Author: Zach Fleming

MACBETH 3000: THIS TIME, IT’S PERSONAL

Posted on by Zach Fleming

MACBETH 3000: THIS TIME, IT’S PERSONAL
dir. Geoff Warren Meech, 2005
Canada. 114 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – 7PM ft Q&A with cast + crew, moderated by filmmaker Alex Megaro
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – 10PM ft Introduction with cast + crew, moderated by filmmaker Alex Megaro

TICKETS

This time it’s personal.

The President is dead. Murdered in his sleep by an unknown assassin. British Agent Macduff is sent in to investigate and soon finds himself confronting an old ally Macbeth – only this time, he’s the president…and it’s also very personal as implied by the subtitle. As stakes rise, car chases & light-sword battles ensue, allies become enemies and it becomes clear that there can only be one!

Part Shakespeare adaptation, part Bond parody, part war-on-terror-satire, not to mention easily one of the best feature films made entirely by high school students, MACBETH 3000 is a rare treat. You can feel the craft improve over the course of its making, packed to the brim with stunts and VFX that should have been well outside the scope of a home-brew Macbeth riff.

Director Geoff Meech went on to become one of the leading stunt people working in Toronto, with over a hundred credits to his name, including big budget Hollywood fare ranging from Suicide Squad to Black Phone 2.

This November, Spectacle is thrilled to host the US Theatrical Premiere of this hidden gem. Join us on Friday, 11/20 for a Q&A with cast and crew.

IN THE WOODS

Posted on by Zach Fleming

IN THE WOODS
dir. Lynn Drzick, 1999
USA. 81 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 10 PM

TICKETS

Vengeance is timeless.

A grieving firefighter and his hunting buddy dig up a mysterious grave in the woods and unleash a horned creature with a very long memory.

Shot on a $252,000 budget and hurled into video stores just before the millennium, IN THE WOODS is the kind of shot-on-16mm (and then transferred to Digital Betacam for editing), blood-soaked DIY monster movie that only exists because somebody in Kalamazoo, Michigan really wanted it to. DJ Perry (of Knight Chills fame) stars as Alex Kerwood, a fireman haunted by a mother and baby he couldn’t save, whose grief drives a wedge straight through his marriage. Naturally, the solution is a hunting trip with his buddy Wayne, deep into some very unlucky woods, where things quickly spiral when they stumble on, and dig up, a grave with a three-horned skull in it.

Writer/director Lynn Drzick throws practical monster effects, backwoods folklore, and soap-opera marital strife into a big pot and lets it simmer. The results are gnarly, sincere, and completely unconcerned with things like pacing or plausibility. Drzick, a Kalamazoo native, shot the whole thing on his home turf, roping in local landmarks like Henderson Castle and the now-shuttered Portage Pub, and even got the actual Portage Fire Department to set off real explosions for the film’s more volatile scenes.

This is the platonic ideal of a regional creature feature: a film made by people who clearly loved the genre, bankrolled just enough to actually build a monster suit, and abandoned by history until a recent Blu-ray resurrection dragged it back from the void of long-lost Beta SP masters.

We’re screening Drzick’s newly recut director’s edition, restored and expanded straight from that resurrected master with extra monster footage spliced back in — because if there’s one thing this movie needed more of, it’s the guy in the horn suit.

This Spectober, come dig up something you shouldn’t.

MORBID WEEKEND

Posted on by Zach Fleming

MORBID WEEKEND
dir. Chris Shields, 2026.
United States. 68 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 7:30 PM w/ Q&A
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18 – 5 PM w/ Q&A
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 10 PM

BUY TICKETS

In California’s San Gabriel Valley a pizza delivery driver dies while on the job leaving three orders unfulfilled. Later, a young woman mourns the dead driver, taking on a number of personas as she grieves. With the specter of the driver haunting the night, the pizzas finally arrive to their intended customers–better late than never. 

“There is nothing like Morbid Weekend, an exquisite assembly, a-a-a-a-a-almost more of a curation, of mesmerizing urban tableaux cut together in the dreamiest rhythms that sound the sensual depths of the nocturnal subconscious” – Guy Maddin

“Morbid Weekend is one of those films that moves just a bit ahead of the viewer but comes together as it unfolds in a way that preserves its essential mystery. Shields shows us that the isolation of his characters is rooted in form. The photo scroll scene functions as a quotidian meditation on cinema, motion and the look of love. Have a lovely weekend.” – Christopher Harris

FILMMAKER STATEMENT:

Morbid Weekend is a love letter to the San Gabriel Valley with all its eerie other-worldliness, poetic cinema, and shitty jobs. In a way it simply flowed from my life, the people in it, and the way I see time and space artistically. The film was made by a group of friends. There was no script. There’s almost no dialogue. The biggest expense was, appropriately enough, ordering food for everyone.

In my video work, I have always attempted to make the stupid and banal a little more beautiful, and nothingness a little more emotive. My mantra while making Morbid Weekend was high and low without compromise. I tried to embrace the totality of my artistic interests (punk and experimental music, horror, duration, poetry, humor, ellipses, film writing, etc), synthesizing the utter crap I love (Ray Dennis Steckler, Don Dohler, and worse) with a more elegant mode of cinema (India Song, Lancelot du lac, What Time Is It There?, Last Chants for a Slow Dance, Serene Velocity, and so many more) that’s equally important to me. In the end, I hope Morbid Weekend is a unique experience for the viewer that reads like poetry on screen and opens possibilities for them. I like to say it’s Tsai Ming-liang meets Pizza Hut.

Chris Shields is a film critic and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. As a writer he frequently contributes to Sight and Sound, Reverse Shot, Film Comment, Screen Slate, Cineaste, Vinegar Syndrome, Cinematographe, LARB, and a host of other film publications. As a filmmaker he has a large body of experimental video work that has screened around the world including at Chicago Underground Film Festival and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival. His experimental film, Channels, is featured on the streaming platform Paracme. He is the co-writer and co-star of Lindsay Denniberg’s cult favorite Video Diary of a Lost Girl (available from AGFA and Vinegar Syndrome) and her forthcoming feature Killer Makeover. He is also a moderator for the American Cinematheque, conducting Q and As with filmmakers such as Jon Jost and Tsai Ming-liang. As a musician he performed for years as Mr. Transylvania, a punk/noise performance project, and in the bands United Waters and Alien Trilogy. He has also had every minimum wage job imaginable, including pizza delivery. Morbid Weekend is his feature directorial debut.

Distributed by Factory 25

LES PROIES DU MAL

Posted on by Zach Fleming

LES PROIES DU MALS
dir. Antoine Pellissier, 1982
France. 147 min.
In French with English subtitles.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 5 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18 – 7:30 PM

TICKETS

Fragile residents of a nursing home find themselves struggling with Satanic energy. A door to hell just opened …

For years thought lost and only seen in a truncated 90 minute version, LES PROIES DU MAL is the debut feature of Antoine Pellissier, France’s king of drone-horror (most famous for the previously screened Spectacle classic FOLIES MEURTRIERES). Shot on super 8 with no sync sound, it follows a young woman who is sent to a rest home to recover from ‘trouble with her nerves’, only to discover a Satanic conspiracy.

Rescued in its uncut form by Bleeding Skull, Spectacle is thrilled to present this behemoth of bad vibes, synth, fog and gore in its entirety, as originally intended. At once enthralling, hypnotic, exhausting, hilarious, and unnerving, LES PROIES DU MAL has untold delights to offer for anyone willing to get on its wavelength.

SATAN’S MENAGERIE

Posted on by Zach Fleming

SATAN’S MENAGERIE
dir. Gary Griffith, 2001
USA. 101 min.
In English with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 24 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28 – MIDNIGHT

BUY TICKETS

See – Vampires! Demons! Ghouls! And Satan Himself!

The monsters of the world gather at a one-of-a-kind gathering. Who will attend and what kind of carnage will break out?

Dr. Craymoor (co-writer Thomas V. Powers, doing his best hammy public-access-Vincent Price) is a paranormal talk show host who dabbles in the dark arts in pursuit of fame and riches. We’ll refrain from spoiling the (surprisingly convoluted) plot, but it involves, among other things, a Vietnam vet turned werewolf, a half-man half-amphibian who escapes from a carnival sideshow, and the disciples of a centuries old blood cult called the ‘Sons of Jeramin’.

Not released until the early 2000s and shot in the mid-90s on whatever money one-shot filmmaker Gary Griffith could scrape together (including cash from selling his own comic book collection), SATAN’S MENAGERIE approximates the feeling of channel surfing through B-movies late at night while in the grip of a severe fever.

GAME OF PLEASURE

Posted on by Zach Fleming

GAME OF PLEASURE
dir. Dale E. Frantz, 1998
USA. 63 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 17 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 21 – MIDNIGHT

BUY TICKETS

Welcome to Pleasure — a sexual experience played at your risk.

Shot on video for the late-90s erotic-thriller market, GAME OF PLEASURE feels like a softcore Existenz for dummies. Writer/producer/star/co-editor Kevin Summerfield plays a hacker, stealing and selling games on the black market, and gets more than he bargained for when he stumbles on a new VR game called ‘Pleasure’, accidentally unleashing the horniest demon in DTV history (Home Shopping Network model turned adult film star Tammy Parks).

Features plentiful nudity, a nifty demon designed by Doug Ulrich (director of SCARY TALES and SNUFF KILLS), tons of shoddy 90s CGI effects and transitions – basically a perfect midnight movie.

DRONECORE MIDNIGHTS

Posted on by Zach Fleming

This July, Spectacle presents three midnight flicks united by a shared frequency: dronecore, the microbudget mode where genre scaffolding quietly collapses into texture and trance. Separated by decade and continent — French suburban gore, American experimental horror, and acid-house sci-fi — Folies Meurtriéres, Lost Prophet, and Suroh: Alien Hitchhiker arrive at the same destination through different doors: a cinema of dead air and degraded image, where obsessions and budget limitations fuse into something genuinely hypnotic.

FOLIES MEURTRIÈRES
dir. Antoine Pellissier, 1984
France. 48 min.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, JULY 11 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, JULY 13 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, JULY 17 – 10PM
SUNDAY, JULY 26 – 5PM

BUY TICKETS

A crazed killer wanders around killing several young women with various weapons. Is there a motive for these crimes or is it purely for the joy of killing?

A masked killer stalks and murders women in a French suburb. That’s it — no motive, no dialogue, no relief. What Pellissier delivers instead is a slasher boiled down to pure signal: forty-eight minutes of blown-out Super 8, warped synth, and gore effects that feel less like horror movie craft than evidence of something that maybe actually happened. Beautiful, cursed dead air, vibe cinema of the highest order.

Preceded by a screening of


THE CHOSEN ONE OF HELL
dir. Antoine Pellissier, 1985
France. 35 min.
In French with English subtitles.

Two year old little Cindy has been chosen by the devil to become the antichrist.

A short offering from Antoine Pellissier from the year after FOLIES – plays like a cross between a home-video recording of a satanic ritual and a no-budget remake of THE EXORCIST (Friedkin is actually name-checked in the opening credits) featuring a very unbothered toddler. As one Letterboxd user excellently describes it, “Cindy is the chosen one, Satan has a fit, and a priest takes a nap. It’s like discovering Chaucer while inhaling fumes at a gas pump.”

Restorations courtesy of Bleeding Skull.

LOST PROPHET
dir. Michael De Avila, 1992
USA. 74 min.
In English.

TUESDAY, JULY 7 – 10PM
SUNDAY, JULY 12 – 5PM
SATURDAY, JULY 18 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, JULY 29 – 10PM

BUY TICKETS

Unstable man spends the summer in an empty mansion, where he meets punks, serial killers and witches.

‘Lynchian’ is a term that gets thrown around ad nauseam, and frequently incorrectly, but this scrappy thesis film earns it, while carving out its own specific territory – what might be best described as American gothic filtered through the lens of a film student who’s seen too much Maya Deren (complimentary).

Shot on 16mm, edited, and scored by De Avila himself, and it shows (also complimentary). Part experimental horror, part fever dream journal, Lost Prophet is a singularly strange artifact of the early 90s DIY horror boom, the kind of film that could only be made by one person answering to no one.

Restoration courtesy of VHShitfest.

SUROH: ALIEN HITCHHIKER
dir. Patrick McGuinn, 1996
USA. 74 min.
In English.

MONDAY, JULY 6 – 10PM
FRIDAY, JULY 10 – 7:30PM ft Q&A with director Patrick McGuinn
TUESDAY, JULY 14 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, JULY 24 – MIDNIGHT

BUY TICKETS FOR 7/10 Q&A
BUY TICKETS

Why must you kill all the heroes?

Paul, a non-believer in life on other planets, late one night discovers a crash-landed and wounded alien. He rescues the being and is initiated into a psycho-sexual metamorphosis.

What starts out feeling like a familiar regional SOV sci-fi flick quickly morphs into something much stranger and more interesting than your average no-budget genre affair. Awash in acid-house pulse and LSD-smeared video, Suroh is queer, strange, and genuinely beautiful — less interested in alien contact as sci-fi premise than as a vehicle for transformation. One of the most unique SOV artifacts of the ’90s underground.

Restoration courtesy of Bleeding Skull. .

THE WORLD DROPS DEAD / WHEN THE MOON RETURNS

Posted on by Zach Fleming

THE WORLD DROPS DEAD
dir. Brandon Colvin, 2025
United States, 70 min
In English

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 7:30 w Q&A moderated by Joanna Arnow
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19TH – 7:30PM w Q&A moderated by Brandon Streussnig
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH – 5PM w Q&A moderated by Mark Asch
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21ST – 5PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25TH – 10PM

Q&A TICKETS

REGULAR TICKETS

Claire struggles to cope as the shock of her father’s passing ripples through her small Quaker community. Beset by visions and desperate to reunite with the only person who seemed to understand her, Claire reaches out to her father across the boundary of death.

to be followed by a screening of

WHEN THE MOON RETURNS
dir. Brandon Colvin, 2025
United States, 15 min
In English

Young Deirdre and her clan of druids eke out an itinerant existence in the forest. When the threat of Christianizing forces grows more imminent, a holy sacrifice is made that changes Deirdre’s life forever.

Writer/director Brandon Colvin (A Dim Valley) returns with another daringly poetic microbudget salvo from the American south. With The World Drops Dead and the accompanying animated short, When the Moon Returns, the director has created a cryptic cinematic diptych that fearlessly explores a trinity of interrelated concerns—love, faith, and death.

Part What Dreams May Come, part folk horror, part Clive Barker, part Takeshi Miike, Colvin’s pair of elegant new works represent the most exciting possibilities for contemporary independent film. Minimal yet thematically and visually ambitious, these idiosyncratic and emotionally raw films interrogate the darker sides of the human mind and heart without blinking and without suggesting easy answers. Elevated by Colvin and collaborator Aaron Whitt’s hypnotic score, and given thorny psychological depth by the dense, shadowy foliage of its wooded setting, The World Drops Dead is a film rich with sensorial delights.

When the Moon Returns supplements the feature with its own expressive and implicit mythic connections, turning pagan ritual into hallucinatory psychedelia. It’s a heady and satisfying pair of films that revel in their own esoteric complexities as works of intimate fantasy, love, and grief only possible outside of the mainstream.

CRITICAL FAILURE: ROLE-PLAYING HORROR

Posted on by Zach Fleming

Remember when rolling a twenty-sided die and eating pizza with your pals in your mom’s basement was literally perceived as performing witchcraft and ritual sacrifice, or at least worthy of a wedgie from your classmates? Tabletop role-playing games—and the Hasbro-owned DUNGEONS & DRAGONS more specifically—have reemerged over the last decade into a multi-billion dollar industry with the largest number of players the hobby has ever witnessed along with a seemingly endless stream of podcasts, video games, films, shows, and enclosure of the creative commons to cash in.
With role-playing experiencing a much deserved embrace among millions of people as a unique form of community and creativity, as corporate exploitation simultaneously riddles it hollow with meaningless products and online services, it’s hard to fathom a time when D&D was effectively culturally outlawed during a wave of evangelical moral panic that reached its heights in the mid-80’s and stained its reputation for generations.
In an urgent attempt to encourage that role-playing become evil again (i.e., a child-endangering, pornography-promoting, demonic cult practice), and to rally against this consumerist holiday season, Spectacle presents four D&D-adjacent horror-fantasy films from around the globe (or at least from Canada, Michigan, Florida and Chile) that traverse the years of the Satanic Panic. Featuring chopped up geeks, vampire freaks, and a role-player from beyond the grave!

KNIGHT CHILLS
dir. Katherine Hicks, 2001
USA. 82 min.
In English.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17 – 10 PM

ADVANCE TICKETS

Role-playing with a vengeance

John is an avid role-player. He has feelings for fellow RPer Brooke. But when Brooke makes it clear the feelings are far from mutual, John, in despair, takes his own life. In the wake of this, his friends and fellow gamers are stalked by a mysterious black knight.

One of the all too rare SOV features directed by a woman, KNIGHT CHILLS is a solidly crafted supernatural slasher (not to mention a Christmas movie!), featuring one of the more convincing losers to ever grace the screen.

Its full of lovely details that DnD players will appreciate the hell out of, some of the most useless cops in cinema history (redundant, I know) and ingenious low budget effects, KNIGHT CHILLS is due for a reappraisal.

Screening from a new remaster from the original SVHS master tapes.

 


ETERNAL BLOOD aka SANGRE ETERNA
dir. Jorge Olguin, 2002
Chile. 107 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 5 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 – 10 PM

ADVANCE TICKETS

It’s the Essence of Life…and Death.

Carmila is introduced by ‘M’ to a sinister role-playing game called “Eternal Blood”. Once settled in an abandoned house, the group meets Dahmer, a young man who practices vampirism rites and who begins to influence young people, or perhaps… turn them into vampires.

Goth teens in Chile play a vampire themed role-playing game that starts to bleed (hehe) into real life. Or does it? The only film of the series to include the internet – feels like a snapshot of a very specific time in early-internet-end-of-mall-goth culture.


SKULLDUGGERY
dir. Ota Richter, 1983
Canada. 95 min.
In English.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9 -10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 5 PM

ADVANCE TICKETS

It started as a game… until death started playing!

Adam is cursed: one of his ancestors played a game and fell victim to a sorcerer or possibly Satan. The curse manifests through Adam and the game, making him attend a strange amateur theater where immensely talentless people try to do farce and a janitor wanders around with a game of Tic-Tac-Toe on his back.

The oldest, and potentially the most bizarre of the series – features an incredible original song, a really strange sense of humor and pacing, some uncannily creepy moments, periodic cutaways to someone finishing the easiest puzzle to ever exist, and a horrendous puppet – not to mention some of the worst in local theater that Canada has to offer.

Also one of those movies where everyone inexplicably wants to fuck the bland pro(an)tagonist. An all around blast!

 


WAY BAD STONE
dir. Archie Waugh, 1991
USA. 84 min.
In English.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – MIDNIGHT
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20 – 5 PM

ADVANCE TICKETS

39 Gruesome Deaths!

A band of adventurers steals an enchanted stone, and earns a wizard’s desperate revenge. The wizard must summon all his old fighting comrades to get the artifact back – before its evil dooms their world.

Shot on video in Florida, featuring a cast of Renaissance Faire performers who the film was specifically written for, clearly thrilled able to flex their stunt skills while spilling as much blood and guts as possible – also features a non-zero number of actual swords and weaponry used in fight scenes – not to mention a killer theme song.

A shockingly cohesive and well wrought fantasy action mini-epic that the director affectionately referred to as a “home video that got out of hand”.

Screening from a new remaster courtesy of BLEEDING SKULL.

BUGGED

Posted on by Zach Fleming

BUGGED!
dir. Ronald K. Armstrong, 1996
USA. 82 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 – 10PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – 10PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 7:30PM

TICKETS

They Exterminate You!

Exterminators unwittingly create monsters by spraying crickets with a genetic mutating agent.

A wildly underrated mid-90s horror-comedy gem, BUGGED! was a passion project from writer/director/editor/star Ronald K. Armstrong. A huge fan of Troma films, he pitched the idea of a movie about killer crickets that would be told from a Black perspective to Lloyd Kaufman, and luckily for us, Troma decided to produce.

Shot by S. Torianno Berry (director of Spectacle favorite THE BLACK BEYOND) and starring an entirely Black cast, BUGGED! feels like a shockingly charming low budget cousin to GHOSTBUSTERS, featuring effective and goopy practical effects alongside genuine laughs and a refreshing lack of self awareness or irony that ruins a lot of Troma originals.

In a just world, this film would have led to bigger and better films for Ronald and his team, but at least we’ll always have BUGGED!