The Farmer’s Almanac predicts that Summer 2018 will be hot, muggy, and fully Satanic. These offerings dig deeper into the devil’s work than you might have thought possible. We have a direct line to the source, what can we say.

Happy Solstice to you, and welcome to the long-awaited SATANIC SVMMER.

ENTER THE DEVIL
(aka: Disciples of Death)
dir. Frank Q. Dobbs, 1972
92 min, USA


THURSDAY, JUNE 7 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 10 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 15 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 25 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 29 – 7:30 PM

ONLINE TICKETS HERE

Special thanks to Massacre Video.

A man named Ozzie Perkins has gone missing in the desert. Pulled away from a hot date and told to shave his mustache, Deputy Jace must travel to a remote outpost by the border to look for the missing gringo. Little does he know this path will take him to some of the darkest corners of the desert. Jace teams up with Leslie, a specialist on the subject of ancient religious cults, who thinks there’s something more to the rash of disappearances around the outpost. The scary thing is…she might just be right.

Massacre Video proudly presents the debut of Frank Q. Dobbs’ low budget regional chiller, ENTER THE DEVIL (aka DISCIPLE OF DEATH), newly restored from a recently discovered inter-negative.

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SATAN’S BLOOD
(aka: Escalofrio)
dir. Carlos Puerto, 1978
82 min, Spain
Dubbed in English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 9 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 11 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 18 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 25 – 10 PM

ONLINE TICKETS HERE

Andres and Ana are a couple living in Madrid. One fine day they decide to pack the car and wrangle their dog and set out for a fun time in the Spanish countryside. Not long into their trip, they encounter another car on the road. The couple in the other car, Bruno and Berta, flag them down. Bruno is excited to see his old college buddy – Andres, but Andres isn’t so sure they know each other. Never-the-less, the two couples set out for Bruno and Berta’s gigantic house for a grand reunion and a nice hot meal. But once they arrive, a storm rolls and in the as the weather gets worse and worse, Andres and Ana decide to stay the night. When the foursome decide to tamper with the spirit world in the form of a Ouija board, things really start to get weird. But that’s the least of their problems.

Drug fueled orgies, suicide, creepy living dolls, and a freezer full of who knows what become a disorienting whirlpool and the helpless couple can’t get out. Trapped by a coven of devil worshipers, the film builds to a terrifying, twisting climax.

Produced by none other than Juan Piquer Simon (PIECES, SLUGS) SATAN’S BLOOD is a veritable cornucopia of sin and debauchery. A gothic tale of Satanic panic who’s influence can be seen as recently as Ti West’s throwback jam/only good movie HOUSE OF THE DEVIL while showcasing the Spanish countryside and a score by Simon regular Librado Pastor.

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SATAN’S BLADE
dir. L. Scott Castillo Jr, 1984
82 min, USA

SATURDAY, JUNE 2 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 11 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 21 – 7:30 PM

ONLINE TICKETS HERE

A group of friends travel to a ski lodge to celebrate one of them becoming a lawyer. When they arrive they find out there was a MURDER in their cabins the night before. Luckily the resort has an excellent clean up crew and the group decides to stay. After some poking around they find out about a local legend. The legend tells of a man possessed by the spirits of the mountain returning every 14 (?) years to wreak havoc with his knife on Mountain Men and Ski Bunnies alike. Nightmares, pranks, and carnage ensue.

Filmed in 1981 and left to age like a fine wine until it’s release in 1984, SATAN’S BLADE rounds out our Satanic Summer line up for June.

Eckhart Schmidt is Spectacle royalty. His 1982 film DER FAN, a teen pop melodrama with a horrifying, drawn-out cannibalistic climax, has returned to the theater as a fan favorite again and again over the years. But Der Fan is not a one-off exploitation oddity; Schmidt is an unbelievably prolific filmmaker with wealth of cineastic knowledge to match. His work spans genres and mediums, but is perhaps at its best when focused on exploring and satirizing the stark divisions between art and commerce, which is what he does in his loose trilogy of surrealistic 80s bloodbaths of which DER FAN is the first installment.

The other two films in the series, while perhaps not as strikingly iconic as DER FAN, are similarly nightmare-inducing and incredible showcases of a filmmaker with a limitless imagination and a fondness for abrasively catchy soundtracks and bleak parables bathed in neon.

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THE GOLD OF LOVE
aka Das Gold der Liebe
dir. Eckhart Schmidt, 1983
West Germany, 86 min.

SATURDAY, JUNE 2 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 8 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 13 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 18 – 10 PM

Schmidt’s follow up to DER FAN plays a bit like the same film detuned to a harsher register. The palatable pop of new wave superstar “R” is replaced by the raucous tremors of actual rock band D.A.F. (Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft), whom teen Alexandra Curtis (yes, half-sister of Jamie Lee) harbors an unhealthy obsession. While the horror of Der Fan came from its chillingly slow descent towards a maniacally bleak outcome, the follow-up pretty much starts in a post-punk underworld with no hope of escape — tears of blood run down the protagonist’s face within the first half an hour, after she finds herself without any cash to gain entry to D.A.F.’s show. The rest of the film chronicles her attempts to see the group at any possible cost, traversing a zonked-out, eternally nocturnal Vienna in the process.

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LOFT
dir. Eckhart Schmidt, 1985
West Germany, 81 mins

THURSDAY, JUNE 7 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 29 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, JULY 10 – 9 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 27 – 10 PM

The final film in a trilogy in which the only throughlines are German Expressionist-tinged punk nihilism, gruesome murders, neon-lit underworlds and banger soundtracks, LOFT maintains the ramshackle lo-fi minimalism of its predecessor in some ways (ie its one-location setting), but with pretty much everything else turned up to an electrifying extreme. Set in a post-apocalyptic maybe-future/maybe-present, a high society couple visits a dingy, industrial art gallery only to find themselves trapped. It is soon made explicit that more value is placed on the art than on human lives.

SUNDAY, JUNE 17th  – 7:30 PM
FILMMAKER IN PERSON! ONE NIGHT ONLY!
(THIS EVENT IS $10)

ONLINE TICKETS HERE
FB EVENT

Zia Anger’s film and video work has played at the New York Film Festival (MY LAST FILM with Rosanna Arquette and Lola Kirke), New Directors/New Films (2015’s I REMEMBER NOTHING), Maryland Film Festival, Locarno, Basilica Soundscape and others. She has collaborated with Jenny Hval, Angel Olsen, Beach House, and Mitski.

You may have seen some of her work. She is particularly adept at depicting characters, typically women, in various stages of fragmentation — identities blend and the seams of personas are frayed.

You have not seen other work of hers. No one has. The internet, perhaps of its own officiary volition, has deemed it “abandoned.” For one evening, we will attempt to recover it: embarking down the shadowy online systems that entomb the unscreened works of independent film, through hyperlinks and password protected screeners. Join the filmmaker at Spectacle this June for an in-person, semi-improvisatory discussion and performance.

Catch out with Spectacle for the summer with these four documentaries spanning five decades all revolving around the mythical hobo and their prefered mode of transport, hopping freight trains. Filled with lush landscapes, and scenery that make the Hudson River Valley school of painters look like Thomas Kinkade, these films use train riding as a vehicle to tell unique stories of the hobo subculture, class disparity in the United States, and personal stories of those out there riding the rails.

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WHO IS BOZO TEXINO?
Dir. Bill Daniel, 2005
USA. 57min

TUESDAY, JUNE 19th – 7:30 PM & 10 PM, FILMMAKER IN PERSON
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

ONLINE TICKETS HERE
FB EVENT

Shot in 8mm and 16mm over 16 years, the infamous WHO IS BOZO TEXINO? is an experimental documentary searching for the identities and stories behind the ubiquitous and yet esoteric art of hobo graffiti found on the sides of boxcars, grainers and train bridges spanning North America from coast to coast. Landing somewhere between outsider art and subculture minutiae—utilizing the conjecture, half-truths, tall tales and mythology that occupies the jungles and campfires—Daniel interviews an array of old timers, hobos and rail workers as well as streak and moniker heavyweights like Herby, The Rambler, and Colossus of Roads.

Bill Daniel is a filmmaker, photographer and installation artist based in the Gulf coast of Texas. Bill is currently touring on his newly released book of photos Tri-X Noise, and will have copies and other goods for sale at the screening.

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HOBO
Dir. John T. Davis, 1992
UK. 90min

FRIDAY, JUNE 1 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 5 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 21 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27 – 10 PM
ONLINE TICKETS HERE

Irish director John T. Davis follows Beargrease, a vietnam veteran and father, as he travels and philosophizes from Minneapolis to Seattle via freight train. HOBO is a powerful portrait of the American poor and working class, using the train line as a means to get from town to town, meeting the depressed and marginalized along the way in the soup kitchens, unemployment offices and jungles at the sides of the tracks. With scenes of hobos reading newspapers, listening to the radio news programs and slandering politicians, the documentary shows the hobo not as an out-of-touch outcast from society, but an engaged yet struggling worker trying to make ends meet with what is at their disposal; chancing the risk of arrest or even death for a free ride to the next town. HOBO addresses subjects of homelessness, class disparity, alcoholism, and even sex-workers’ rights through Beargrease’s conversations with his traveling partners and land-locked friends along his route.

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LONG GONE
Dir. Jack Cahill, David Eberhardt, 2003
USA. 90min

SUNDAY, JUNE 10 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 22 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 29 – 10 PM
ONLINE TICKETS HERE

Featuring an original score by Tom Waits and filmed over seven years and 30,000+ miles, LONG GONE follows a large cast of hobos spanning multiple generations: The aging veterans Horizontal John & Joshua Long Gone; the publically besmirched Dogman Tony with his young bride and loyal tramp friends, and the steadfast, level-headed New York Slim, are contrasted with the younger generation of punks that have taken to hopping trains, James, Jessie, and Stonie. Filmmakers Jack Cahill and David Eberhardt are so comfortable with their subjects that the camera becomes invisible as they deal with depression, loss, drug use, alcoholism and being a scapegoat for the state to pin multiple murder charges on (really!). LONG GONE is less about the act of riding the rails, and more about the personal stories and circumstances of those riding them.

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THE LAST OF THE AMERICAN HOBOES
Dir. Titus Moede, 1967
USA. 82 min

FRIDAY, JUNE 1 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 4 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 16 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 22 – 10 PM

ONLINE TICKETS HERE

A labor of love for director, schlockmeister, and jack of all film-trades, Titus Moede—who himself played a hobo in the 1964 film THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES!!?, and is considered to be one of the better directors of early B-grade adult films—LAST OF THE AMERICAN HOBOES is a docu-drama love letter to the hobos, hitchhikers and working men of decades past. Part historical documentary, part afterschool special, part original musical and all ‘bo-sploitation, the film is good-natured at heart, attempting to dispel the myths and misconceptions that accompany tramps and vagabonds, but at points just ends up enforcing others. Featuring flashbacks within flashbacks, and even a segment devoted to the Wobblies via a miniature Joe Hill bio-pic. With all the attention that surfers, bikers and even cannibals got in the 60s and 70s, one wonders how ‘bo-sploitation never took off as a genre.

Note: a low buzz intermittedly accompanies the first 20 minutes of audio.

Special thanks to Joe Ziemba & Bleeding Skull.

THERE’S A STRONG WIND IN BEIJING
dir. Ju Anqi, 1999
50 mins. China.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, MAY 1 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 9 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 23 – 7:30 PM – w/intro from Aaron Fox-Lerner, guest programmer and Time Out Beijing film editor!
SATURDAY, MAY 26 – 7:30 PM

Like some unholy combination of avant-garde independent film and Jackass or a YouTube prank video, Ju Anqi’s documentary THERE’S A STRONG WIND IN BEIJING sets a small camera crew loose on late-90s Beijing, barging into any possible public or private space to ask one simple question: “Is the wind in Beijing strong?”

This blunt query coupled with the unexpected presence of cameras spawns a world of responses, while the movie itself, shot on a limited amount of expired film, forms a street-level portrait of a city in transition that’s already practically unrecognizable 20 years later.