Forget Star Wars – MIFF’s all-night sci-fi marathon represents an opportunity to see obscure, mind-blowing, rare, and underappreciated movies that push intellectual boundaries.
The marathon kicks off with Dead-End Drive-in, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1986 adaptation of Peter Carey’s story ‘Crabs’, about a drive-in cinema that is really a concentration camp. A Boy and His Dog from 1975, based on Harlan Ellison’s writing, is an incredibly weird post-apocalyptic comedy about a horny teenager (Don Johnson) and the telepathic dog who finds him women in return for food.
The ingenious Timecrimes (2007) is a low-budget Spanish thriller in which a man accidentally stumbles upon a time loop. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) is a logic-free black-and-white nightmare in which a salaryman’s body gradually turns into scrap metal, complete with a huge drill for a penis.
David Cronenberg’s trippy 1999 film Existenz concerns a videogame designer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) hiding out in her own created universe after an assassination attempt. The Visitor (1979) is an extremely odd Italian-American production with an all-star cast that features a demonic little girl, Jesus Christ, detectives, basketballers and an army of bald children; the cast includes film directors John Huston and Sam Peckinpah.
Finally, Nothing Lasts Forever is a 1984 arthouse comedy, filmed mostly in black and white, in which an artist in New York under a state of martial law takes a trip to the moon in a bus driven by Bill Murray. After a long night of bizarre films, it will make as much sense as any other movie.
Read Time Out's picks of the 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival.
