Perth Voice Interactive

IF you need a left-field antidote for all those saccharine Christmas family movies, then check out the “nastiest, sick and twisted” film festival in Perth. 

Now in its 26th year, Trasharama is known for screening horror shorts with lots of gore and pitch black humour.

The festival was founded in 1997 by South Australia’s Dick Dale, who fronted nihilistic punk bands in the 1980s before turning his hand to making horror shorts and bad taste comedies.

He says his love of the macabre started when he was a school boy.

“I was inspired by my love of VHS rentals from the 1980s that I used to hire out when I lived in Queensland,” Dale says.

“Then there are the movies you only heard about, in whispers down the back of the bike sheds or having a dart behind the boy’s loo – video nasties. Banned films.

“What unseen terrors were on these movies that were too much for our delicate Queensland eyes?

“The Queensland Censorship Board was an overzealous lot so a lot, not all of the movies were overrated anyway. You’d end up watching them on some third-generation bootleg video dub. 

“They were bad quality with heaps of static and rolls and it made the films even more grimy.”

Seven years in the making, Dale’s award-winning debut feature film Ribspreader will be screening at Trasharama and he’ll be hosting a special Q&A.

The dark comedy follows Bryan Burns (Tommy Darwin), a former tobacco advertising icon whose life is in ruins.

After his mother dies of lung cancer, he is tormented by a talking cigarette from an anti-smoking billboard who blames him for his mother’s death.

Bryan’s already fragile mental state can’t handle the abuse and he snaps, transforming himself into The Ribspreader – a killer stalking the city streets, extinguishing smokers one-by-one and cutting out their lungs to make his macabre smoking jacket.

But in a city of murderers, freaks and perverts, The Ribspreader isn’t the only killer out there and it’s not long before a turf war erupts into a horrific showdown of explosive violence and bloody carnage.

“I thought it would be a great idea if an ex-cigarette icon goes completely bonkers and decides to make a ‘smoking jacket’ out of lungs!” Dale says. 

“It’s inspired by my love of 1980s horror and gore movies with lashings of my yobbo low-brow straylian humour!

“It really is a comedy. If you are entertained for 90 minutes I am happy. There’ s a lot going on in this movie. I have a phobia of boredom.”

Ribspreader was an epic labour-of-love – it took seven years to make and Dale coaxed heaps of industry folk into working on the film for free.

He even used his old punk network to persuade The Damned drummer Rat Scabies to appear in the movie, and there’s also a spot for actor Laurence R Harvey, who was in the infamous Human Centipede 2.

“Myself and my many talented friends who made Ribspreader , just had to see it to the end,” Dale says.

“It’s the craziest film to ever come out of South Australia – the home of Bad Boy Bubby and Wolf Creek. 

“So I pushed on and more people got involved and it snowballed!” 

Dale will host a Q&A screening of Ribspreader and will be on hand to sign blu-rays of his film.

The 18+ Trasharama Film Festival and the screening of the feature film Ribspreader are on Saturday January 6 at The Backlot, Simpson St in West Perth from 4pm-9pm. Tix and the full program at www.eventbrite.com. 

by STEPHEN POLLOCK