Drive-In to the #Melbourne International Film Festival #MIFF #geekgirl #zombies

Friday July 30 & Saturday July 31
Shed 4, North Wharf Road
Victoria Harbour, Docklands, Melbourne

Open Channel have joined forces with MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival) to present two nights of Drive-In Cinema at Shed 4. Rev up your engines, lay down the front seat and head for the Docklands end of Bourke Street.

Friday July 30, 9.15pm
Machete Maidens Unleashed! + For Yr Height Only
Buy Tickets

Machete Maidens Unleashed!
(Mark Hartley, Australia, 2009, 85 mins)
Admission 18+

Busty babes, mutated monsters and midget secret agents, the Filipino genre films of the 70s and 80s had it all. Saturating drive-ins around the world, the Philippines became a dreamland for exploitation filmmakers with cheap labour, exotic scenery and non-existent health and safety regulations!

The all-too often overlooked world of Filipino exploitation flicks gets the Mark Hartley (Not Quite Hollywood) treatment in Machete Maidens Unleashed! Featuring interviews with Roger Corman, Joe Dante, John Landis, Eddie Romero and a host of filmmakers, actors and critics, each with a story about a genre with no scruples, no scripts, no boundaries and – more often than not – no clothes.

Screens with For Y’r Height Only (Eddie Nickart, Philippines, 1981, 93 mins)

This Filipino heightsploitation classic starring 2″9′ action hero Weng Weng is a satire of the James Bond series that – while featuring a hero short in stature – doesn’t fail to measure up in the cheesy action department.

Saturday July 31, 9.15pm
Survival of the Dead + Down Terrace
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Survival of the Dead
(George A Romero, USA, 2009, 90 mins)
Admission 18+

The sixth film in the Dead series from zombie king George A. Romero.

Offering up the flesh-chomping effects enthusiasts have come to know and love, Romero’s franchise continues with a pulpy Western-influenced tale that follows Sarge (a minor character from Diary of the Dead) and his deserter band of soldiers.

After stumbling across an exiled Irishman called O’Flynn, Sarge and his militia head to the remote outpost of Plum Island. What they encounter is a stand-off between O’Flynn and a rival clan over whether the zombies should be annihilated or confined until a cure is found. As the conflict escalates, Sarge’s band find themselves fighting to survive.

screens with: Down Terrace (Ben Wheatley, UK, 2009, 89 mins). Admission 18+

This black suburban comedy slickly marries family drama to crime-flick to produce a cross-genre gem.

Father-and-son gangster duo Bill and Karl, released from a four-month stint in a Brighton prison, settle back into a routine of drinking, pot-smoking and crime. But there’s a snitch in their midst, and the dysfunctional family of thugs are set to explode with violence.

Brimming with menace, Down Terrace stars co-writer Robin Hill alongside his real-life wife and father, and features a chilling crime clan matriarch that puts Jacki Weaver’s performance in Animal Kingdom to shame.

Mathematical Model for Surviving a Zombie Attack

It is possible to successfully fend off a zombie attack, according to Canadian mathematicians. The key is to “hit hard and hit often.”

Oh yes, somebody actually did a study on mathematics of a hypothetical zombie attack, and published it in a book on infectious disease. So, while we still don’t know what to do if a deadly asteroid takes aim at Earth, an unlikely but technically possible situation, we now know what to do in case of a zombie attack.

“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

Betsy Mason for Wired writes:
Having spent a fair amount of time mixing science with beer in the wee hours while trying to finish a thesis, I’m guessing that at some point, a graduate student who had spent far too many hours tweaking a mathematical model of infectious disease in the basement of a Canadian university said something like this: “What would happen if we made it so they could come back to life?”

More from Wired Science News for Your Neurons…

even books #9: vampires vs. zombies

Do you prefer blood, or brainzzzz?

NOTE CHANGE OF DATE: Your deathtination this April 4th? Why, the even books: VAMPIRES vs ZOMBIES party, of corpse!  Do you prefer blood, or brains? Read up, garb up and get your ghoul on for a night ripe with fangbangers and zombie hombres. |

There will be:

• a fight to the death (aka “formal debate”)
• prizes for swampiest threads and most terrorific zombie walk
• vampire voiceovers
• fangtastic flicks
• free beer, kept as cold as satan’s heart
• much more, to be announced (check the obituaries)

Plus: WE NEED YOU! Like a pain in the neck! No really. If you spot a vamp in the wild, please send us a letter (to 29 Percival Rd Stanmore NSW 2048) in Ye Olde English for INCLUSION IN THE ZZZZINE FOR THE NIGHT. Zero in on a zombie? We need a lab report in sci-gobbledegook. Illos also welcome!

So suckers, see you scare …

+ + even books

Whet your appetite with some of these babies:

For the Zombie Hombres

FRANKENSTEIN; or, The Modern Prometheus (Mary Shelley) (1818)
The Serpent and the Rainbow (Wade Davis) (1985)
Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (Wade Davis) (1988)
George Romero’s original Day Of The Dead script: http://www.horrorlair.com/scripts/dayofthedead.txt (1985)
Zombie (Joyce Carol Oates) (1996) – winner of the Bram Stoker Award
The Zombie Survival Guide (Max Brooks) (2003)
World War Z (Max Brooks) (2006)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance-now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! (Jane Austen & Seth Graheme-Smith) (2009)

For the Fangbangers

The Vampyre (John Polidori) (1819)
DRACULA (Bram Stoker) (1897)
The Vampire Chronicles (Anne Rice) (1976-2003)
Lost Souls (Poppy Z. Brite) (1992)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Richard Tankserley Cusick, adapter) (1997)
Southern Vampire series (Charlaine Harris) (2001-2009) – upon which HBO show True Blood is based

Host: even books
Type: Party – Night of Mayhem
Network: Global
Start Time: Saturday, April 4, 2009 at 9:00pm
Location: CuriousWorks
Street: 402/11 Randle St
City/Town: Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia

Email: evenbooks@evenlovershavefights.com
http://www.evenlovershavefights.com/evenbooks/