The Twinkling Twilight of Mr. Rollin

It's hard to believe it, but he's gone.

He's no longer with us. For the first time in our lives, we live in a world without Jean.

He'd been sick for a long time, but he forged on despite the hardships.

That's how powerful his passion was. Like a priest's calling to God, his devotion to filmmaking was a vocation.

When I was a kid, he was someone I read about. His work was impossible to find, but there were stills in books like David Pirie's The Vampire Film that iced my nerve endings and ignited my sense of wonder. So THIS was cinema???!!!

In a dusty second hand bookshop I discovered a magazine called Midi Minuit Fantastique, an incredible labor of love that often devoted pages and pages to the work of Mr. Rollin.

The magazine would inspire the late Frederick S. Clarke to create the American Cinefantastique, another incredible tome, at least under Clark's watch.

Ironically, Rollin's often maligned (by many) and deeply loved (by a loyal few) work would inspire others to create and re-create and venture deeper into long buried genres in order to unearth treasures as precious as his.

Few, of course, were ever quite THAT precious.

Midi Minuit, to me, was like a shrine to the marginalized films of the imagination, and Jean was one of its gods. He existed in a twinkling twilight to me, a world where creation was not second guessed by a man in a suit or polluted by too much money. His work, finessed on the penny pinching planet of his unique imagination, always stood apart from the rest because its orbit was deliciously unconventional.

Rollin was not a consenting role model to me as a filmmaker, but he was a role model in so many ways. His eternal struggle to make films from his heart made my struggle (also eternal) a little bit easier. If Jean could keep pushing the barrow, so could I. If Jean could persevere, so could I. If Jean could dare to embark on a project driven only by personal faith, so could I.

My film Defenceless was certainly partly inspired by Jean's Living Dead Girl and fueled by a mutual love of the sea.

Already I sense the yawning hole he's left, a hole that can only be filled with sweet memories of first encounters and shared new encounters with his celluloid children.

Mr. Rollin, you came and went and bequeathed us a mint of wonders.

Thank you so much.

The Gunman Always Cums Twice

I know, I know, I wrote about my movie The Masturbation Gunman (2000) last month. At the time, however, I didn't have these great stills to share; they were taken by my brother, Colin, who is an excellent still photographer. He always captures the feeling of the moment in a professional, dynamic way.

In this scene, The Masturbating Gunman (Robin Brennan) is interrupted in the middle of a phone call by three assassins. While remaining on the line, he dispatches one of them with a bullet and the other with an act of disembowelment. To rub salt into the wound, he shows the man his own balls and scrotum and beats him across the face with them. The third assassin gets away.

In this still, the Gunman penetrates the fort where his sibling 'Sister Mary Van Hooten' (Nene Powell) is being held by 'Helmut Gunta'.

Ordered to find 'Gunta' a virgin, his henchmen grab 'Sister Mary Van Hooten'.

That's me (in a cameo) on the left. On the right is Scottish-born George "Cunty McFuck" Gladstone, a popular Melbourne cult actor. He also appeared in my films Sensitive New Age Killer (as an assassin) and Defenceless (as a rapist who is hacked to pieces by the film's heroine).

I once asked George where his nickname, "Cunty McFuck", came from. It was given to him by his mother when he was a kid, he told me. Several years later, his mother confirmed this fact to my face.

"Why did you call him that?' I inquired.

She replied in a matter-of-fact tone: "Because the boy was such a Cunty Mcfuck."

And there you have it.

As 'Sister Mary Van Hooten' waits for her first audience with 'Helmut Gunta', the eyes of her perverted kidnappers drill right through her.

First in line is "Cunty McFuck", of course, who could always be relied on to deliver a solid, mean-spirited performance.

'Helmut Gunta' (Peter Beitans) was a crazed Coffin Joe-type character whose soul purpose in life was to sire a son. Peter, whose background was in the theatre, appeared originally in my unreleased film The Sentimental Assassin ('96) as a crime boss. He was then cast in the fun Spagehetti Western homage A Bullet in the Arse ('93), in which I played a gay gunman who is blasted off a cliff.

The little girl who brings The Masturbating Gunman (Robin Brennan) a glass of water, thereby reviving him from a state of exhaustion, was truly terrified of the latex mask. It took many hours to shoot what amounted to approximately six shots of her. By the time this final shot was filmed, she'd overcome most of her fear.

Needless to say, she never saw the movie.

Not many other people did, either.