The success of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) and THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981) sparked a movement of post-apocalyptic imitations. Always ready to develop burgeoning cinematic trends, Italian exploitation filmmakers jumped on the craze. Traditionally set in a Manhattan wasteland, these action-packed films offer gritty New York glamour on a shoestring budget. Unlike other Italian film trends, the post-apocalyptic fad burnt fast and bright, with 1984 marking the end of the era. However, more than fifteen movies were made during the two-year boom by directors such as Lucio Fulci, Ruggero Deodato and Sergio Martino.

1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS
Dir. Enzo G. Castellari, 1982
Italy, 92 min
In English

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28 – 10 PM

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1990. The Bronx is officially declared “no man’s land.” From then on, the borough is ruled by the Riders. Anne, a wealthy Manhattan heiress, hopes to escape her family’s greed and seeks refuge in the Bronx. When Anne’s father discovers she’s gone, he sends a murderous cop to retrieve her. Anne’s only hope lies with the Riders and their knowledge of the many rival crews that control the neighborhood.

The first, and arguably coolest, in the Italian post-apocalyptic subgenre, 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS (1982) is dripping in style and sleaze. Directed by THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS (1978) director Enzo G. Castellari and starring the late Vic Morrow in the year before his death on the set of TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983). From its soundtrack to its codenames, costume design to its set pieces, it’s easy to see how 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS influenced so many other films in the subgenre, including a sequel ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX (1983) and a pseudo-sequel THE NEW BARBARIANS (1983).

2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK
Dir. Sergio Martino, 1983
Italy, 96 min
In English

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29 – 10 PM

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Nuclear war has decimated the planet and left humans sterile. In the aftermath, two factions emerged: the evil Euraks and the rebel Federation. The Federation recruit a mercenary, Parsifal, to infiltrate New York City and retrieve Melissa, the last fertile woman on Earth. With the clock ticking, the fate of the human race rests in Parsifal’s hands.

The plot of 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK (1983) might sound a lot like Alfonso Cuaŕon’s CHILDREN OF MEN (2006), both even including scenes backdropped against Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. However, don’t let the similarities fool you. 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK is a high-octane gorefest featuring Nazis, ape mutants, and armoured-car dune races. Directed by legendary Italian B-movie director Sergio Martino.

ENDGAME
Dir. Joe d’Amato, 1983
Italy, 98 min
In English

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30 – 10 PM

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The year is 2025, a nuclear holocaust has left New York a wasteland. The televised battle royal show ENDGAME plagues the airwaves. Ron Shannon, 22-time ENDGAME champion, must assemble a team to lead a group of mind-reading mutants to salvation or face certain extinction.

With a bleak atmosphere and desolate set pieces, ENDGAME (1983) is an impressive low-budget adventure film. Like Lucio Fulci’s WARRIORS OF THE YEAR 2027 (1983), ENDGAME uses a lethal game show to levy poignant socioeconomic commentary atop an exploitation film. With veteran genre director Joe D’Amato at the helm and a cast of Italian cult royalty including Al Cliver, Laura Gemser and George Eastman, ENDGAME is a must-see for genre fans.

CINEMANIA
Dir. Angela Christleib and Stephen Kijak, 2002
USA, 83 minutes
In English

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 02 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 05 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 17 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23 – 7:30 PM w/ Q&A
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 7:30 PM

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Featuring an in-person Q&A with the film’s subjects on Sunday 10/23 at 7:30 PM!

“It’s better than sex. It’s better than love.” It’s cinema! Or CINEMANIA, to be exact. Stephen Kijak and Angela Christlieb’s documentary follows five film-obsessed New Yorkers in their daily trevails as they struggle to fit as many films as possible into a single day (3-6 is the average number). From spending their unemployment checks on movie tickets to surviving off meat-heavy, constipating diets (it reduces mid-screening bathroom visits), to hoarding stacks of old program notes, CINEMANIA is as vivid a portrait of what it means to be a film-lover as you can find on screen. As the film celebrates its 20th anniversary, we’re happy to host two of the film’s subjects on 10/23 to give their differing, and sometimes contentious, opinions on the film.

“I don’t go to weddings; I don’t go to funerals; I don’t visit people in the hospital if I have a screening to go to.”

“These are not crazy people. Maladjusted and obsessed, yes, but who’s to say what normal is? I think it makes more sense to see movies all day than to golf, play video games or gamble” – Roger Ebert

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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This fall, Spectacle is pleased to host artist, filmmaker and writer Lydia Nsiah for a special one-night evening of selected films touching on spiraling body archives, techno distortions and the getting by forgetting – followed by a Q+A with the artist moderated by filmmaker Melissa Friedling.

distortion
2016. 5 mins.

Interference signals on all tracks: booming, choppy sound. The image disintegrates into digital blocks, into patterns and grids; flickers and vibrates. Flashing in between is a figure, a landscape, and a face. An uncanny rush of image and sound that probes the aesthetic potential of digitally deformed film. The concrete disintegrates into the abstract — distorted film in its most beautiful form.

to forget
2019. 17 min.

to forget is a filmic journey on the potentialities of forgetting and its resemblance to remembering. Recorded entirely on expired Super-8 and 16mm film, forgetting becomes productive and ‘visible’ in non-existing, fading and colour transformed film exposures. This (non-)documentation of possibly empty and fading spaces (to be) is further highlighted by Jejuno’s trance-like and uncanny sound composition: The abyss is present.

vs
2021. 8 min.

Images of buildings, strange architectural structures, in between vegetation and lots of blue sky: at first glance, it could be travel photos that Lydia Nsiah uses in the film vs. But the viewers’ eyes never arrive at the point of sorting out or more closely analyzing what they see: the images are accelerated, shifted, distorted, and blurred through a spiral rotation.

The artist designed and operated the technical apparatus for this. Recordings from server farms and data centers, which are the result of various translation processes between World Wide Web, expired 16mm films, and digital video, are sent into a metaphorical and literal maelstrom – becoming a mechanical eye that looks back and looks at us, the viewers. In return we look briefly into the abyss of the resource consumption that the server farms require to store millions and millions of bits and pixels.

Hui Ye’s composition processes the analogue and digital sounds of the multiple film recordings. A soundscape of layers and samples arises, which makes the film three-dimensional. The movement of the images, the spiral camera pan, is thus located between repetition and standstill, and becomes a seemingly eerie “impossibility.”

Like in earlier works, also in vs, Lydia Nsiah is concerned with recording and forgetting. What might a “body archive” (Julietta Singh) located in the sensorial look like? Who or what do data storage systems exclude? Can gaps be intentionally included in an archive? The strudel of images, the hypnotic sound of vs set the viewer’s entire body, not only the eye, in upheaval, in rapture, which deprives the subject of an ontological base. Arising through this “queering” of an established cinematographic human-machine connection is the possibility of a new, different way of dealing with memory, production of meaning, and ultimately cinema.

LYDIA NSIAH is an artist, filmmaker and writer, working with the in-between, abysses and gaps in audiovisual knowledge production by transforming and incorporating found and recorded analogue and digital memory images, often in collaboration with sound artists. She publishes and exhibits internationally on Virtuality, Forgetting and Remembering, Failure and Error, Decolonial Practice, Film Art and Use. Her works were shown, among others, at the Berlinale Forum Expanded, the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (DE), Prismatic Grounds/ Maysles Documentary Center, NYC (US), Crossroads San Francisco Cinemateque/ SFMOMA (US), IDFA – International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (NL), Festival Ecrã (BR), Bangkok Art & Cultural Center (TH), Blickle Kino/ Belvedere 21, Kunsthalle Krems (AT), Slovenska kinoteka (SL), Curtocircuíto, Santiago de Compostela (ES), Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, BC (CA), Kunstforeningen GL Strand (DK). Her films are distributed by Arsenal – Institut für Film- und Videokunst and sixpackfilm. Her art is in the collections of Wien Museum, Van Abbemuseum, Center for Book Arts, Mumok, Belvedere, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna et al.

SHRIEK SHOW XI

WELCOME BACK to the official return of the IN PERSON SHRIEK SHOW MARATHON!

After a brief hiatus last year (and a remote-stream marathon in 2020 for the Spec-Twitch-Heads), we are ready to melt faces for 12+ straight hours in person again.

Mystery meat all day and night long, starting at NOON and ending when your brain leaks out your ears and/or after the midnight movie.

Those brave enough to stay for all features can expect a satisfying arc / certain ‘rhyming’ elements from one movie to the next, so stick around if you can!

Hints + rough showtimes below, expect random shorts + trailers + goodies between screenings. BYOScreams.

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10/22 – NOON TO 1:30AM
$5/MOVIE OR $25 FOR DAY-PASS

NOON –
XXX XXXX XXXX XX XXXXX
dir ??????? ??????????, 196X
Italy, 90 min
English dub

We kick off our day of screams with a heady dose of gothic witchcraft goodness with this underseen black and white mid-60’s classic, starring one of Italy’s greatest scream queens.

2PM
XXX XXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX
dir XXXXXXX XXXXX, 198X
Italy, 86 min
English dub

One of dozens of made-for-TV schlock gems by one of Italy’s most prolific horror directors – fans of our MADE FOR ITALIAN TV series from a few years ago (or any of the GHOST HOUSE / LA CASA series), take note!

4PM
XXXXX
dir. XXXXXX XXX, 197X
Japan, 103 min
In Japanese with English subtitles

Up next as an afternoon aperitif, the most ‘serious’ film of the day – a surprisingly moody folk horror eco-freakout from Japan, focusing on a town about to be exploited for its natural resources and a vengeful spirit. Still has a generous helping of sleaze though, don’t worry!

6PM
XXXXXX XXXXXXX
Dir. XXXX XXXXXX, 199X
USA, 71 min
In English

Enough with the polished, ‘classy’ sleaze – time for home brew SOV premium grade trash!

Teens helping one of their uncle’s clean out a barn on haunted Native American land, cursed during the Trail of Tears, accidentally unleash an ancient demonic force.

Jokes aside, this no budget Missouri-shot Evil Dead labor of love is better than it has any right to be, packing an impressive amount of gore and inventive camera techniques – not to mention flat exposition in thick Missouri accents (and fashions) into 70 minutes.

8PM
XXXXXX XXXXXX
dir. XXXXX XXXXX, 198X
Mexico, 83 min
In Spanish with English subtitle

It’s about 8pm, and its time for the tough stuff. This recently remastered Spanish horror flick feels like a direct mix of RABID DOGS and TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD as it follows a group of young degenerates on a crime spree, who eventually stumble onto the myth of a vast fortune buried in catacombs beneath abandoned ruins in the countryside (and also, maybe, a satanic curse?!).

This one will keep you off balance til the end, a real underseen gem of a facemelter.

10PM
XXXXX XXXXXXXX
dir. XXX XXXXXX, 198X
USA, 74 min
In English

Up next, a psychotic brew of every type of horror flick imaginable from one of the greats of homebrew horror (hint: shot in Maryland…)

A Vietnam vet on a killing spree links up with a group of criminals, also on a bit of a spree – their flight to the countryside brings them to the home of a family who isn’t what they seem…

The less said about this one the better, but it’s grimey in all the ways you could hope for and over before you know it.

MIDNIGHT
XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX
dir. XXXXX XXXXXX, 199X
Canada, 82 min
In English

As your sanity slowly slips away, the casio tones of our final SOV feature of the night wash over you, and you think, ‘yeah, this is it, this is the best movies have ever been’

Two cops investigating a suicide find a tape cassete recounting a group of teens’ strange night at a farm. Shot in Canada (and for some reason, recently re-released with ‘revamped’ atrocious CGI FX (which we will NOT be showing)), this is the hidden Halloween garbage classic you didn’t know you needed.

Not the goriest of the night, but maybe the most unhinged in its own way, and a truly special sign off for this year’s Shriek Show.

Back again for “Spectober,” Worse Than Jail Presents: Jail for Kids & Faces of Jail.

Faces of Jail & Jail for Kids is a bold, horror-centric back-to-back program about nightmares and bad kids by Matt Minter, aka Worse Than Jail. His films collage and merge a depraved mix of obscure, lost and forgotten video clips ranging from nightmares and children’s entertainment for disaffected youth to the world of alcoholic clowns, public access Star Trek parodies, and DIY tributes to The Muppet Show.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1 – MIDNIGHT
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 10PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 24 – 10PM

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Faces of Jail
dir. Matt Minter (aka Worse than Jail), 2022
45 min, USA
Faces of Jail focuses on the nightmarish aspect of horror masks and what lies beneath them. Strangely grotesque and mysterious, Minter presents a mix of faces, masks, visages, and expressions in which the audience can see how masks in horror films take on different forms— from being abstract to strictly frightening.

Jail for Kids
dir. Matt Minter (aka Worse than Jail), 2022
45 min, USA

This film takes the audience on a journey through deranged children’s entertainment found via public access TV and obscure, lost and forgotten films. Today we like to think of the Teletubbies or Barney as a “creepy kids show” with subtle symbols and messages secretly meant to corrupt children, but Minter dives deeper and earlier than these shows to weave a mix of surprising content that’s too strange to be real.

Worse Than Jail is the internet alias of Kentucky-based artist Matt Minter. Minter is most notable for his horror-centric B&W illustrations, as well video work and association with the noise-rock group Wretched Worst. Worse Than Jail Video is a series amassing the filmic inspirations for Minter’s work. Expanding on Minter’s curatorial contributions to Los Angeles’ Cathode Cinema, the series will check off a list of exceptionally psychotronic obscurities.