Monday, December 21, 2009

Incident at Uluru and Other Undiscovered Aussie Films

I had never heard of The S.P.A.S.H. until today when Matt Riviera mentioned it on Twitter. They are "The Society for the Preservation of Australian Secret Histories, which is an independent organisation dedicated to the discovery and study of undocumented, suppressed and censored historical events that have occurred in Australia since becoming a federation on the 1st of January 1901." Basically they work in showing you things that have heretofore been unseen.

Thing is, it's all a big ruse. I love it!

The S.P.A.S.H., I take it, is essentially a new and interesting way for whoever it is that runs the joint to get their work out there. The first of their "undocumented, suppressed and censored historical events" to be uncovered is the work of cult leader Ray "Millennium Ray" Author" who ran a cult/film studio in the Australian outback. The studio was called Dreamtime 79 and they made many films as a way of getting the Dreamtime cult message to large audiences, an effort that ultimately failed. What we have left is this suspiciously well-preserved series of poster artwork for films such as Incident at Uluru, TasMANIA!, Cemetary Dogs and The Lair of the Lyre Bird.

Some of the absolutely stunning pieces of artwork are shown below, but click here to see the rest of them. If you're going to make up an entirely fictional cult movie studio as a method of showing off your poster designs (including an extensive history) then I think they deserve to be seen.



Is it bad that all of these posters are better than almost all of the posters made for real movies? And that all of these movies have such wonderful titles and delicious artwork that I instantly want someone to actually make them. They would have to be in the style of 1970s and '80s "ozploitation" flicks though. What a hoot!

Of course, the whole thing could be entirely real, in which case...