MORBO (AKA MORBIDNESS)
Dir. Gonzalo Suarez, 1972
Spain, 88 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 19 – 7:30 PM

Alicia and Victor are newlyweds – in fact, Morbo starts as they exit the church on their wedding day, and take to the road with a trailer to spend some time alone, together, on a camping honeymoon. At first, the solitude leaves the couple ample time to fool around and just relax in nature, but as small things start going missing, and Alicia increasingly feels like she is being watched, the couple comes face to face with some disturbing questions: Are they really alone in the woods? Does the house that Victor claims to have visited for water actually exist? Do Alicia and Victor even know who they married?

Morbo is a deliberately paced, four-character thriller that leaves the audience in the dark as much as Alicia is – the slow burn and increasingly tense atmosphere are more effective than a slasher running through the woods ever would be. Somehow, director Gonzalo Suarez makes the empty wilderness seem as claustrophobic as Catherine Deneuve’s apartment in Repulsion – with as much terror derived towards female sexuality, as well. Like a horror film directed by Luis Bunuel, Morbo leaves the audience unsure what is actually happening, what is in the characters’ minds, and what is just a cosmic joke.

TIGHTEN YOUR BELTS, BITE THE BULLET
Dirs. Martin Lucas, James Gaffney and Jonathan Miller
USA. 48 minutes.
Special thanks to Icarus Films.

THURSDAY, JULY 9 – 7:30PM (Q&A with filmmaker Martin Lucas)
TUESDAY, JULY 14 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, JULY 26 – 5:00PM

“It’s like there was a palace coup.” A searing comparison study in cutbacks undertaken by the governments of New York and Cleveland to ride out the late-70s financial crisis, Tighten Your Belts, Bite The Bullet is essential viewing in the era of prolonged neoliberalism. The documentary traces both the cuts and their consequences: how we got here (there), how many thousands of jobs were lost, city hospitals, fire stations and daycare centers closed. It’s a fascinating eye-of-the-storm glimpse at what would become Reaganomics – a vast cancellation/turnover of municipal and state services to private companies, further marginalizing the political viability of their utility in the name of something called “fiscal responsibility”.

The filmmakers also get their cameras up-close-and-personal to the bankers whose illegal bond manipulations sent the city into near-default in the first place, and probe the dubious debt-mortgaging plans exerted upon New York by their attendant, now forgotten advisory bureaus. You’ll see the “redlining” of specific neighborhoods struggling to pay rent, (insurance?) fires running untreated in Koch-era Greenpoint, and the neighborhood’s eventual promise of being repurposed (and thus, reopened for gentrification) in the future.

“Strikes me as conceivably the most intelligent, powerful, and informative rabble-rousing leftist film that I’ve seen in years… Exemplary in its clean, polemical construction, Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet deftly incorporates a specific popular struggle – the 18-month campaign in Brooklyn’s Northside to keep a firehouse – into its overall argument, without succumbing to any of the temptations of a political travelogue. In other words, it means business. ” –  Jonathan Rosenbaum, Soho Times, 1981

“Though (the filmmakers) touch only glancingly on the differences between the two cities’ political cultures, they bring to life clarion footnotes of New York tabloid history—including the eighteen-month occupation of a Greenpoint firehouse by longtime residents protesting its closing while peering into a future of ramped-up real-estate development with a blend of paranoia and prescience.” – The New Yorker

MIRRORS OF THE PLANET
aka Planetens Spejle
Dir. Jytte Rex, 1990
Denmark, 100 min.
In Danish with English subtitles

TUESDAY, MAY 5 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 15 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, MAY 18 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 27 – 10 PM

“Here is a passage through a wall of darkness; nothing appears anymore, neither beauty nor ugliness. It sounds easy, but in actual fact it rushes up from the heart of the planet. Like multicolored fire. An infinity of waste.”

Long before Love was the final frontier in INTERSTELLAR or Terence Malick balanced the universe between the poles of Nature and Grace in TREE OF LIFE, there was Jytte Rex’s MIRRORS OF THE PLANET – a dialectical discourse on death, lust and the cosmos that’s sorely due for reappraisal. The film is a probing battery of philosophical inquiries, with black holes and rock formations re-etched in the idiom of a dissolving (or not?) relationship between astronomer Adam Morgenstern (Ole Lemmeke) and his unnamed colleague (Cher Guetze). There is no scientific certainty to Morgenstern’s work; the infinite cosmos become mere projections of his individual fears and refracted half-memories. Aside from an earnestness that runs surprisingly deep, what makes MIRRORS OF THE PLANET one of a kind is Rex’s collaboration with cinematographer Manuel Sellner, writing a slow-morphing spectrum of spectacular locations and Borgesian fata morganas in long, mezmerizing Steadicam takes. Words don’t just fail MIRRORS OF THE PLANET–the movie renders them useless.

Negative Pleasure Publications (Felony Comics, Night Burgers)
celebrate the release of their latest comics anthology, Jeans 3, with
a night of erotic dread at Spectacle, featuring screenings of Death
Game (1977) and The Pit (1981), two twisted tales pulsating with lust
and rage, drenched in blood and guaranteed to hurt your emotions.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21:
10:00 PM: DEATH GAME (1977)
MIDNIGHT: THE PIT (1981)
Separate $5 Admission for Each Screening

DEATH GAME
Peter S. Traynor, 1977

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21 – 10:00 PM

In Death Game (1977) (10:00 PM), a suburban family (Seymour Cassel) man finds two
free-spirited teenagers (Colleen Camp and Sondra Locke) on his doorstep one stormy night.  What starts as a night of seduction turns into a morning of madness and murder.

Death Game, allegedly based on a true story, is sick a sleazy, but showcases a surprisingly prestige pedigree. Seymour Cassel was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in John Cassavete’s Minnie In Moskowitz in 1971 and would go on to work with the likes of Sam Peckinpah, Barry Levinson, Warren Beaty, Nicolas Roeg and Wes Anderson. Sondra Locke had appeared in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Willard and would go on to become a frequent collaborator with Clint Eastwood (as well as the director of the bizarre “Ratboy”). Colleen Camp had roles in both mainstream (Smile, Funny Lady) and exploitation (The Swinging Cheerleaders) before Death Game, and would go on to appear in dozens of films, including Apocalypse Now, Clue, Wayne’s World and Election. Despite this aura of legitimacy, Death Game is pure trash in the best possible sense, a sweaty, feverish collision of sex, violence and outright insanity.

THE PIT
Dir. Lew Lehman, 1981.
97 min. USA.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21 – MIDNIGHT

Death Game is paired with another tale of desire and despair, and one of the most mind breakingly weird movies ever made, The Pit (1981) (Midnight), a huge influence on the Negative Pleasure ethos.

FORGET KILL BILL, DEATH WISH AND STRAW DOGS: here is a revenge fantasy you can actually relate to. At 12-years-old, Jamie Benjamin already has a CV of torture that would make Dawn Weiner blush: the hot librarian at elementary school tears up the erotic collages he makes with her photos; the cool kid at recess splits his lip open; Jamie’s nubile live-in babysitter only has eyes for an indifferent jock; and even the old woman down the street tries to mow him down with her motorized scooter (“he’ll probably grow into one of those hippies…”). It’s not clear exactly what’s wrong with the kid—he shows signs of autism, and a creepily over-affectionate mother might have something to do with it—but he finds solace in friendship with his teddy bear and the afternoons he spends visiting a pit in the woods full of bloodthirsty, primordial trolls. The youngster does his best to see that they’re looked after, but a kid can only steal so much meat from the butcher truck before another solution is in order—and if it can satisfy two problems at once, so much the better.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15
7:30 PM & 10:00 PM + MIDNIGHT SHOWING ADDED!
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

CLICK HERE FOR THE FACEBOOK EVENT

An up-close and personal cross-section of H.R. Giger’s elegantly morbid world at the height of his career, featuring rarely-seen documentaries, experimental films and music videos made in collaboration with longtime friends J.J. Wittmer and F.M. Murer.

Following a succession of Giger’s experimental short-form work—all of which showcase Giger’s drawings, paintings and sculpture work of the late 60s and early 70s—we proudly present two rare documentaries directed by J.J. Wittmer: GIGER’S NECRONOMICON (1975, 40 min) and GIGER’S ALIEN (1979, 34 min), both created in a collaboration that affords the viewer an authenticity rarely achieved by documentarians. Additionally, both films are scored by Giger’s friend, experimental synth-lord Joel Vandroogenbroeck (of the brain-splattering band Brainticket), drenching the atmosphere in moody psychedelia.

With GIGER’S NECRONOMICON (1975), Wittmer allows us to step into Giger’s literal POV as he moves through his studio, a gallery opening, meals with friends & family and more.  Narration consists of internal dialogue written by Giger himself. The film is littered with interviews with eccentric collectors and friends, images of never-before-photographed artwork, and a sequence in which Giger airbrushes an entire painting from scratch.

GIGER’S ALIEN (1979) is also narrated by Giger, providing an in-depth trek through the arduous process of realizing his work on Ridley Scott’s ALIEN.  As we watch Giger move through the stages of conceptualizing and fabricating his most well-known body of work, we get a first-hand account of the trials of protecting a sublimely original artistic vision against the pressures of working for a Hollywood Studio.