Page 128 – Spectacle Theater

THE FILMS OF ANTON PERICH: SHIT ON THE FENDERS OF YOUR CONVERTIBLE BECAUSE WE’RE COMING THROUGH NO MATTER WHAT

Posted on May 22, 2014December 24, 2019 by spectacletheater

THURSDAY, JUNE 12 – 7:30 (Program I) & 10 PM (Program II)
TUESDAY, JUNE 24 – 7:30 (Program II) & 10 PM (Program I)

In 1973, filmmaker Anton Perich, the legendary Candy Darling and Taylor Mead, and the Broadway actor Craig Vandenburgh went to a nice apartment on Central Park West to make a film. The apartment belonged to the art collector Sam Green and the walls were groaning with Warhols. Perich came up with a simple scenario: Taylor Mead would play a decadent and perverse wall street type, Candy his socialite daughter. As the film opens, Craig Vanderbilt plays the piano for Candy while she screams “Play!” and strikes the instrument with her high heeled shoe. From there, everything is improvised. Before the night is through, Candy and Craig have split, Taylor Mead sits on the stairs, singing incoherently, with his pants around his ankles, and Anton Perich had a finished film.

Many of Perich’s films were made this way, in two or three takes and improvised from simple premises. His films and interviews feature many regulars from Max’s Kansas City (he was a busboy there) and Warhol’s clan (he was also a photographer for INTERVIEW), including Andrea Feldman, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, Edwige Belmore and Tinkerbelle, as well as orbiting artists and celebrities like John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Hugh Hefner, Grace Jones and John Waters, resulting in an incredible cross-pollination between art and personality. FRANKENSTINO (1973, starring Taylor Mead as Frankenstein, Katrina Toland, Jayne County and Robert Starr) was shot in the studio of sculptor John Chamberlain atop one of his giant works of foam (and features the line which serves as title for this series, uttered by Taylor Mead). In VICTOR HUGO ROJAS, the performance artist descends into an “Egyptian trance” (he’s wrapped in toilet water, spritzed with water and doused with baby powder) before destroying an original Warhol painting. In HUNTINGTON HARTFORD’S TIE CLOSET (1977), Jerry Hall drapes herself with ties from the Fifth Avenue closet of multimillionaire Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P supermarket fortune and art collector (who hated abstract art and once called Picasso a “mountebank”).

Perich’s MR. FIXIT (1973) is among the earliest material to be actively censored on television. Starring Susan Blond, Sami Melange and Danny Field, it appeared on public access in Manhattan and concerns a married couple (Blond and Field) who take a special interest in a television repairman’s ass (a lightbulb and a jar of vaseline are involved). The cable operator literally cut the sound and picture for periods of time during the broadcast, interrupting and resuming the tape’s transmission as he saw fit, explaining afterwards in a disembodied voice, “Certain segments of this tape were deleted on purpose. There was no time to edit it.”

Anton Perich embraced television at a time when video and performance artists were beginning to turn to New York galleries in which to show their work. To him, the galleries were safe and bourgeois, whereas television was the “last taboo for artists”, a pristine middle class venue waiting to be anointed by a subversive underclass of artists. Perich spent many years as a painter, poet and filmmaker before embracing the Portapak and its primitive video quality, and wanted to do something new with the technology. “TV was so perfect and sanitized, the answer was to introduce bad quality, bad sound, bad taste”.

In addition to the short narrative and experimental content of the show, Perich also followed a rotating cast of hosts (Susan Blond, R. Couri Hay, Tinkerbelle) to parties, fashion shows, concerts and gallery openings. The show became such an exciting weekly event that Newsweek’s media arm attempted to co-opt its success with its own mainstream version, with Tinkerbelle as host, called “Tinkerbelle’s Parties”. Producer John Peaslee recalls, “We were going to do a slicker version of Anton Perich.” The show failed miserably. “The minute it got slick we lost it.”

Beginning in 1980, Anton Perich took a 25-year break from filmmaking but continued to paint. Then he began to make films once again. His sense of humor is thoroughly intact (in 2010’s MOTHER OF GOD, 85 year-old Taylor Mead plays an aging Sarah Jessica Parker) and he still uses improvisation to build on simple narratives – lately they often have to do with technology (he equates googling oneself to masturbating). Proust is his hero these days. Perich said that he thinks about the fact that Proust made his contribution to the world with just a pencil. Now for the first time, a pen can cost more than a video camera. “Everyone can be a filmmaker, but not everyone is.” Therefore, “it’s a good time for people to redefine cinema again”.

In this special series, Spectacle presents both old and new works by extraordinary underground filmmaker Anton Perich.

Films by Anton Perich PROGRAM I: MAX’S KANSAS CITY, CANDY & DADDY, HUNTINGTON HARTFORD’S TIE CLOSET, and LIKE CINDERELLA
(97 min.)

THURSDAY, JUNE 12 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 24 – 10 PM

MAX’S KANSAS CITY (1972)
14 min. Silent.
Andrea Feldman, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Jack Smith, Taylor Mead, Holly Woodlawn and others hang out inside and out front of Max’s Kansas City.

CANDY AND DADDY (1972)
35 min.
Featuring Candy Darling, Taylor Mead and Craig Vandenburgh. A perverse wall street broker (Taylor Mead) walks in on his daughter (Candy Darling – whose improvisation is genius) with her lover and then tries to seduce him.

HUNTINGTON HARTFORD’S TIE CLOSET (1977)
17 min.
Featuring Jerry Hall, R. Couri Hay, Antonio Lopez, Roger Webster and Huntington Hartford. The multi-millionaire Huntington Hartford had a collection of thousands of ties in a special closet in his Fifth Avenue penthouse, which a gorgeous, 21-year-old Jerry Hall puts to good use in this short film. She sings dirty songs, one of which begins “Going through the jungle with a dick in my hand.” Huntington Hartford appears periodically, annoyed that his ties are being disturbed.

LIKE CINDERELLA (2010)
31 min.
Paparazzi kidnap a glamorous Italian movie star, and force her to clean while they photograph her.

Films by Anton Perich PROGRAM II: THE LIMO LIFE, VICTOR HUGO ROJAS, FRANKENSTINO and MOTHER OF GOD(101 min.

THURSDAY, JUNE 12 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 24 – 7:30 PM

THE LIMO LIFE (1976)
13 min.
Featuring Victor Hugo Rojas, Tinkerbelle, Nancy North and Ramona. “What was the name of that limousine company? Where we had the orgy last week?” Five upscale citizens cruise “Los Angeles” (Manhattan) in a white limo. They pause to sing showtunes, brush their teeth, put on frog masks and die in the gutter. Brought to you by Dom Perignon and a jar of pickles.

VICTOR HUGO ROJAS (1978)
14 min.
Venezuelan performance artist Victor Hugo Rojas was an icon of the separate but overlapping fashion, art and gay party scenes. Here he performs various “Egyptian rites” before destroying an original work by his friend Andy Warhol.

FRANKENSTINO (1973)
31 min.
After the controversy surrounding the live televised censorship of MR. FIXIT, Perich and his cohort were on a mission. FRANKENSTINO features full frontal nudity and general nonsensical discussion of cunts and Hitler. Taylor Mead plays Frankenstein, who frolics atop a giant foam sculpture by John Chamberlain (the film was made in his studio) with Katrina Toland, Jayne (formerly Wayne) County, Robert Star and others.

MOTHER OF GOD (2007)
41 min.
Featuring Taylor Mead as an actor who has made millions playing an aging Sarah Jessica Parker. Mead’s pregnant granddaughter arrives to ask for money but gets only a belly dancing lesson.

ALIEN WORKSHOP’S MEMORY SCREEN (ON VHS) WITH SPECIAL GUESTS!

Posted on May 22, 2014December 24, 2019 by spectacletheater

MEMORY SCREEN
Dir. Alien Workshop, 1991
USA, 44 min.
On VHS

TUESDAY, JUNE 10 – 8 & 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY! WITH CHRIS CARTER & DUANE PITRE!
Celebrate an awesome video and Alien Workshop’s beginnings with AW co-founder Chris Carter (coming from Ohio!) & original AW pro Duane Pitre (coming from New Orleans!) Chris and Duane will be on hand for a Q&A following the 8PM show.

Spectacle is pleased to present a rare screening of MEMORY SCREEN (1991), skateboard company Alien Workshop’s video debut featuring the team’s first group of skaters: Bo Turner, Duane Pitre, Neil Blender, John Pryor, Rob Dyrdek, Scott Conklin, Steve Claar and Thomas Morgan. Founded in 1990 in Xenia, Ohio by Chris Carter, Mike Hill and Neil Blender, Alien Workshop embodied an oddball, DIY alternative to the SoCal-based industry in the early 90s. AW’s later videos would include TIMECODE (1997), PHOTOSYNTHESIS (2006), MINDFIELD (2009) and the Life Splicing series (2011 – ).

MEMORY SCREEN is not your “typical skate video.” It blends low-fi skate footage with abstract and quixotic non-skating segments (much of it shot on Super8), all to an impossibly good soundtrack featuring lesser known tracks by J Mascis, Dinosaur Jr., Pain Teens, Worked World, Eddie Boy and Toxic Death Sentence.

“…If you have an artistic side you just might appreciate it. The big problem with this vid is the lengthy non-skating parts. If you were at an indie film fest it would be great, but it’s a little much at times. The skating parts are very worthwhile with quality footage of the entire team, but they are a little short and will have you screaming for more only to wander into some montage footage of an old guy hobbling across the street.” – Kosh Guido, Skim the Fat. Thanks Kosh, that’s exactly it!

I asked artist/skater/librarian Andru Okun, an old friend from college who first showed me the movie, to share his thoughts on MEMORY SCREEN:

My own MEMORY SCREEN testimonial goes back to the early 2000’s, total teenage skate rat shit. I had an older friend who kicked me down some old skateboarding videotapes. I don’t remember which videos exactly. I think there were some old Powell-Peralta videos and an original copy of Stereo’s TINCAN FOLKLORE, which pretty much changed my life at that time, but I think that the bulk of what I received were dubbed on one of those six-hour VHS tapes, the kind that lets you put the most amount of footage at the lowest possible quality onto one tape. These old, poorly-dubbed VHS skate videos served as my cultural capital in the world of skateboarding message boards. I started trading VHS with strangers over the internet, sending and receiving tapes through the mail. People would list all the titles they had, most of which were more likely than not already dubbed at least a few times already, and trade back and forth. You could PM NorthwestThrashDad and be like, “Hook me up with a six-hour VT with all the old Girl videos, the old Life flick, and throw in Video days but cut out the vert part.” A little while later a tape would arrive in the mailbox. You might turn on the TV in the living room to find a super-fuzzed out Sean Sheffey in a version of A SOLDIER’S STORY that was a dub-of-a-dub-of-a-dub but it didn’t really matter. It was more about just building up a collection at that point. A collection which now sits, I think, in a large, busted cardboard box in my parent’s attic, a treasure chest of obsolete plastic artifacts my Dad probably already threw away by now, THE SEARCH FOR ANIMAL CHIN ending up in a landfill.

I was four-years old when MEMORY SCREEN came out. A decade later I finally saw it, stuck somewhere in the middle of one of those six-hour skate video marathon tapes I had. Seriously, it’s been almost another ten years since I’ve last seen it. I do remember that the thing that made it stick out from all the other skateboarding videos I’d seen is that it didn’t have very much skateboarding in it. It was less of a skateboarding video than it was an art film with some skateboarding it, which was totally confusing to me at the time. Of course, now I’d rank my experience of watching MEMORY SCREEN right up there with finding Mark Gonzales in a “Transworld,” skateboarding inside of a museum in Germany dressed in an all-white fencing suit. Skateboarding was for weirdos, or at least it felt like it at that time. Now it seems like it’s as much for jocks as any other mainstream sport and the only thing sillier than fully-formed adults pushing around on tiny pieces of wood are the people that write about it. It’s a skate video, you know? How much can you really say here? As much as I’d like to claim that I’m writing about MEMORY SCREEN as this vivid artistic expression and not just some skateboarding video, that would be like saying I read Thrasher for the articles. Everybody knows skateboarders can’t read.

😉

Special thanks to Alien Workshop, Chris Carter, Mike Hill, Duane Pitre, Chris Grosso and Neil Brown. Also check out http://www.chromeballincident.blogspot.com/ for excellent interviews & posters (from which our graphics are cut-ups).

JUNE MIDNIGHTS

Posted on May 22, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

FRIDAY, JUNE 6: The Franco Files: LILIAN THE PERVERTED VIRGIN
SATURDAY, JUNE 7: AMERICAN COMMANDOS

FRIDAY, JUNE 13: MESSIAH OF EVIL
SATURDAY, JUNE 14: DEATH DRUG

FRIDAY, JUNE 20: SURVIVE
SATURDAY, JUNE 21: NEW DRUG CITY

FRIDAY, JUNE 27: DIGITAL MAN
SATURDAY, JUNE 28: SPECIAL SILENCERS

The Franco Files Presents:
LILIAN THE PERVERTED VIRGIN (Lilian la virgen pervertida)
Dir. Jess Franco (as Cliford Braun), 1984
Spain, 79 min.

FRIDAY, JUNE 6 – MIDNIGHT

It’s fitting that as soon as Spain lifted the ban on pornography, Jess was the first through the hardcore gate with Lilian, The Perverted Virgin.

It’s the 13th of the 19 films he’d do with Golden Productions, so Lina Romay and Antonio Mayans are there of course, but the star here is Katja Bienert, who plays Lilian, found on the beach by Mario (Mayans), who listens to her tell the story of her abduction and torture at the hands of two wealthy perverts (Romay, naturally, and Emilio Linder). Betrayal, manipulation, wigged-out drug scenes, Jess as a drunk police official (again), freaky stage acts — it’s got everything you’d hope for in a Franco film.

With an excellent score by Pablo Villa and some excellent cinematography by Juan Soler, it’s an excellent introduction to Franco’s 80s classics.

WARNING: Hardcore pornography, including bondage.

AMERICAN COMMANDOS
Dir. Bobby A. Suarez, 1989
Philippines, 89 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 7 – MIDNIGHT

Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

Envelop yourself in our patented FUZZ-O-VISION VHS tape technology!

What’s deadlier than an American Hunter? An AMERICAN COMMANDO(S). Christopher Mitchum, our second or third favorite action star-turned-California politician, returns as an American commando in this high-stakes Southeast Asian shoot-’em-up directed by the legendary Bobby A. Suarez (AMERICAN COMMANDOS).

At the outset, as a gas station attendant in the outskirts of Philippines, Dean Mitchell (Mitchum) bravely kills a bunch of druggie scum by flipping over their car with bullets. Nice! But the problem with killing doper thugs with guns is they have doper thug friends with guns. When these human vermin exterminate Mitchell’s wife and child, they tell him they’ve settled the score – but really, they’ve only upped the stakes. Mitchell is a Vietnam vet, and, reuniting with his fellow war buddies, he traces the group to Saigon before going – that is, returning – deep into the dark heart of the jungle. And once there, he learns that the truth of who is behind the drug killings is far more criminal than he could have imagined.

AMERICAN COMMANDOS is a bleak, brute force actioner relieved only by non-stop moments of extreme unintentional humor, usually in the form of meaningless, blank expressions of loss, anguish, and victimhood. It’s the American right’s most constipated attempt to reconcile (or circumvent) the lessons of Vietnam. As the Bond-esque end credits song states: “He lost everything he had / He came close to going mad / He’s so good / But he is also bad.”

Mm. Anyway: explosions, Filipino-Italo soundtrack, righteous fist shaking toward an absentee God, rocket-firing motorcycle, and squibs galore. What’s not to like?

MESSIAH OF EVIL
Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, 1973.
90 min. USA.

FRIDAY, JUNE 13 – MIDNIGHT

Like H.P. Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth” transposed to the west coast, MESSIAH OF EVIL operates on the same kind of eerie dream logic as CARNIVAL OF SOULS and NIGHT TIDE. A young woman travels to a costal SoCal town in search of her father, a reclusive artist, only to find the entire area completely deserted. In his studio she locates a series of distressed audio recordings describing a literal and figurative darkness falling on Point Dune, whose residents only come out at night to stand by seaside fires, staring at the moon while anticipating the arrival of an arcane evil—and feeding on any outsider who strays through. After languishing unseen for decades, MESSIAH OF EVIL is now appreciated as a classic of the genre. It’s the rare film that manages to have it both ways between measured artiness and exploitation excess, creepy suggestiveness and explicit gore. Husband and wife Huyck and Katz went on to write AMERICAN GRAFFITI and the first two Indiana Jones movies, and art director Jack Fisk has since worked almost exclusively on career-spanning collaborations with David Lynch and Terrence Malick.

DEATH DRUG
Dir. Oscar Williams. 1978
USA, 73 min.

SATURDAY, JUNE 14 – MIDNIGHT

1978’s Death Drug (AKA Wack Attack) is more than just a simple drugsploitation movie – it’s a look inside the delusional mind of its star, Miami Vice’s Philip Michael Thomas. Convinced that he would one day win the “EGOT” (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony), and driven mad with jealousy over co-star Don Johnson’s hit albumHeartbeat, PMT decided to re-release the film eight years later as a vehicle to plug his own album, Living the Book of My Life. The result is a fascinating trainwreck and a study in pure, unbridled hubris.

Jesse Thomas (PMT) is a young plumber and budding musician with his whole life ahead of him. That is, until a smooth-talking drug dealer convinces him to switch out his “burn-out weed” for “the stick with the kick” – angel dust. Jesse slides into a series of hallucinigenic nightmares as his life crumbles around him, all set to the funky soundtrack of the legendary Gap Band. Things are further complicated when the movie attempts to insert the mindblowingly bizarre music video for PMT’s 1986 single, “Just the Way I Planned It”, into the middle of the film and awkwardly work it into the narrative.

It’s a spectacle which needs to be seen to be believed – complete with trivia, prizes, and the world’s most renowned Philip Michael Thomas expert on hand to provide relevant background and annotations. In the words of PMT himself, “We hope you enjoy the dramatization.”

SURVIVE (w/ DEVIL MOON)
Dir. Liam Makrogiannis, 2014
USA, 90 min.
In English

FRIDAY, JUNE 20 – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY! ADVANCE TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE!

Global terrorists defile New York’s water supply with a deadly dose of mind melting bacterium, mutating the population into undead murdering machines hellbent on non-stop brutal carnage. Can eight strangers band together to survive the endless hordes of the bloodthirsty dead?
Will they be able to survive each other?

WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

Spectacle, Horror Boobs, and King of the Witches join forces once again to bring you a cinematic event you won’t experience anywhere else! 15 year Liam Makrogiannis presents his feature length NYC splatterfest – SURVIVE! A labor of love conceived when he was just 13, SURVIVE, follows a ragtag team of misfits (including Philly’s youngest F/X wizard and director of SLAUGHTER TALES – Johnny Dickie) as they fight against the end of the world. Featuring appearances from Nik Taneris, Evan Makrogiannis, Josh Schafer of Lunchmeat VHS Fanzine, Matt D of Horror Boobs, and the world’s uncle – Lloyd Kaufman.

This screening of SURVIVE will be paired with Liam’s short film – DEVIL MOON – with the filmmakers and special guests in attendance for a Q&A.

Special VHS release from HBV & KOTW will also be available!

DIGITAL MAN
Dir. Philip J. Roth, 1995
Nevada. 91 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, JUNE 27 – MIDNIGHT

Hot on the heels of 2013’s sold-out screenings of Richard J. Pepin’s Hologram Man, Spectacle offers up this late-night cyberwar curio fielded from the pixelated precipice between Atari and The Matrix. Starring an Altmanesque corps of noteworthy surnames, Philip Roth’s Digital Man concerns a glitch in national security so cruel, it’d be divine if it weren’t so damn digital: a time-traveling supercyborg touches down in the small-town Southwest just in time to hijack an apocalypse’s worth of nuclear launch codes.

Fresh off a realm too insane in its violence and punishment for mere humans to enter, the Digital Man must be stopped – and it’s up to a motley crue of wisecracking heavyweights (some military experts, some shotgun-toting salt of the earth) to take him out, analog style. Tons and tons and tons and tons of fireball explosions (replete with slo-mo backflips and brutal, spaghetti-worthy shootouts) ensue, culminating in one night you can’t merely “attend” while on your laptop.

Digital Man is a very entertaining movie, with good acting, excellent photography and outstanding F/X. It does suffer from a mediocre script however. A very good, overall effort from a bunch of actors who fall into the category of “where have I seen them before?” A rating of 8 out of 10 was given. – VCRanger, IMDB

lets get down to brass tax where can we get this movie someone upload cmon it cant be ilegal look at it buying it would be a magor crime – Jamie Mcfayden, YouTube

I’ve seen Digital man almost a decade ago when it came to video. My dad rented me this movie to watch over the weekend since he was leaving with my mom. I loved it so much that I’ve watched it five or six times in 48 hours !!! – thebigmovieguy, IMDB

Don’t just settle for T2 ,experience this equal ,yet lower budget Sci-Fi action outing,with martial arts giant Matthias Hues in the lead. – “A Customer”, Amazon

I rented this when it came out on video. I remember thinking the special effects and costumes were pretty cool back then. And in the early-to-mid-1990s computer animation was a novelty, so that added to the movie’s appeal. (And back then CGI looked cooler with those smooth surfaces.) – felicity4711, YouTube

SPECIAL SILENCERS
Dir. Arizal. 1982
Indonesia, 86 min.
In Indonesian dubbed into English with Dutch subtitles.

SATURDAY, JUNE 28 – MIDNIGHT

NOTE: SINCE PROGRAMMING THIS SCREENING WE LEARNED OF THE PASSING OF THE LATE MASTER INDONESIAN ACTION FILMMAKER ARIZAL. THEREFORE, THIS IS AN ARIZAL TRIBUTE SCREENING. RIP ARIZAL. LONG LIVE ARIZAL.

~!+ \ m / EXPLODING CARS IN HEAVEN \ m / +!~

Magic, Mystism, and Mutilation! Spectacle heralds the return of its favorite mononymous Indonesian auteur, ARIZAL, the Monet of cars spewing fire from their trunks while barrelling nose-first, upside-down into other exploding vehicles while Anglo heroes arc through the flames like star-spangled ropes of jism raining down bullets from a musclebike. SPECIAL SILENCERS is his most out-there film: a blend of hardcore action and gory jungle horror that’s not to be missed.

When a power-hungry magician decides to assassinate the beloved village mayor, he’s not content to simply dispatch a knife-wielding killer; rather, he slips the mayor one of his “Special Silencers,” a small tablet which causes an orgiastic gaggle of tree branches to burst forth from its victim’s stomach with a torrent of blood and entrails streaming from its surcles. It’s up to rebel cop Barry Prima and the deadly Eva Arnaz to stop him before his insidious political plot takes root. It’s like John Carpenter’s THE THING starring RAMBO meets I guess that boring-ass Radiohead song “Treefingers” as covered by Cliff Burton-era Metallica drenched in blood. Multiplied by a factor of Adventure!

This isn’t so much an “action-horror” hybrid as a brute-force action extravaganza in which gnarled tree branches periodically explode out of people’s stomachs in spectacularly violent ways. We’re not going out on a limb by saying it’s an unforgettable experience, and one you won’t find anywhere else!

THE FUTURE WEIRD: NON-RESIDENT ALIENS

Posted on May 15, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
WEDNESDAY, MAY 21 – 8 PM

ALIEN LIFE FORMS captured in Roswell and Area 51. Elaborate hoax, or something more sinister? Alleged “crash sites” are located in remote places; unmapped, walled off, and protected by intense government secrecy, classified documents, and official denial.

NON-RESIDENT ALIENS motivate this month’s episode of The Future Weird. Remembering so-called “black sites”– where government projects are conducted outside of a country’s territory and legal jurisdiction– and isolated immigrant detention centers, we invite you to consider the kind of landscapes we protect, the people we eliminate, and the shocking logic of labor without bodies.

The Future Weird is a bi-monthly series exploring contemporary film from the global south – with an African bias. Our title “the future weird” is inspired by The State’s ongoing documentation of non-western futurisms: http://www.thestate.ae/

7TH ANNUAL DRUID UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

Posted on May 8, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

7TH ANNUAL DRUID UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL
Dir. Various, 2013-2014.
France, UK, Austria, USA, Italy.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
PROGRAM 1 – 8:00 PM [65 min]
PROGRAM 2 – 10:00 PM [78 min]

Free raffle at both shows!

The Druid Underground Film Festival comes out swinging with 2 crazy new shows featuring the BEST of the Long Form Shorts and Features submitted to the 2014 season. New images and hilarious horror—hallmarks of any DUFF screening—are infused with themes of surrealism and obsession to create a truly unique theater experience that “Packs a lot of weird shit into two hours of screenings.” —LA Weekly

I LOVE The Druid Underground Film Festival from Druid Underground Film Festival on Vimeo.

Druid Underground Film Festival Site

7th Annual Druid Underground Film Festival Facebook Event

– PROGRAM 1 (8:00 PM) – [65 min]

NUIT NOIRE
Dir. Qarxx.
France, 28 min.
What do a psychotic viking pimp, a transsexual rapist, and a nerve-wracked heroin junky have in common? This brutal and over-the-top narrative is fresh off the sleazy streets of the French underground. Kinetic, beautiful and funny as hell.

FORTUNES
Dir. Gregory Barth.
UK, 3 min.
A constant climax of new images, Fortunes demonstrates the flurry of everyday activities before grabbing them by the guts and pulling them inside out with surreal sequences designed to drive you insane!

EX
Dir. Fritz Aigner.
Austria, 23 min.
A dude. Somewhere in a house. A whispering romance. But then the blood buckets.

REFEREE
Dir. Guy Kozak.
USA, 11 min.
A dedicated but slightly obsessed high school football referee must make one of the toughest calls of his life. Twisted.

– PROGRAM 2 (10:00 PM) – [78 min]

MONSURA IS WAITING
Dir. Kevin Newbury.
USA, 15 min.
A bizarro comedy about two aging showgirls in Bridgeport, CT whose nightly performance is a kinda sexy, kinda creepy worship ritual to a giant creature (think Mothra) they believe will be returning to earth to redeem them.

SEX EQUO
Dir. Werther Germondari & Maria Laura Spagnoli.
Italy, 63 min.
In the tradition of Pasolini’s THE CANTERBURY TALES and Borowczyk’s THE BEAST, this feature has Adam and Eve choose several new forbidden fruits, each a new weirdo erotic tale. Inflatable pool toys are abused en-mass, blow jobs are given in shooting ranges, lesbians throw random parties, Little Red Riding Hood even gets down with a mushroom in the forest and so much more- all drawn from the real-life images hidden in plain view on the walls of Italian architecture. It’s totally messed up but tasteful and picturesque all at the same time!

VIEWS FROM THE INSIDE

Posted on April 30, 2014December 24, 2019 by spectacletheater

This May, in honor of the flowers blooming just outside our windows, Spectacle presents two unforgettable tales of world cinema with a common backdrop: the nuthouse.

JANNIE TOTSIENS
aka JOHNNY FAREWELL
Dir. Jans Rautenbach, 1970
South Africa, 106 min.
In Afrikaans & English with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, MAY 1 – 7:30PM
MONDAY, MAY 5 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, MAY 16 – 10PM
SUNDAY, MAY 25 – 7:30PM

Considered a cornerstone of South Africa’s little-revisited 1960s “Golden Era,” Jannie Totsiens is a heady and disturbing surrealist grapple with apartheid as an entrenched form of neurological illness. A paltry band of inmates – including a washed-up Nazi sympathizer and a baby-talking blonde nymphomaniac obsessed with rocking horses and dolls – roam the grounds of South Africa’s most opulent mountain-retreat madhouse. Filmmaker Jans Rautenbach gives each character their own hard-etched idiosyncrasies, allowing linkages to their pre-asylum lives to burble to a surface before dissipating amidst so much wheezing, rambling gibberish.

Into the fray enters a catatonic young mathematics professor named Jannie (Cobus Rossouw). Committed following a plunge into despair, Jannie’s addition tests the menagerie’s thin veneer of community, exposing the lunatics’ threadbare delusions and the bottomless hypocrisy of their sane keepers. (At one point, the sanitarium’s director sighs that he’s given up on therapy – from here on out, “just pills and injections.”) As a drama, Rautenbach’s film is avant-garde in its disavowal of emotional logic: his camera pushes, pulls or spins on the caprices of his insane characters. The result is a sometimes hilarious shadow play of predatory human weakness, richly textured in its balancing of color and death, veering wildly from satire to tragedy in the space of a few edits.

HEAD AGAINST THE WALL
aka La Tete Contre Les Murs
Dir. Georges Franju, 1959.
France. 95 min.
In French with English subtitles.

MONDAY, MAY 5 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 9 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 17 – 7:30 PM

Anouk Aimee. Charles Aznavour. A shimmering black motorcycle jacket. Georges Franju’s Head Against The Wall taps into cinema’s inherent attractions but renders its own utterly untenable, less a cautionary tale than a smoldering portrait of loss. Behind the gates of a countryside sanitorium lives young Francois (future filmmaker Jean-Pierre Mocky), the hotheaded son of a stuffy lawyer – a wild one in the Brando tradition on the outside, bored to sedation within. Francois knows he’s sane, but while waiting for this latest convulsion of The System to pass, all he can do is look at the people around him – and now, without the comfort of his on-and-off girlfriend Stéphanie (Aimee), his visage isn’t pretty.

Blessed with the same magisterial stillness and dark beauty that gave Eyes Without A Face its inimitable power, Franju’s feature debut is both straightforward and serpentine. The screenplay (adapted from a Herve Bazin novel) posits man’s place in society as anything but certain; as Francois seeks validation from parties neutral to his domineering father, his individuality seems to vanish. What develops is not a critique of doctors or hospitals, but instead of French paternalism at large. Under the heel of a society founded on class expectations, Francois doesn’t lose his freedom so much as he realizes it never existed in the first place.

“He seeks the madness behind reality because it is for him the only way to rediscover the true face of reality behind this madness… Let us say that Franju demonstrates the necessity of Surrealism if one considers it as a pilgrimage to the sources. And Head Against The Wall proves that he is right.” – Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema

“Whether it’s the weird, eerily erotic gaze of a female inmate or a strange gathering of doves or a cityscape by night that seems as dank and claustrophobic as the asylum walls themselves, Franju’s mastery and palpable adoration of effect is ever evident.” – Glenn Kenny, The Auteurs

MAY MIDNIGHTS

Posted on April 22, 2014December 24, 2019 by spectacletheater

FRIDAY, MAY 2: DORIANA GREY

FRIDAY, MAY 9: HANNAH, QUEEN OF THE VAMPIRES
SATURDAY, MAY 10: THE MANIPULATOR

SATURDAY, MAY 17: SCREAMPLAY

FRIDAY, MAY 23: THE REVENGE OF GHOUL FRIDAY
SATURDAY, MAY 24: DEMON QUEEN

The Franco Files Presents:
DORIANA GREY (Die Marquise von Sade)
Dir. Jesus Franco, 1976
Germany, 75 min.
In German with English subtitles

Franco’s ongoing collaboration with Lina Romay (which continued until her death in 2012) was in full spring by the time we reach 1976’s DORIANA GREY, but her uninhibited (read: nude) performance reaches new heights in this dual role as both wealthy recluse Doriana Grey and her nymphomaniacal twin sister, currently in a mental asylum. A journalist (Monica Swain) visits Doriana in order to interview her, discovering that while Doriana is an elderly woman she never seems to age, that her twin sister feels pleasure for her, and her sexual partners end up dead.

Those of you expecting strong ties to either Wilde or Sade are probably going to be disappointed, but Franco’s sense of melancholy even during his most explicit scenes will find a lot to love: it’s a good companion piece to FEMALE VAMPIRE. The contrast between the subtly suggestive Doriana and her completely lust-mad sister makes this one of Lina’s best performances, and the beautiful mansion locations give both Franco and cinematographer Peter Baumgartner plenty to work with. Add to this an excellent score by Walter Baumgartner and it’s a Franco film well worth seeing both by newcomers and hardcore fans alike, and a perfect start to our Franco Files series, highlighting some of the master’s lesser-seen works.

HANNAH, QUEEN OF THE VAMPIRES (La tumba de la isla maldita)
Dir. Ray Danton and Julio Salvador, 1973
Spain/USA, 85 min.
In English

FRIDAY, MAY 9 – MIDNIGHT

Professor Bolton, while investigating a sealed tomb alleged to contain the body of a vampire, is crushed to death, and his son Chris (played by Andrew Prine of SIMON KING OF THE WITCHES/THE CENTERFOLD GIRLS) comes to the island to investigate his father’s death. He meets fellow historian Peter (played by the everpresent Mark Damon) and a schoolteacher who warns him against opening the tomb (played by Patty Shepherd, of The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman). Chris ignores this advice, and attempting to lift the tomb off his father’s body he opens the lid, freeing Hannah the vampire queen (Teresa Gimpera, best known from SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE) from her tomb, beginning a spree of seduction and destruction across the land. As offers of help recede, Chris finds fewer and fewer people willing to him him kill Hannah — will he be able to stop her? Presented here in the most complete edition available (the video from a Spanish tv production with all gore intact and the audio is from the original English edition, not a dub), and unlike many Mill Creek editions, this one is completely in color. Fans of brooding rural horror, Prine’s moustache and she-wolves should definitely make it out for this one.

THE MANIPULATOR
Dir. Yabo Yablonsky
USA, 85 min.

SATURDAY, MAY 10 – MIDNIGHT

“We all change. But that’s just the way it goes.”

Certain performances are for the ages. They transcend the actor and place the role into an realm of their own. They cut against the actor as we know them, they are a slap in the face to our assumptions, they are the films that make us uncomfortable with who we think we are and who we want to be. Consider Andy Griffith in A Voice In The Crowd. Consider Ernest Borgnine in Marty. That’s exactly what you’ll get from Mickey Rooney in THE MANIPULATOR, as intense a delivery as David Hess or Roger Watkins in a film that is about as weird as they come.

Perhaps best considered a role-reversed SUNSET BOULEVARD or a twist on the screen-queens-gone-bad roles of 70s Elizabeth Taylor or Joan Crawford circa STRAIGHT-JACKET Mickey Rooney tears into the role of B.J. Lang like a freight train, screaming his demented paranoid soliloquies over synth bloops and echoplex for days. In honor of his recent passing, Spectacle is proud to present what I (Darren) consider Mickey Rooney’s true magnum opus: THE MANIPULATOR.

THE REVENGE OF GHOUL FRIDAY
Another Series of Short Films Celebrating the Supernatural!
Approx. 80 min.

FRIDAY, MAY 23 – MIDNIGHT

Like a severed hand with a gypsy curse, THE REVENGE OF GHOUL FRIDAY: Another Series of Short Films Celebrating the Supernatural! will crawl through nightmare swamps to get you!

It’s the follow-up to April’s sacrilegious smash-hit, GHOUL FRIDAY, and like all good horror sequels, THE REVENGE OF GHOUL FRIDAY doubles the mayhem and the stupidity!

With more than 20 shorts in an approximately 80 minute program, be the first kid on your block to experience unfathomable and indescribable evil; all for the low, low prices of $5—and your immortal soul!!!

Attend tonight’s show and you will witness the End of the World many, many times over: Flying saucers, the cannibalistic undead, hellish relics, killer robots, homicidal maniacs from beyond space and time, rabbits, hungry monsters, ancient demon-gods, vicious aliens, mad and horny doctors, murderous mutants and various Lovecraftian beasties all do their part to destroy civilization and devour humanity! Even God, the greatest serial killer EVER, makes an appearance! And y’know what? He’s bringing His two sons along…

Unspeakable satanic ceremonies? All the kids are doing it! Undead, unholy, supernatural, hilarious, nightmarish, sacrilegious, absurdist, magical—it’s all here!

Like Dan O’Bannon’s zombies, THE REVENGE OF GHOUL FRIDAY can’t be stopped with a bullet to the head—after all, you can’t kill something that was never alive!

Stay tuned for BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE SON OF GHOUL FRIDAY!!!!

Troma Entertainment Presents:
SCREAMPLAY
Dir. Rufus Butler Seder, 1985
USA, 90 min.

SATURDAY, MAY 17 – MIDNIGHT

The Troma Team is proud to present SCREAMPLAY, the story of aspiring screenwriter Edgar Allen (Rufus B. Seder) as he arrives in Hollywood carrying his most valuable possessions: a battered suitcase and a typewriter. Edgar Allen’s best attribute is his wild imagination. He imagines scenes so vividly for the murder mystery he is writing that they seem to come to life…and they do! As mysterious murders pile up, and Edgar Allen must confront aging actresses, rock stars, and the police in the bleak setting of broken dreams in Hollywood.

As the line between reality and imagination becomes more blurred, Edgar Allen convinced the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is driven slowly mad. With an appearance by legendary writer, director and actor George Kuchar as Martin, SCREAMPLAY is the gritty suspensefest that takes Hollywood by the throat and strangles it… but always with style and art!

Massacre Video presents:
DEMON QUEEN
Dir. Donald Farmer, 1986
USA, 55 min.

SATURDAY, MAY 24 – MIDNIGHT

Jesse (Dennis Stewart), a seedy, low level dope pusher and his bitchy, strung-out girlfriend Wendy (Patti Valliere) are in deep. They owe six grand to a coke dealer naned Izzie (Ric Foster). But when his henchman Bone (Cliff Dance) comes to collect, a mysterious lady comes out of nowhere and lays waste to the goon. When Jesse awakens he finds the crony dead, his throat ripped to shreds and his guardian angel, Lucinda (Mary Fanaro) in need of shelter. Jesse feels the need to repay the woman who saved his life, but soon finds out that a place to stay is the least of what Lucinda is after. (Spoiler alert: She also needs human flesh, and lots of it.) Spectacle and Masscare (who first presented this at our second annual Shriek Show) are thrilled to team up and screen this rare SOV nugget!

Massacre Video was started in 2008 by Louis C. Justin as a small internet retail store specializing in low-budget and hard to find horror/cult/exploitation DVDs and magazines. In 2009, MV purchased the rights to the independent shot-on-video film 555 and planed on releasing it on to DVD for the very first time. Since then Massacre has churned out releases of JUNK FILMS, OROZCO: THE EMBALMER, and most recently the deeply twisted VOYAGE TO AGATIS. Look for more releases in the near future and check out massacrevideo.com for more details, to order these films, and more!

STARTS WITH DAD

Posted on April 22, 2014December 24, 2019 by spectacletheater

STARTS WITH DAD RETURNS!

TUESDAY, MAY 6 – 8:00 PM

Yes! Join us once again at Spectacle for another round of…well, whatever you made!

Starts With Dad is a loose group with two goals: shoot something, show something. No need to be a filmmaker, an artist, or an actor. It’s all about the impulse to create, no matter how unprofessional.

The theme is a bit different this time. We need a compelling enough hook to draw in outsiders and grow our numbers, so this month will be “Ripped From the Headlines.”

The rule is simple: find a news article from the months of March or April, open your film on the headline, your film must follow from there.

Remember, there is a 7 minute limit. Keep in mind that it’s up to 7 minutes so if you have 20 brilliant seconds, Dad will still be proud.

You can glean further info, find out how to participate (or, you know, just show up with your film!), and see previous Starts With Dad films at www.startswithdad.tumblr.com.

You will find human tissue obsessed housewives, deicidal squirrels, claymation testicles, jump rope gurus, blatant plagiarism, and lots else besides.

MIL KDU DES: GXH (Live Score!)

Posted on April 18, 2014December 24, 2019 by spectacletheater

MIL KDU DES: GXH
edited by Louis Piquette, music by MIL KDU DES

SATURDAY, MAY 31 – 8:00 and 10:00 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

BEHOLD!

On May 31st, MIL KDU DES return from the depths of the ocean to present and score GXH. A collaborative effort featuring the skillful edit of none other than Louis Piquette and that classic MIL KDU DES sound – fully formed (and performed) in the hallowed halls of Spectacle – a place that has recently been called “The Worst Sandwich Shop In Brooklyn” and “The Greatest Movie Theater In The Entire World.”

With water coolers abuzz and the rumor mills churning, America is settling into be cautiously optimistic about the newest entry in the Godzilla canon. (Full disclosure, some of us are pretty hyped up about it.) But with the bad taste of 1998’s utter disaster still on our tongues, we here at Spectacle set our sights to a simpler time. A time of rubber suits and miniature cities. Piquette takes his razor sharp edits to 1971’s GODZILLA vs. HEDORAH, a strange, colorful, psyched out, and environmentally-conscious film filled to the brim with incredible sets and (of course) big bad battles.

Here’s what Spectacle programmer, filmmaker, and critic Steve Macfarlane had to say about it as part of Not Coming To A Theater Near You’s excellent retrospective “The Compleat Godzilla” from last February:

“To call Godzilla Vs. Hedorah a relative masterpiece may sound like faint praise, but hindsight solidifies the film’s status as one of the most novel in the Godzilla canon. The family at its core are tenants of a badly polluted suburb, living in a Japan where Mt. Fuji appears carefully nestled between power station grids, where news commentators can’t tell the difference between a colossal beast and a new military weapon. Humanity and nature flat-out do not get along, and Godzilla’s rival, the “smog monster” Hedorah, is less the traditional diamond-encrusted invader from outer space than a sprawling manifestation of industrial Japanese growth after World War II, a red-eyed effigy in sludge. Director Yoshimitsu Banno dives head-first into making the series ever kid-friendlier, while simultaneously returning to it the political teeth that had gone lacking long since.”

An evening feast for two of the five senses, maybe three who knows.
Join us or die or don’t.

THE NAKED WITCH (with Live Score!)

Posted on April 13, 2014December 24, 2019 by spectacletheater

THE NAKED WITCH
Dir. Larry Buchanan, 1961
USA, 59 min.

TUESDAY, MAY 27 – 8:00 and 10:00 PM
TWO LIVE SCORE SCREENINGS – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

“For a moment I felt sorry for her, this lonely nymph, whose friends were water-snakes and the moon, and she seemed to know every sound of the night.”

Inspired by the Finnish film Noita Palaa Elämään, THE NAKED WITCH is one of the earliest films in the career of b-movie “schlockmeister” Larry Buchanan, better known for films like MARS NEED WOMEN, ZONTAR THE THING FROM VENUS and MST3K staple ATTACK OF THE EYE CREATURES. Working with Claude Alexander (in his only film), Buchanan moves the story from Finland to the hill country around Lukenbach, Texas (an area settled by German immigrants and, by the late 50s, nearly a ghost town). A young scholar visits the area to learn about local legends of The Lukenbach Witch, gradually discovering this water witch not only existed, but still exists. A film closer to Russian fantastika films than drive-in horror, it’s generally dismissed by z-film bloggers and other scum but offers strange delights for fans of no-budget rural weirdness.

A live score will be provided by Medroxy Progesterone Acetate using a collection of tapes, pedals, samplers and homemade oscillators to provide a supplemental score. Currently based in Brooklyn, MPA has played basements, abandoned barns and the occasional stage since 1999, releasing albums on Black Horizons, Ruralfaune, Sloow Tapes, Small Doses, MusicYourMindWillLoveYou and personal label Midwest Death Cult. Most recently MPA was one of the opening bands for the premiere of GO DOWN DEATH. More info available at http://www.cryptonarrative.com/mpa/

7TH ANNUAL DRUID UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL Dir. Various, 2013-2014. France, UK, Austria, USA, Italy.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28 ONE NIGHT ONLY! PROGRAM 1 – 8:00 PM [65 min] PROGRAM 2 – 10:00 PM [78 min]

7TH ANNUAL DRUID UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL
Dir. Various, 2013-2014.
France, UK, Austria, USA, Italy.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
PROGRAM 1 – 8:00 PM [65 min]
PROGRAM 2 – 10:00 PM [78 min]