New direction: Ant Timpson at Auckland’s Hollywood Cinema, owned by his brother, Matt.
Ant Timpson is the creator of the Incredibly Strange Film Festival, purveyor of insanely gory films and possessor of a deep streak of black humour. He likes horror and mayhem and what most normal people might regard as sicko stuff.
Do you know what trepanation is? I didn’t. Timpson does. Of course he does. His first short film, Crab Boy, involved “a pregnant woman who got hit on the head by a falling giant crab claw and died during childbirth”. The practice of trepanation – which involved drilling holes in people’s skulls to let evil spirits out and which presumably is now out of medical fashion – featured in a script he wrote and, god only knows how, got a grant for.
He had an obsession with holes in heads and “that jaw-dropping home movie Heartbeat in the Brain, where Amanda Feilding drills into her own head in 1970”. What do you mean you’ve never heard of it?
You really wouldn’t want to drill into Timpson’s head. It must be incredibly strange in there. I read him a quote: “Really, I reject people’s attempts to portray me as some sort of unprincipled smut peddler. To be
