#independent filmmaking
The opening scene for The Astronot film featuring President John F Kennedy’s historic 1962 Speech at Rice University in which the goal was stated to land a man on the moon & return him safely by the end of the decade. The independent film by director Tim Cash & screenwriter @pennanbrae streams on Prime Video via the below link.
Early sketch of ‘The Astronot’ movie poster by artist John Keane. It was quite beautiful to see this early rendering & its relation to the finished artwork. The Oregon-shot work set in the 1960s streams on @primevideo in the USA & UK (& perhaps other countries I’m not aware of at the moment) via the profile link or below. The 72-minute independent film was shot in Bend & La Pine by FFE Films director Tim Cash & written by Vancouver screenwriter @pennanbrae. The soundtracks for the film also stream on @spotify & @applemusic. If seeking some weekend viewing & have a chance to tune in, thanks very much for sharing your time with it.
Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls (1988)
Directed by Meredith Lucas
Doomsy’s Rating: 93/100 (on my Great Films list!)
A radical, punk explosion of feminine rage.
I don’t even know how to describe this, other than it being absolutely essential viewing for riot grrrls and punk rock girls everywhere. This is certainly not an easy sell to a lot of people, as some of the production values are unquestionably shaky, but director Meredith Lucas and producer Jon Jost (yes, Jon Jost!) make up for it with some aggressive and hyperkinetic cinematography and stream-of-consciousness editing, not to mention a BANGING score. Lucas is demonstrably a fan of the Russ Meyer school of empowerment, but with a firmly lesbian-gaze toward her protagonists. Everything about this film is caricatured to the point of becoming basically a cartoon. There’s loads of over-the-top comic-strip splattery violence (usually with the abhorrent men on the receiving end) and tons of scenes of the girls walking around carrying immense shotguns and wearing punk leather jackets and the whole movie just feels like the biggest riot grrrl recruitment ad I’ve ever seen (in the best way possible).
It’s interesting to note how the story is told from a male perspective (a clearly-defined attack on that gender’s perceptions of women as a threat to their own insecurities), as all the men depicted are either buffoons, selfish pigs, or almost playing a comic-book level of misogyny in a villain-screaming-about-world-domination way. There’s sequences where the male narrator literally describes women as “another, more dangerous species” and it is through this satire that we understand not only the brilliantly self-deprecating style of Lucas (not unlike Jon Moritsugu’s attack on L.A. culture’s historically despicable treatment of Asian-Americans) where violence begets violence, but here in the fantasy world of The Leather Girls it is the women who hold all the power, and all the best weapons. This is fantastic lo-fi filmmaking, and simply a cult classic waiting for to be found. If you love punk cinema, feminism, Lizzie Borden, or any of the 80s underground, this is gonna hit all the notes you want.
Please, everyone reading this give it a watch. It’s so worth a viewing.
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