Ex-con Eddie Cleary gets a job working on his older brother's isolated farm. It's not long before bizarre things start happening--dead birds falling out of the sky, family pets attacking their owners, strange apparitions beginning to appear, and people who had been "normal" suddenly going insane.
Encounter At Raven's Gate, Blue Fever, Magnetismo mortal, Incidente a porto del corvo
Australia
Australian Film Institute
Belgium
Brussels Science Fiction Film Festival
Australia
Australia
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Australia
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Part of my new *Collab Catch-Up Project*. This is number 20/66.
This sits smack dab in the middle of the dark photography scale between The Godfather and Too Late For Tears, and while the darkness is obvious, the film also dips into the deep, ravishing colors of blues, reds and greens with appropriate gratuity. Easily attributable to something that is much more style over substance, I think gets a pass for just how stunning some sequences are and how these visuals fill in for the loose plot where “crazy, unexplainable phenomena occur”. The rough and gruff condition of the actual film also assists the film’s atmosphere, oddly enough, as it seems the footage was discovered in some post-apocalyptic shelter or a misplaced…
"Why did the sexual pervert cross the road?" - Special Branch investigator Cummings
Encounter at Raven's Gate is another classic 'unknown' Ozploitation flick (by an equally unknown director, Rolf de Heer) that has sadly been all but lost to the ravages of time. It had an extremely short run locally, a one-off DVD release, then slipping quietly into sci-fi/ arthouse obscurity. Until... NOW!
Special Branch investigator Cummings rolls up on local law enforcement officer Taylor at the Cleary farm. The Cleary farm kinda looks a little bit like downtown Palestine. Shell casings. Carnage. Buildings and vehicles burning. It's a bit of a mess. Clearly, shit's gone down here at Cleary Farm.
Cut to the not too distant past. Eddie Cleary…
This is just wonderful. Along the backroads of the Australian outback, amongst the pylons of desert farmers cultivating what greenery they can, and over-saturated Refn lightening is such a fantastic Koontz premise to coincide with strictly Australian sensibilities. This outright oozes with atmosphere, as well as an encapsulation into late-eighties punky guerrilla filmmaking (the Space Invaders cabinet is both thematic and capsular!) as it becomes hauntingly clear that a foreboding presence is overtaking the town. I really just expected a silly sci-fi B-movie but it elevates itself beyond drive-in alien action, more subtle in providing social context over cheap thrills. You’re always right in the middle of strange occurrences, never fully explained, that creates such a realistic tone. I just love a narrative that zaps you into happenstance — there is no one essential meaning, but an overriding trip into the absurd.
1st Rolf de Heer
Watched with the lovely Anna, who I saw Legend of Hell House with.
And the equally lovely Sav, who you may remember from my recent review of Celia. If you haven’t followed them before, do so!
A lonely farm in the Aussie Outback becomes witness to a series of strange and unexplained events that seem like a potential alien invasion but are never really resolved. Not that that’s a bad thing. If anything, that ambiguity makes the film so much more tantalising, so radioactively strange. When the water begins to dry up, or when the titular location becomes lit with incredible bright lights, there is no sense of release by knowledge, instead a constant feeling of…
"Hear that fellas? He's not in the mood---"
Skull crack.
Edith Wharton's Collab celebrates the 119th Anniversary of Australian independence at the request of Nick Langdon with this Ozzie sci-fi thriller.
Director Rolf de Heer (Dingo) brings his Art House sensibilities to the proceedings, casting a slice of Southern Australian life through a distinctly alien lens. Richard Michalak ( who would follow this with the masterpiece, Driving Force) provides a rich colour palette with striking visuals which are constantly in contrast thanks to Suresh Ayyar's punchy cutting. The appearance of Steve Vidler's lead, bleach blond with reflective shades seems more in line with a Rutger Hauer or Frank Zagarino cyber punk android, but provides our human perspective in all its…
Five years and two films before Rolf De Heer would write and direct one of the greatest movies ever made he dropped this solidly composed piece of pulp. His second feature.
DP Richard Michalak, who would go on to shoot Dark City, photographs the shit out of this and the gaffer work is outstanding. If only there was more light pushed through the version I saw on YouTube. Sadly, a lot of the gorgeous night-time lighting design is robbed by the age and wear of the print.
I’m curious about Incident At Raven’s Creek in relation to Bad Boy Bubby. The two films have similar endings. Protagonists arriving at some kind of idealized Australian suburbia, escaping the hyper-masculine outback wastelands.…
*KZZZZT*
We interrupt this program to bring you the Eddie the Cowardly Aussie Show!
Starring Eddie… the Cowardly Aussie!
Laid off from his job, he was taken in my Rachel
Who lives in the middle of nowhere
With Eddie’s brother, Richard (who’s mad)
But creeeeepy stuff happens down under
It’s up to Eddie to save his new home!
*click*
"Stupid brother! You kissed my wife!
OOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!"
Encounter at Farpoint, err, Incident at Ravenholm, may appear on the surface to be a mere boilerplate alien invasion story produced purely on pocket change, but it transcends its limitations into arthouse territory thanks to director Rolf de Heer and visionary cinematographer Richard Michalak (just don’t dig…
Rolf de Heer deserves some sort of proper introduction, but given the obscurity of the man's work little information exists to do him justice. Besides the cult hit Bad Boy Bubby that's best remembered for its heavy experimentation (major usage of binaural audio, 30+ directors of photography), and Ten Canoes, the first movie filmed in Australian Aborigine languages, none of his films have scraped above 1,000 watches here, in spite of his arthouse/alternative tendencies that would normally make a filmmaker beloved by the weirdos on the site (no attempts at a diss there, it's a compliment). Needless to say, a film as undiscovered as Encounter at Raven's Gate deserves to be better recognized, not just for how well it manages…
I went on a bit of an Ozploitation tear a few years back after seeing the excellent primer, Not Quite Hollywood, and stumbled across some of the most wonderful films I’d ever seen. While I wouldn’t rank Incident at Raven’s Gate among my favorites, it carries many of the quaint hallmarks that so endeared me to the genre. The film is neck-deep in atmosphere, has a killer soundtrack, is wildly ambitious, weird in all the right ways, and competently helmed. I’d buy the thing in a heartbeat if someone would release a cleaned-up edition, as I’m sure it would reward multiple rewatches handsomely, but something just didn’t gel for me this time around.
I’ve tried to plumb the source of my discontent…
Mini-Collab with Savage and Ethan Lyon as part of Collab catch-up.
I feel bad, because I suggested to watch this, and for me, it was an unfulfilling dud. So much so, that my attention strayed that I can't write as much of a review as I originally wanted to.
Nick Langdon summarised it well -- the sci-fi and visual elements excel while the human drama of it doesn't. I didn't feel connected to any of these people either. Not sure if that was a deliberate choice by director Rolf de Heer or not.
What I took away from it was you shouldn't build your own happiness on somebody's misery. Eddie and Rachel face the house on their own at the…
If one was being unkind one could dub this Distant Encounters of the Vague Kind, but to be fair it's hard to compare a low budget Australian art film to a Hollywood blockbuster. Although Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) would be an obvious reference point in looking at how ordinary folk would be affected by an extraterrestrial visitation, but here there are no easy answers or really answers of any sort. While it might be somewhat cinematically and emotionally unsatisfying, the thing about movie aliens is their typical lack of any essential alienness. Too often they're either just like us or some animal life we have on this planet. Perhaps the human mind simply cannot consider what intelligence…
