed quite cool, The Last Dragon is an exquisitely and quite proudly ridiculous martial arts movie about two competing New York City martial artists, one a young fan of Bruce Lee, the other the megalomaniacal self-styled Shogun of Harlem.
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
Prepare yourself to grapple with the impossible as Forbidden Planet confronts you with a Leslie Nielsen before he went grey and telling approximately zero jokes. Stunning matte paintings, beautiful rotoscope animation, and some very 1950s sexism await you in the far, exotic future of the 23rd century.
INVASION OF ASTRO-MONSTER (1965)
An illuminating cautionary tale about the dangers of lending your Godzilla and your Rodan to your supposedly friendly alien neighbours, in the hope of curing their King Ghidorah problem. Invasion of Astro-Monster has all the quality hallmarks of a Showa-era Godzilla movie: Meticulous miniature work, stunning special effects, thrilling man-in-a-big-suit combat, and a completely baffling plot confected to facilitate the previous things in this list.
HOWARD THE DUCK (1986)
One of the great “How and why was this made?” movies in film history. This early Marvel cinematic adaptation had a budget large enough to fully facilitate the unhinged vision of a wisecracking, lascivious duck-man hybrid bumbling his way around Earth. Did the world need to see a topless duck drinking a cocktail in the bath? Probably not, but art is supposed to challenge you.
SUPER MARIO BROS (1993)
The film put into canon that Mario and Luigi’s names are, respectively, Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. 1993’s Super Mario Bros puts Dennis Hopper and Bob Hoskins in a movie that is wildly divorced in its source material but extremely creative in what it decided to do instead.
LIFEFORCE (1985)
From the director of iconic horror movies The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 comes the somewhat less iconic Lifeforce. Everything seems fine when a perfectly harmless-seeming abandoned spaceship is discovered in the trail of Halley’s Comet, but somehow things go awry when the space vampires hidden aboard make their way back to Earth.
HELLRAISER (1987)
One of the most iconic movies about a cube ever made (after, perhaps, Cube), Hellraiser is the middle of the Venn diagram of “solving puzzles” and “BDSM”. Hellraiser presents a strange and inarguably cool vision of hell, where a bunch of weird all-powerful goths explore the far limits of pleasure and pain mostly through ripping people apart with magical meathooks.
THE ART SHOW
Feature Presentation will curate an art show with interpretations of select festival films by a group of local and international artists. Each poster will be in the classic Australian daybill format and will be on display at New Farm Cinemas throughout the festival. Prints of the posters will be available to purchase online and in the lobby.
Feature Presentation: https://www.instagram.com/feature__presentation
Artists:
Tom Williams – https://twitter.com/TimboTheChamp
Goran Gligovic – https://twitter.com/GoranGligovic
Luis Mela – https://twitter.com/ReptileEnclosed
Rhea/Young Earl Grey – https://www.instagram.com/youngearlgrey/
Sam McKenzie – https://twitter.com/ohnosam
Ashley Ronning – https://www.instagram.com/ashleyronning/
WHO WE ARE
Two Bit Movie Club is a regular movie event run by Ben McLeay and Ben Nichols, held at Netherworld, The Scratch Bar, Red Hill Cinemas and New Farm Cinemas. TBMC celebrates trash, cult and classic film, with the aim of getting the things they like to watch on the biggest screen they can and finding the kind of people who would like to watch it with them..
Netherworld is an arcade bar Fortitude Valley serving craft beer and diner-style eats amongst a collection of forgotten treasures from the 70ss until present day including 15 pinball machines, 25 arcade machines, classic consoles, and countless board games.
Restored by Five Star Cinemas in 2013, New Farm Cinemas is a family-run cinema dedicated to giving cinema fans a mix of retro style and state of the art sound and vision, while bringing the ‘experience’
