MOVIE News: THE DEATH PARADE - THE UNHOLY SMOKE OF 'LOON'

Fabrizio Federico (filmmaker)

Death & cinema has always been a powerful union, people are fascinated by serial killers, car crashes and violence in general, but in art-house films ambiguity & uneasiness is much more involved on a personal level. ''My maxim has always been create in the dark, shine in the light'' says Loon's director Fabrizio Federico.

''I call it Mistakeology, it's best to stamp on the eggshells of Neoism. This is my darkest film yet!''
  
The lo-fi experimentalism is a big plus from the filmmakers point of view, in that he has completed the movie he dreamed of making, and since it was on zero-budget, if the film bombs financially it doesn't matter.
It's a long list of filmmakers living the cinema dream this way, film outlaws such as 
Abel Ferrara, Jim Jarmusch, Larry Clark, John Cassevetes, Todd Haynes, Alex Holdridge and all the way to the present day. 
Loon is an irrational movie, and a natural extension to this cannon of filmmaking.

''I don't want to smooth out my rough edges, like using a script or being linear, it's probably never gonna fucking happen I enjoy being spontaneous and childlike too much. Being avant-garde is normal to me, it's like a spider's web.'' 

When a director decides to use as the soundtrack to his new film, an album recorded at the cursed Boleskine house in Scotland, previously owned by the notorious magician Aleister Crowley and then Led Zeppelin's virtuoso guitarist Jimmy Page, you know that you're about to enter into Grimm's fairy tale's. But not everybody's gonna understand this film's purpose I can guarantee that. This is the cinema for the future, but the speed of the attention span of this movie is diabolical.

   ''I don't think my true fans have been born yet.''

Films such as Natural Born Killers and We Need To Talk About Kevin have addressed the issue that goes into the making of a murderer. The beauty of Loon is that it takes the primal experimental side Oliver Stone's Killers and the poetic stillness of Lynne Ramsay Kevin and transfuses them together. 

In LOON you witness the family environment, including how the NHS is responsible for encouraging the parents to judge their children and label them under the umbrella of a medical condition. But mix it with delusions of grandeur, drum lessons, a Folie à deux relationship and a lunatic streak, what you get is a ticking time bomb.

The main character Charlie brings to mind lone killers who one day snap and go on an uncontrollable rampage, such as Charles Whitman, Mark Chapman, and Jodie Foster's stalker John Hinckley Jr. A person can change his home, religion and passion but not his family. What this film understands is the root of what creates a serial killer. 
The invisible puppet master from your past trauma, pulling the strings that creates new tragedy.

''I just want people to find the movie, it's been a complete DIY operation filmed on a CCTV camera, and is only gonna be available in digital form (it's on YouTube), I've got the passion and commitment to do it all myself but to keep it simple, without going through the headache of having a team... I should treat myself to an ice cream.''

http://fabriziofederico.co.uk/

CHAOTIC CINEMA - 'LOON' A CURSED MASTERPIECE [WATCH FREE]

When the director decides to use as the soundtrack to his new film an album recorded at the cursed Boleskine house, previously owned by the notorious magician Aleister Crowley and then Led Zeppelin's virtuoso guitarist Jimmy Page, you know that the sweet sinful life is on the horizon.

We'll have to wait and see how the film Loon divides audiences, and what intellectual debates will materialise over the films topics on family, obsession, abuse, racism, homophobia and Brexit. But what this experimental chaotic tale is really designed to show is a sick twisted family saga that could be happening right next door to you - they could even be your very own neighbour.

Ladies and gentlemen meet the Sheen family.

A spectacle machine is never a good neighbour. Their teenage son Charlie is both goofy and violent, but his racist/homophobic perspective is driven by his twin obsession of becoming a superstar drummer like his idol Keith Moon, which is matched by his uncontrolled passion for his batshit crazy but sensuous older cousin, Georgia. 

The director Fabrizio Federico is very quiet but also very funny and slightly unusual, the whole nutcase thing came from him smoking pot because he didnt really have a temper before that. ''I just say how things make me feel, I hate being let down and I lose it sometimes, other then that Im happy to chill and see what happens.''
He's a very ambitious person and see's underground & experimental cinema being appreciated by a much younger international audience. ''Im giving the audience the benefit of the doubt, Im guessing if you're into my films your a bit wild to begin with'', ''a family can be like a war zone, only these characters dont care about landing on a mine.''

Getting that buzz-film reputation, Fabrizio is as much an intriguing character as his films, with a dark depth to them concerning shamanism, reincarnation, sex and addiction, they also have that pop-culture pulse beat that early Tarantino and Korine bring to cinema. That vivid film geek quality, except instead of being into genre films he's into cinematic anarchy.

Folie à deux (/fɒˈli ə ˈdu)  French for "madness of two"

• Bonnie & Clyde
• Ian Brady & Myra Hindley
• Sid & Nancy
• Kurt & Courtney
• Charles Starkweather & Carol Ann Fugate

History is littered with similar couples, egging the other partner on to see how far the other will go.

filmmaker Fabrizio Federico

  

LUCIFER RISING - Jimmy Page's chilling soundtrack

Step into the fun house where music, cinema and the occult finally mix.

The music itself is wonderfully perverse: a languid but steadily building Middle Eastern-sounding drone, festooned with evil chanting, tabla, screaming mellotron, a sonically shifting low frequency foreboding ambience and shimmering 12-string guitar work. It’s a mad, diabolical symphony of beautiful evil; a fascinating piece of unconventional aggressively avant-garde music from one of the rock era’s most mysterious living legends, so intertwined in mysticism that he even sent an assistant out to Egypt to buy the 'Stele of Ankh-ef-en-khonsu'. The stele is also known as the "Stele of Revealing" and is a central element of the religious philosophy Thelema founded by Aleister Crowley.

In Rolling Stone’s December 2012 cover story “Jimmy Page Looks Back,” Page said “...there was a request, suggesting that Lucifer Rising should come out again with my music on. I ignored it.”

Guitar World: There was always a certain amount of speculation about your occult studies. It may have been subtle, but you weren’t really hiding it.

Page: I was living it. That’s all there is to it. It was my life – that fusion of magick and music.

Guitar World: Your use of symbols was very advanced. The sigil on Led Zeppelin IV and the embroidery on your stage clothes from that time period are good examples on how you left your mark on popular culture. It’s something that major corporations are aggressively pursuing these days: using symbols as a form of branding.

Page: You mean talismanic magick? Yes, I knew what I was doing. There’s no point in saying much about it, because the more you discuss it, the more eccentric you appear to be. But the fact is – as far as I was concerned – it was working, so I used it. But it’s really no different than people who wear ribbons around their wrists: it’s a talismanic approach to something.

Young filmmaker Fabrizio Federico says the music and Lucifer Risings feel have been a big influence on his new film Loon, ''I think the vibe that they came across is phenomenal, it's eerie and exotically fascinating in that it feels evil. It's a very heavy creation, it's a beast. One day when I get a chance I'm going to replace Bobby Beausoleil's soundtrack and replace it with Jimmy's, he'd like that, him and Kenneth should make peace before it's too late.''

Being able to picture Jimmy in the dark at Aleister Crowley's haunted Boleskine House creating this music has always fascinated in that it feels so dark and hypnotic like a cobra. Where was this different music coming from, in 1972-73 with the speed of Zeppelin's ascent the adrenaline of success mixed with Jimmy's 'Do what though wilt'' evocation on the groove-out to Led Zeppelin III seems to have done the trick. But this music was different to what Page was recording with Led Zeppelin.

Page's soundtrack was finally released in 2012 after decades of it being a sought after prize and one of Led Zeppelin's biggest bootleg's to own. It's the type of album you put on before an Eyes Wide Shut naked virgin scene as she lies down on the alter and the ceremony begins. 

At 31 minutes the soundtrack is a short and sweet spell, entrancing the listener mere seconds into it's first peculiar Moroccan drone, similar to some of Brian Jones's experiments in 1967 on The Rolling Stones 'Satanic Majesties Request' album inspired by the Master Musicians of Joujouka in Morocco and their pipes of pan goat sacrifice. 

Page in his home studio

The band Mao on Federico's soundtrack for Loon taps into this pagan/kashmir atmosphere. ''I recorded the guitar parts at Boleskine House, I had my walkman on with the backing tracks playing along and brought my portable guitar amp into the house and recorded in the burnt bedroom with the pentagram mattress on the floor, which was used as an ouji board by local kids. Then I recorded in the hallway which is still sublime. At one point the toilet flushed by it's self, you can hear it on the mix. I recorded the guitar into my mobile phone, smoked some weed and it's some of the most supernatural music I've ever played.''

Director Fabrizio Federico

Eventually Page’s music escaped in 1981—probably sourced from the magnetic track from an early 23-minute-long “to be continued” print of Lucifer Rising that Anger showed potential investors (I’ve seen this, it’s pretty incredible)—when it hit the bootleg market as “Solo Performances by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant,” a limited edition LP with a green wax seal. Another blue vinyl version was released in a Kabbalistically numbered limited edition. Better quality digital versions started making the rounds on torrent trackers around 2005 and last year Jimmy Page released the music he’d composed for Anger’s film via his website on very limited edition red vinyl that sold out instantly.

Listen for your selves on the extended edition:

Filmmaker Fabrizio Federico tours Aleister Crowley's Boleskine House

Hanging out in the notorious old pent house Boleskine.
The vibes in the place are unreal. I took a chair home, would have been a shame to see it ruined. It's like stepping into a void, especially the back room, black ooze drips from the taps and there's a sulfor scent mixed with weed in the house. Back of the house you can see the mountain scene that was used in the Song Remains the Same.