1900s

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It was the movie that stunned audiences, shocked the MPAA and marked the debut of one of the most uncompromising filmmakers in modern horror. Golden Globe winner Dylan McDermott (The Practice) stars as a post-apocalyptic scavenger who brings home a battered cyborg skull for his metal-sculptor girlfriend. But this steel scrap contains the brain of the M.A.R.K. 13, the military’s most ferocious bio-mechanical combat droid. It is cunning, cruel and can reassemble itself. Tonight, it is reborn….and no flesh shall be spared. Stacey Travis (Ghost World) co-star – along with appearances by Iggy Pop, Lemmy of Motorhead and much by Ministry and Public Image Ltd. – in the kick-ass sci-fi thriller from Richard Stanley (Dust Devil) that Fangoria calls “gritty, trippy and frightening….Hardware is one of the best horror movies you’ve never seen!”Read More »

This stunning example of Edwardian cut-and-paste creativity, powered by magical scissors and Hunts Fish Glue, is part of the origin story of British animation. Former stage magician and special effects pioneer Walter Booth was one of the pioneers in adding stop-motion filming frame by frame to make static objects and still images appear to move to the filmmakers armoury.Read More »

Felicity Rash wrote:
During the war years, film developed as a novel and effective vehicle for primary and secondary war propaganda. Visual images of a heroic Self and a terrifying enemy Other were a popular means of conveying a nationalist message and boosting patriotic sentiment. […] In Der Heimat Schützengraben (1916) a farmer newly returned from the East Prussian front tells of the horror he experienced when fleeing from Russian soldiers. His story brings him sympathy from a group of villagers from whom he is requesting a loan. At the end of the film, children are shown opening up their piggy-banks. An old man makes an emotional speech to the villagers, and hence the film’s audience, telling them to lend money to the state …Read More »

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Baby’s Toilet is a 1905 British short film directed by Cecil Hepworth. The film features Hepworth’s baby daughter Elizabeth being bathed and dressed by her nurse, and was categorised by Hepworth as a “Domestic Scene”. In the film Hepworth combines a series of shots to produce a narrative depicting the bathing process from beginning to end. He would later acknowledge the influence of the pioneering work of the Lumière brothers on this and other similar films he produced in the 1900s. The print of Baby’s Toilet survives, and Patrick Russell of the British Film Institute observes: “Long after Elizabeth Hepworth’s own death, the affecting innocence of infancy remains a basic human theme. Baby’s Toilet has lost none of its charm.Read More »

An unscrupulous and greedy capitalist speculator decides to corner the wheat market for his own profit, establishing complete control over the markets.Read More »

A king exacts vengeance upon his faithless mistress and her lover.Read More »

Set in an early cinema house, this comic short illustrates the problems with the gals’ hats obscuring the movie patron’s line of vision.Read More »

Plot: A greedy tycoon decides, on a whim, to corner the world market in wheat. This doubles the price of bread, forcing the grain’s producers into charity lines and further into poverty. The film continues to contrast the ironic differences between the lives of those who work to grow the wheat and the life of the man who dabbles in its sale for profit.Read More »

Melodrama about a rich father who gains custody of his child while the mother goes off in tears. Of course, the child is miserable even though he has everything in the world but after a weekend trip at his poor mother’s house, the child realizes that money isn’t everything and he has to convince the father that his money is evil.Read More »