Thus, Melbourne band Super Wild Horses thought it would be fitting to arrange an evening at The Tote dedicated entirely to the unholy fringe stylings of Lux and Ivy, and they recruited a slew of other local acts to help them do it.

Pearls kicked off the evening, atop a stage strewn with a strange mess of spiderwebs and shrunken heads, with a thrumming rendition of Can’t Hardly Stand It. Next, Hissy Miyake brought their gothic schoolgirl sensibilities to the fore, managing to sound at once cutsie and, in true Cramps style, also a little frightening.

It’s unfortunate, but whether Melbourne’s hip-and-trendies can live up to the wild trashpunk antics The Cramps should elicit is debatable. There were a few seasoned fans visible, but the crowd was mostly composed of well-groomed hipster-children. Soon a skin-headed British gentleman started menacingly pacing around the floor, eventually getting so frustrated that nobody was joining him, he yelled back at the crowd in exasperation: “AUSTRALIANS DON’T DANCE!” The hipsters stared nervously into their beers.

Super Wild Horses, looking most vixen-y, were joined by guests from UV Race, The Bowers and The Twerps to bash through some classics, among them an impressive version of Can Your Pussy Do The Dog which mustered almost as much spit and bristle as the original.

In tribute to the genre-bending aspect of The Cramps, Richie 1250 & The Brides of Christ evoked a swampy, doowop-interpretation, playing covers and original songs inspired by the band. Teen Archer brought back a more frenetic energy and the crowd finally decided it would be a good idea to start dancing. By the time Woolen Kits mounted the stage to play through the EP Gravest Hits in all its trash-addled glory, The Tote had become a damp pit of thrashing and rather amorphous gogo-dancing.

An evening which didn’t quite evoke the fizzing, spitting, oozing temper of The Cramps themselves, but an enjoyable one all the same.

Thankfully, Miles Phillip (aka Miles Cosmo)’s Metropolis: Audio Redux spares audiences the power ballads and instead employs a more Eno-esque approach. Taking over a year to refine, Phillip’s personally crafted electronic soundscape takes Lang’s classic dystopian vision and dresses it with dark and contemporary tonality.

Screened at Loop Bar on a particularly soggy Wednesday evening, a bedraggled and rain-drenched group of cinephiles took refuge in the back room and waited to be immersed in a filmic world of lavish sets, class tensions, and ostentatious pantaloons.

An intensely pulsating beginning suggests that Phillip’s interpretation might verge on becoming an overblown aural affront, however it soon softens into something else entirely. Gentler, more melodic traces are introduced and Lang’s iconic water fountain scene is given new emotional depth. As the camera lingers on the maidenly Maria, the score manages to evoke a genuine sense of longing, where other versions have felt flat, forced, or camp.

The score succeeds in capturing the film’s dichotomous sensibilities, being at once humanist and machine-like. The undulation between throbbing scenes of mob anarchy and more gentle moments of emotional weight, are echoed deftly by Phillip’s sound.

The evening was given an even more surreal aural element as, during the quieter moments of the score, fragments of gangster rap and The Velvet Underground could be heard bleeding through from the Loop’s main room.

Metropolis: Audio Redux, offers a distinct interpretation and will delight cinephiles and experimental music geeks in equal measure.

Originally penned by Eugene Ionesco in 1959, the play is said to be inspired by the German occupation of France, and allegorical for the “collective psychosis” of uprising Nazism. Five Pound Theatre’s interpretation is directed by Jason Cavanagh, and features fellow Five Pound collaborators, Susannah Frith, Giuseppe Mauceri and Adrian Dean, plus an impressive ensemble of actors and acrobats.

An economical set folds around the outside of the room, which Cavanagh describes as “kind of like a large pop-up book”. Once audience members have expectantly taken their seats in the middle, characters soon converge onto the nebulous stage, and the frenetic performance begins.

Rhinoceros centres around the slightly hapless Berenger, who, after being denounced a drunken fool in the opening scene, harbours an increasingly confused expression as his friends and co-workers steadily succumb to the strange urge of transformation. A strong cast of supporting characters are featured: a rakish logician with slight Captain Jack Sparrow tendencies; a neurotically raving leftist; a lady hysterical about her dear cat being mauled by a rogue Rhinoceros.

The literal shaking, rattling and window pane-clattering that signifies incoming rhino attack, manages to evoke genuine terror, and will have you questioning the structural integrity of the somewhat charmingly dishevelled venue.

The rhinocerotic costumes seem to have been designed by someone with a slight steam punk fetish, featuring stylised gasmasks and swathes of green leather. After their respective transformations the beastly characters each seem to achieve an individual, yet also creepily uniform, set of birdlike movements. By the final scene their animalistic moans reach such a volume that it surely must disturb the window-washers on the Punt Road intersection.

The inclusion of takeaway coffee cups and multiple Apple products assumes that this is a decidedly contemporary rendition, however temporality and location stand back to accommodate Ionesco’s original exploration of the struggle between firm individualism and fear of isolation.

Don’t ignore the rhinocerotic facts: Rhinoceros is absurdly entertaining.