Page 130 – Spectacle Theater

AN EVENING WITH RUMI MISSABU (UNCLE BOB & SHORTS)

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

UNCLE BOB
Dir. Robert Oppel, 2010
USA, 78 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY! WITH RUMI MISSABU IN PERSON!
FRIDAY, APRIL 25 – 8:00 PM

Rumi Missabu of the Cockettes returns to the east coast with a handful of new short features and the full-length documentary Uncle Bob. Produced by Rumi and Abel Ferrara, Uncle Bob is an examination of photographer and gay rights activist Robert Opel as directed by his nephew Robert Oppel (Opel dropped a p from his last name to protect his family). Best known among trivia buffs for streaking during the 1974 Academy Awards show, Uncle Bob examines Opel’s involvement in the San Francisco art scene (he ran a gallery called Fey-Way, produced stage plays with Divine and became friends with Robert Mappelthorpe and Tom of Finland, all of whom are interviewed in the film), his struggle for gay rights (particularly the rights of gay teachers) and his murder during an alleged robbery of his gallery. Robert Oppel investigates multiple scenarios surrounding his uncle’s murder, and by examining both his death and his life, succeeds at providing a glimpse into both his uncle’s life and the climate of San Francisco during the seventies.

SCREENING WITH THE FOLLOWING SHORT FILMS:

* TIP-TOE PAST THE WITCH (work in progress currently in production) from director/animator Kimba Anderson. Running time approx 3-5 minutes

* RUMINATIONS (work in progress currently in production) from director Robert James and Thedore Nguyen. Running time approx 3-5 minutes

* I SCARE MYSELF (music video) co-directed by Rumi Missabu and Mister WA. Running time approx 5 minutes

* ELEVATOR GIRLS IN BONDAGE (teaser/trailer) directed by Michael Kalmen. Running time approx 3 minutes. I have a sparkling new DVD addition of the film lipstick-kissed and autographed for sale.

GETTING HIGH ON HIV MEDICATION (with Hamilton Morris!)

Posted on April 7, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

GETTING HIGH ON HIV MEDICATION
Dir. Hamilton Morris
USA, 30 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10 – 10:00 PM Hamilton Morris in attendance!

Hamilton Morris presents his newest documentary for Vice, GETTING HIGH ON HIV MEDICATION.

“In 1998, the antiretroviral drug efavirenz was approved for treatment of HIV infection. Though the drug was highly effective, patients soon began to report bizarre dreams, hallucinations, and feelings of unreality. When South African tabloids started to run stories of efavirenz-motivated rapes and robberies, scientists began to seriously study how efavirenz might produce these unexpected hallucinogenic effects . Morris travels to South Africa to interview efavirenz users and dealers and study how the life-saving medicine became part of a dangerous cocktail called “nyaope.” – Vice.com

PSYCHEDELIC DIARIES: THE SHORT FILMS OF ÉTIENNE O’LEARY

Posted on April 4, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

PSYCHEDELIC DIARIES: THE SHORT FILMS OF ÉTIENNE O’LEARY
Dir: Étienne O’Leary, 1966-1968.
Total program time: 68 min.

SATURDAY, APRIL 5 – 10PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 20 – 5PM
MONDAY, APRIL 28 – 10PM

Special thanks to ICPCE

Despite an entire filmography of only three experimental short films, Étienne O’Leary’s work is a vibrant, majestic reflection of late 60s youth culture and avant-garde film techniques, including some pioneering editing tricks that still seem fresh and invigorating today.

A 60s French dandy by way of Montreal, O’Leary became intoxicated by the sights and sounds of bohemia and formed an alliance with the Zanzibar Group (his films are populated by French underground luminaries like Pierre Clementi, Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, and Michel Auder). A student of the New York underground and surrealism, O’Leary uses a variety of notebook-style shooting, image layering, and fast cutting to capture the era’s heady decadence and political possibilities. Adding to the trippy visuals, O’Leary composed his own singular soundtracks with a myriad of found instruments and tape recorders, a new music genre in and of themselves.

O’Leary’s shorts were shown at various European galleries and happennings (French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel was a big champion of his work), but since the late 60s remained lost until they were recently rediscovered in the vaults of the Cinémathèque québécoise. A product of his time in the best possible way, O’Leary’s films are the cosmic nexus aligning Warhol’s Factory, Jonas Mekas’s home-movie poetics, and Kenneth Anger’s pop subversion.

Read the last known interview with Étienne O’Leary here.

DAY TRIPPER
Dir: Étienne O’Leary, 1966.
France, 9 min.

O’Leary debut is a staccato black-and-white impression of shared intimacy and late-night mind expansion. A tapestry of party and beach scenes are inter-cut with a lover’s stoned, seductive dancing. The soundtrack mixes screeching, crashing pianos with cut-up tape effects and samples from Nancy Sinatra, The Who, and Screaming Jay Hawkins’s manic “I Hear Voices.”

“May Ray said that Day Tripper was a film he wished he had made. I was flattered.” -Etienne O’Leary

HOMEO
(aka Homeo: Minor death: Coming back from goin’ home)
Dir: Étienne O’Leary, 1967.
France, 38 min.

A travelogue of sorts, O’Leary second work blends cityscapes, nature, summer holidays, and charismatic portraits all together, with everything awash in radiant colors. The droning harmonium soundtrack provides a continuous pulse, with occasional flutters that match the quasi-spiritual vision quests. Most significantly, Homeo foregrounds O’Leary’s radical approach to in-camera editing, with rapid-fire cuts bringing photographs and magazine ads to vibrant life alongside friends’s eternal wanderlusts.

“An object-lesson in the cinematic intensification of images drawn from day-to-day reality, in which home movie footage is rendered rock’n’roll poetry through montage.” -Cork Film Centre

CHROMO SUD
Dir: Étienne O’Leary, 1968.
France, 21 min.

O’Leary final and most fully realized short is a hallucinogenic nightmare of May ’68 riots, sadist fantasies and drug-fueled freak outs. The friendly faces and playful eroticism from before have now grown threatening and perverse. This is O’Leary at his most subliminal and transcendent, with flashing edits and dense layers of juxtaposed dissolves creating entire universes in just a few frames, all of which are augmented by a sonic collage of disembodied moaning vocals, prepared piano, and tinkering electronics.

Taking Chromo Sud as a whole, one can’t help draw parallels to the future psychedelic art and music of experimental band Black Dice or even the 80s work of Toshio Matsumoto, who all seem to be tapping in to the same far-out mainline O’Leary rode for 21 mesmerizing minutes.

“Chromo Sud, his most sinister work by far, owes as much to Kenneth Anger as to Mekas, presenting the libertarian impulses of the time in as orgiastically morbid and sadistic a vein as Anger’s Scorpio Rising biker culture… a testament to the transformative powers of editing and the control it gives the filmmaker in shaping his own reality from the world around him.” —Experimental Film Club

HOW AWFUL ABOUT ALLAN

Posted on April 2, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

HOW AWFUL ABOUT ALLAN
Dir. Curtis Harrington, 1970 (TV).
USA. 73 min.

SATURDAY, APRIL 5 – MIDNIGHT

[Warning: the available DVD-rip that we will be presenting is transferred from a tape copy and is, well… very ‘nostalgic’ looking.]

“For some inexplicable reason, this tele-feature is but rarely accorded the respect it merits. In point of fact, it is a most accomplished, gripping, and well acted affair, from the days when a “Made for TV” movie, could still boast performers, writing, and technical credentials of the first water.

The story is an intense, psychological study of a young man suffering from hysterical blindness following the death of his professor father in a fire. Set in a large, shadowy, Victorian house, this very Gothic story hinges on the sibling rivalry between the young man and his spinster sister, both of whom blame themselves, in different ways, for their father’s demise. Eventually, the young man’s sanity begins to give way, in the face of a series of inexplicable hauntings, which may, or may not be supernatural. Only the denouement will tell.

With its pronounced subtext of repressed, family guilt, the film has literary antecedents in the work of Shirley Jackson, Walter De La Mare, and Nathanial Hawthorne.

Starring a cast of major (big screen) movie and stage actors, this film has everything that is conspicuously absent in current television: an excellent musical score, evocative photography, muted lighting, accomplished art direction, an interesting premise and script, intelligent dialogue (gasp!) and a very good sense of pacing.

Add to that a baseline story that improves on the novel upon which it was based (yes I read it) and you have a viewing experience very different from the “Made for TV’s” of today, which are—I’m told, since I don’t watch them—an endless stream of tedious, politically correct, AIDS, Anorexia, and spouse abuse victim propaganda studies—I believe the catch phrase is “victim of the week” stories.

All in all, “How Awful About Allan” serves as a sad reminder of what was still artistically possible in the world of commercial television, in the not too distant past.”

-Guest summary by ‘BrentCarleton’, IMDb member since December 2003

IN A GLASS CAGE

Posted on March 31, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

TRAS EL CRISTAL
aka IN A GLASS CAGE
Dir. Agustí Villaronga, 1986.
Spain. 111 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, APRIL 5 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 8 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 11 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23 – 10:00 PM

IN A GLASS CAGE is projected in pristine 1080p High Definition courtesy of Cult Epics‘ 2011 Blu-ray restoration.

[Trigger Warning: Sustained, recurring scenes of torture and sexual abuse—frequently involving children—presented in harsh, unsparing tones with a palpable, fascist historical context.]

A deeply unnerving film situated in the middle of a variety of genre film lineages, Agustí Villaronga‘s IN A GLASS CAGE blends morose, art-house chamber drama with psychologically-challenging giallo horror and unflinching exploitation film brutality into a force of will that will likely plant itself in your mind forever.

The narrative is historically-weighted yet mostly hedged in back-story. Death-camp Nazi doctor Klaus (Günter Meisner) flees to Spain after the Holocaust, where the emotional toll of his systemic, compulsive physical and sexual abuse of children during and after the war leaves him suicidal. A botched attempt lands him immobilized in an iron lung, cared for by his tormented wife Griselda (Marisa Paredes) and innocent young daughter Rena (Gisela Echevarria). Soon, a strange and aggressive man (David Sust) arrives and takes control of Klaus’ care… at the elder man’s insistence.

Inspired by the notorious, prolific 15th century child-killer Gilles de Rais, Villaronga immediately tapped Günter Meisner (multiple-time Adolf Hitler, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory) for the role of Klaus, but the actor refused, disgusted with the content of the film. Eventually, he relented, claiming—apocryphally—that he could not get the script out of his mind. Meisner himself had been in a Nazi death camp as a youth.

This marked the first film for Catalan writer/director Agustí Villaronga, who would go on direct Black Bread (2010), winner of numerous Gaudí and Goya awards and the first Catalan-language film to be shortlisted for the Oscars.

Poster designed by Preston Spurlock.

A huge thanks to Nico B. from Cult Epics.

This is the first film in a regular series at Spectacle co-presented by Cult Epics and Kim’s Video.

Cult Epics is a DVD/BD/VOD label that specializes in Cult, Horror, Art House, and Erotica films. It has released the work of directors such as Fernando Arrabal, Rene Daalder, Walerian Borowczyk (The Beast), Agustí Villaronga (In A Glass Cage), Abel Ferrara (The Driller Killer), Radley Metzger’s Erotic Masterpieces “Score,” “The Lickerish Quartet” and “Camille 2000” and the majority of Tinto Brass’ directorial outings. The label is also home to the “Bettie Page” films and Nico B’s feature debut “Bettie Page Dark Angel” for fans of the legendary 1950’s pin-up icon, as well as various collections of Vintage erotic short films. Other classics include “Slogan” featuring Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin and Jean Genet’s “Un Chant D’Amour.”

Kim’s Video is an NYC institution famous for its long-standing downtown presence as a premiere destination for your media fix. Among thousands of other titles, the store carries the entire line of Cult Epics DVDs and Blu-rays. The current incarnation is located at 124 1st Ave (between 7th/8th St.) in the East Village.

AN EVENING WITH LIGHT IN THE ATTIC RECORDS

Posted on March 26, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

AN EVENING WITH LIGHT IN THE ATTIC RECORDS
Approx. 90 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16 – 8:00PM & 10:00 PM

Spectacle is beyond thrilled to team up with the incomparable reissue record label Light In The Attic Records for an evening of rare and wonderful works!

Highlights include a collection of original short docs on Light In The Attic artists Donnie and Joe Emerson, National Wake, and Jim Sullivan- PLUS surprise shorts and music videos!

We’ll cap off the festivities off with an exclusive screening of the cult favorite film Cowboy In Sweden featuring the legendary Lee Hazlewood! The film- originally a 1970 Swedish TV special- is now fully restored and remastered in HD and plucked directly from LITA’s lavish box set There’s A Dream I’ve Been Saving, a box set commemorating the complete legacy of Lee Hazlewood Industries from 1966-1971.

“…the film must have been exceedingly surreal, since the record exists in its own space and time. At its core, it’s a collection of country and cowboy tunes, but the production is cinematic and psychedelic, creating a druggy, discombobulated sound like no other. This is mind-altering music — the combination of country song structures, Hazlewood’s deep baritone, the sweet voices of Nina Lizell and Suzi Jane Hokom, rolling acoustic guitars, ominous strings, harpsichords and flutes, eerie pianos, and endless echo is stranger than outright avant-garde music…” –Stephen Thomas Erlewine, allmusic.com

KINETIC CINEMA: DOLPHIN DANCE PROJECT

Posted on March 25, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

KINETIC CINEMA: DOLPHIN DANCE PROJECT
Chisa Hidaka & Benjamin Harley, Various years
USA, ca. 90 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10 – 7:30 PM

On April 10, Chisa Hidaka and Benjamin Harley will present a night of films from the Dolphin Dance Project and the works of art that inspired the project. The Dolphin Dance Project is a series of underwater dance films created by the collaboration of human dancers with Atlantic spotted dolphins. Ben and Chisa’s influences range from contact improvisation to underwater base jumping films, all of which will be shown at the screening. www.dolphin-dance.org

BIOS:
Inquiry and discovery are the themes that tie together the varied experiences of Chisa Hidaka, MD, Founder and Director of Dolphin Dance Project. Chisa has a 20+ year history in the NYC downtown dance scene and also has experience as a dance educator and musculoskeletal research scientist. Through the Dolphin Dance project, Chisa also brings together her dance and science expertise. She brings to bear her extensive training in improvised dance to interact with wild dolphins through aesthetic choices that are respectful of the dolphins participation as equal partners in the creative process.

Benjamin Harley (producer, co-founder) studied anthropology, philosophy, and theatre at Yale University. After a global career in business development and strategy consulting for the telecommunications and media industries, he settled in New York City and fell in love with dance. Practicing contact improvisation for the last 10 years, he met Dr. Hidaka, and their conversations about her far-reaching insight into the potential for connecting with dolphins through dance inspired him to join her in establishing the Dolphin Dance Project.

ABOUT KINETIC CINEMA
Kinetic Cinema, is a regular screening series of Pentacle’s Movement Media curated by invited guest artists who create evenings of films and videos that have been influential to their own work as artists. When artists are asked to reflect upon how the use of movement in film and media arts has influenced their own art, a plethora of new ideas, material, and avenues of exploration emerge. From cutting edge motion capture animation to Michael Jackson music videos, from Gene Kelly musicals to Kenneth Anger films, Kinetic Cinema is dedicated to the recognition and appreciation for “moving” pictures. We have presented these evenings at Collective: Unconscious, Chez Bushwick, IRT, Launchpad, Green Space, Uniondocs, CRS, 3rd Ward, Fort Useless and The Tank in New York City, as well as at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

For more info on the current Kinetic Cinema season please visit our website and our blog, movetheframe.com.

ABOUT PENTACLE’S MOVEMENT MEDIA
Pentacle’s Movement Media provides services, strategies, and opportunities for dance artists to make dance works for screen and use media to promote and enhance their artistic pursuits. The core activities of Movement Media are screenings, consulting services, workshops, and interactive media publications (blogs, social networking, online videos, etc). These services address a growing need for dance artists to engage with Media, particularly online and on new media platforms, in order to reach audiences, grow artistically, and stay relevant in today’s media-rich world.

Funding Credits
Pentacle’s Movement Media programming is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

KINETIC CINEMA is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

FACCIA A FACCIA

Posted on March 25, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

FACCIA A FACCIA
a.k.a. Face to Face
Dir. Sergio Sollima, 1967
Italy and Spain, 107 min.
In Italian and Spanish with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, APRIL 19 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 28 – 7:30 PM

Sergio Sollima is less well known in the US than the other two Sergios who made their names in spaghetti Westerns in the 60s, namely Sergio Leone with his DOLLARS trilogy and Sergio Corbucci with DJANGO, but his work resonated strongly in Italy and provided the leftist militants there with some of their iconography.

Between 1966 and 1968 Sollima directed his “political trilogy,” which comprises LA RESA DEI CONTI (The Big Gundown), FACCIA A FACCIA (Face to Face), and CORRI, UOMO, CORRI (Run, Man, Run). All three star Tomas Milian, whose other work in the genre includes films by Corbucci and Giovanni Fago. Fago’s morality western VENGEANCE IS MINE was part of Spectacle’s Unearthed Spaghetti Western Treasures series last September, and this April we strike another tragically overlooked motherlode.

FACCIA A FACCIA stars Gian Maria Volonté (better known for his work with Elio Petri in INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION and THE WORKING CLASS GOES TO HEAVEN and with Sergio Leone in A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE) as Brad Fletcher, a Texan history professor teaching in Boston during the Civil War. Because of his illness (tuberculosis mixed with impotent intellectualism) he has to move back south. After his return, he is kidnapped by Bennett, a dark, mustachioed bandit played by Tomas Milian, who takes him to his commune, Pietra di Fuoco—home to all kinds of outcasts of “modernity and reality.” Bennett is the chieftain of this band of the expropriated. After Fletcher takes charge in Bennett’s absence, the people of Pietra di Fuoco eventually end up rejecting Fletcher’s proselytizing intellectual authority.

Although Bennett is a similar character, Milian doesn’t reprise his role of Cuchillo from the trilogy’s other two installments. Cuchillo (Spanish for ‘knife’) became an unwitting third-world proletarian hero, elevated to the level of Che Guevara by the militants of Lotta Continua, Italy’s premiere amorphous leftist street-fighting force of the 60s and 70s, whose flags bore the image of his face.

With a score by Ennio Morricone and “authentic period detail with a baroque expressionist vision,” FACCIA A FACCIA is not to be missed.

APRIL MIDNIGHTS

Posted on March 23, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

FRIDAY, APRIL 4: LADY FRANKENSTEIN
SATURDAY, APRIL 5: HOW AWFUL ABOUT ALLAN

FRIDAY, APRIL 11: LEGEND OF THE EIGHT SAMURAI
SATURDAY, APRIL 12: AMERICAN HUNTER

FRIDAY, APRIL 18: GHOUL FRIDAY
SATURDAY, APRIL 19: ARGOMAN

FRIDAY, APRIL 25: WEREWOLF IN A GIRLS’ DORMITORY
SATURDAY, APRIL 26: NINJA VENGEANCE

LADY FRANKENSTEIN (AKA La Figlia di Frankenstein)
Dir. Mel Welles, 1971
Italy, 94 min.

FRIDAY, APRIL 4 – MIDNIGHT

LADY FRANKENSTEIN (Mel Welles, 1971) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

Dr. Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) obviously raised his daughter Tania Frankenstein (Rosalba Neri under the name Sarah Bey) right, as she’s taking over the family business in this take on the classic tale with extra grave robbing, extra nudity and nice performances from Franco fave Paul Muller and the always crazy Mickey Hargitay! Director Mel Welles provides gothic style to spare: secret doors, gloomy castles, mad science, romantic liasons, and of course The Monster, who (of course) gets loose and goes on a killing rampage. What really sets this film apart from either Universal or Hammer takes on this theme is Neri in one of her greatest performances, turning from coquettish to nightmarish on a dime, always calling the shots and pulling the strings. Spectacle is delighted to show the longest available copy, completely uncensored. Fans of 70s Italian period horror will find a lot to love here.

HOW AWFUL ABOUT ALLAN
Dir. Curtis Harrington, 1970 (TV).
USA. 73 min.

SATURDAY, APRIL 5 – MIDNIGHT

[Warning: the available DVD-rip that we will be presenting is transferred from a tape copy and is, well… very ‘nostalgic’ looking.]

With its pronounced subtext of repressed, family guilt, the film has literary antecedents in the work of Shirley Jackson, Walter De La Mare, and Nathanial Hawthorne.

All in all, “How Awful About Allan” serves as a sad reminder of what was still artistically possible in the world of commercial television, in the not too distant past.”

-Guest summary by ‘BrentCarleton’, IMDb member since December 2003

LEGEND OF THE EIGHT SAMURAI
Dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1983
Japan, 136 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles

FRIDAY, APRIL 11 – MIDNIGHT

“At long last, our dream of vengeance shall come true.”

If SAMURAI REINCARNATION left you wanting more, you’re in luck, as Kinji Fukasaku, Hiroyuki Sanada and Sonny Chiba reunite for LEGEND OF THE EIGHT SAMURAI. Based on the novel Nansô Satomi Hakken-den by Kyokutei Bakin, the film takes off in different directions (we don’t actually have eight samurai, more of a rag-tag crew) but provides action aplenty as eight crystals from the corpse of a princess lead to eight fighters who join forces to defeat an evil witch-queen. Gorgeous fight scenes, sugary English power ballads, flying centipedes, haunted temples, bathing in blood, zombie fighters and more, more, more! If you’re looking for a serious docudrama about feudal Japan you’re out of luck (sorry IMDB reviewers) but for anyone who enjoys high adventure on a grand scale, LEGEND OF THE EIGHT SAMURAI is an extravaganza of action, effects, costumes and stunts sure to satisfy the midnight crew.

AMERICAN HUNTER
(aka Lethal Hunter)
Dir. Arizal, 1988.
Indonesia. 92 min.
In Indonesian dubbed into English with Japanese subtitles.

SATURDAY, APRIL 12 – MIDNIGHT

Starring Christopher Mitchum, son of Robert Mitchum and 2012 Republican candidate for California Congressional District 24’s United States House of Representatives seat.

Christopher Mitchum returns for what might be the purest expression of mysterious Indonesian action director Arizal’s shoot-’em-up aesthetic as Jake Carver, an “agent” whose self-described occupation is to “fight bad guys.” In AMERICAN HUNTER, Carver battles a multifariously evil organization over a piece of microfilm to unspecified ends. Highlights include a jeep driving off the side of one skyscraper into the window of another, a three-way motorcycle/pick-up truck/train chase, a baby being run over by a car crashing through the side of a supermarket yet miraculously surviving, an eight minute helicopter chase, an awkwardly clothed shower sex scene, one house explosion, one castle explosion, dozens of car explosions, male bondage and electrocution, and a fist fight inside a dungeon full of what appears to be cardboard boxes overflowing with shredded paper. Bill “Super Foot” Wallace stars as the bad guy whose nefariousness is conveyed through his variously keeping pet falcons and monkeys on his shoulder, and Peter O’Brien drops in for an unlikely hench villain turn as a businessman who gets the shit kicked out of him then has his legs run over then crashes through a brick wall on the hood of a car. Approximately ten of the 92 action-packed minutes have been described.

GHOUL FRIDAY
A Series of Short Films Celebrating the Supernatural!
Dir. Various
Approx. 90 min.

FRIDAY, APRIL 18 – MIDNIGHT

On this day a gazillion years ago, after the Romans pulled some Takeshi Miike-style ultraviolence on Him, the Baby Jeebuz was ressursusitated and came back as Zombie Jesus, Undead Son of God! (Or something along those lines; the story’s open to interpretation…)

Spectacle presents a soul-stealing selection of seldom-seen supernatural shorts to shatter your sanity and send shivers down your spine. Not to mention deliver some laughs, too! In a 90 minute program, highlighting 22 films—from 4 seconds to 14 minutes in length—ranging from bittersweet to surreal to side-splitting, these movies unleash fiends, ghosts, vampires, psychos, spirits, sorcerers, hobgoblins, yokai, demigods, mutants, madmen and a host of other creepy-crawly critters!

In tonight’s shorts, along with a slew of hungry zombies, Cthulhu will be there, joined by ferocious feline phantasms, a singing frog, Count Dracula, an eel girl, a tell-tale heart, even Death herself! And you just might learn the secret history of the world, courtesy of the stone heads of Easter Island…

And zombies, lots of zombies. In his excellent 2011 textbook War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film, Marc Di Paolo of Oklahoma City University writes, “One of the appeals of the zombie… is that they give angry Americans something to shoot at…. Since the pleasure provided by killing a zombie [sic] is escapist and regressive, it offers little hope of any real solution to such abstract problems.”

But what Professor Di Paolo misses is that the lack of a “real solution” adds to the delicious frisson that the hordes of the flesh-eating dead are truly unstoppable and will always win, thus granting us the sweet release of that unexplored dimension of the afterlife.

An international mix of films, made in a blood-splattered kaleidoscope of styles, GHOUL FRIDAY features many unknown, unseen and uncanny short films, and a couple you might know all too well—from your nightmares! Bwah-hah-hah-HAH! Tonight’s show has adaptations of masters like Poe and Lovecraft, while also showcasing some of the best contemporary artists fascinated with the macabre and unholy. There’s even Slenderman, the new meme-monsters stalking the kids!

ARGOMAN
aka THE FANTASTIC ARGOMAN
aka ARGOMAN THE FANTASTIC SUPERMAN
aka THE INCREDIBLE PARIS INCIDENT
Dir. Sergio Grieco (as “Terence Hathaway”), 1967
Italy, 92 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, APRIL 19 – MIDNIGHT

ARGOMAN (Sergio Grieco as “Terence Hathaway”, 1967) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

This April, Spectacle is pleased to unleash one of its long-hidden midnight treasures: ARGOMAN THE FANTASTIC SUPERMAN. The batshit cousin of swingin’ sixties psych-thriller DANGER: DIABOLIK, and a likely inspiration for AUSTIN POWERS, ARGOMAN is so awesomely weird and hilarious that it is truly unclear whether the film is intended as parody. Like Diabolik, Argoman is a cross between superhero and supervillain and 100% superstud — a Batman-style Playboy vigilante, real name “Sir Reginald Hoover,” who lives in a high tech-pad decked with leopard-print everything and an endless supply of supergadgets and suspended sex beds at his disposal. He is also totally psychic, and one of his best moves is extending his palm really intensely and thinking “kill each other!” really hard until his opponents, such as the Chinese army, kill each other. And solving problems by cleverly levitating objects into new positions. He is also really great at psyching out giant cardboard robots and killing them, too.

In this, the first of one adventures, Argoman comes up against the vaguely amphibious and diabolical Jenabell, alias The Queen of the World, infiltrating to heart to enter her secret lair — or is it the other way around? Due to ARGOMAN’s excellent screenplay, you will be guessing until the very final moments, abetted by one of the great Italian lounge-cheese soundtracks. Indeed, ARGOMAN is the best superhero since Val Kilmer.

FREE ADMISSION FOR ANYONE WHO COMES WEARING AT LEAST 60% SPANDEX!

WEREWOLF IN A GIRLS DORMITORY
(aka: LYCANTHROPUS)
Dir. Paolo Heusch, 1961
Italy, 83 min.

FRIDAY, APRIL 25 – MIDNIGHT

“Mary has a marvelous ability for always being in trouble.”

Spectacle Midnights are about to give going back to college the old college try. There’s a ghoul in school and it’s a wonder anyone can even get a quality education amidst all the blackmail, seduction, and carnage.

A new professor, with a murky past, arrives at school for troubled girls outside of a quiet little town besieged by wolf attacks. On his first night there, a young girl is savagely torn apart just outside of the school. With the mile long suspect list growing ever shorter as the stack of bodies grows taller, the film – penned by the legendary scribe Ernesto Gastaldi (The Long Hair of Death, The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock, Torso, My Name is Nobody, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, The Case of the Bloody Iris, etc.) this film keeps you guessing til the end. Featuring a snappy theme song and a soundtrack peppered with bassoons and flutes and presented UNCUT with footage TOO SHOCKING FOR SIXTIES CENSORS!

“I saw. You’re a beast not a man my dear so go to the Devil.

I haven’t done anything.
I haven’t done anything.”

NINJA VENGEANCE
Dir. Karl Armstrong, 1992
USA, 87 min.
Screening directly from glorious VHS! Feel the fuzz!

SATURDAY, APRIL 26 – MIDNIGHT

[Trigger Warnings: Racial slurs and violence]

What’s so funny about fists, love, and understanding? In NINJA VENGEANCE: everything. Part anglicized martial arts extravaganza, part ineptly intentioned racesploitation picture, NINJA VENGEANCE is like a mix between THE INTRUDER and SAMURAI COP, and every bit as glorious as that tease suggests.

Chris is a young stud from Wyoming breezing through the small Texas town of Maynard on his way to “a seminar” when his bike (“one‘uh those foreign jobs”) breaks down. The local racists look kindly upon Chris’s aryan disposition, but when he encounters the entire police force in Klan outfits murdering the town’s educated young black man, he unleashes his righteous ninja fury on them, and they get super pissed and put him in jail. As if bars could hold a ninja trained on the beaches of Wyoming, and who packs throwing stars, ninja rope, and how-to paperbacks called “Ninja” and “Jujitsu” when he travels! Is it too much to hope that the movie might climax with two white people, one of them in a sheriff’s outfit, karate fighting in front if a giant burning cross? NO.

NINJA VENGEANCE reflects everything that is wonderful and terrible about the early 90’s obsession with shopping mall-style karate, and also what happens when a bunch of karate champions from Texas try to make a movie about racism. (Uh, let alone a bunch of a karate champions from Texas trying to make a movie, period.) The result, while undeniably earnest and progressive in its intentions, is also flagrantly backwards in execution. Like, if you’re going to make an anti-racist movie, you might not want to give characters names like “Mike’s white friend” and “Mike’s black friend,” to say nothing of the problematic westernization of martial arts. As an added bonus, the film has a punchdance-worthy power rock theme song by the same Brad Rushing who is also credited as second unit director of photography. A very talented bunch, and a shame that somehow pretty much no one involved in this movie went on to do any others ever.

Tonight’s screening will be presented from VHS, the way god fuckin intended.

AGGROBATICS

Posted on March 23, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

AGGROBATICS
A LIVE SCORE BY NICK LESLEY
VIDEO BY JON DIERINGER
2014. 40 min.

ENCORE PERFORMANCE!
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25 – Sets at 8 PM & 10 PM

GET STOKABOKA WITH SOME SHRALPING AGGROBATTICS ON FOFFING MACKERS. IN THAR!

Despite torrential rains, our premiere performance/screening of AGGROBATICS was a huge hit. For those unable to attend, stranded by the weather, or looking to mainline a second (or third) trip, we’re pleased to offer this special encore show.

For this very special evening, Spectacle is pleased to welcome Nick Lesley (Necking, Alien Whale, Gunung Sari, Felicia & Coctopus, Oma Yang, Prsms) for a unique live score experience. AGGROBATICS comprises a live performance by Lesley and Jon Dieringer’s two-channel flickerfilm mashup of dueling street surfers and wave riders from the films Thrashin’ (1986) and North Shore (1987). Astute Spectatoes will note these are essentially the same film, only one is ostensibly about skateboarding, and the other, surfing. But essentially, they are both really about the romantic notion of a dim forecast of limited options pitched against endless sunsoaked yearning to be free and fuckin’ ride. And to make it with babes. In its mind-mashing synaptic rush and ecstatic synthesis of sound and screen, this is what AGGROBATICS articulates. Consider it brain candy on waves and wheels.

TRIGGER WARNING: Tonight is not for anyone afraid of big hair, killer waves, high-hip swimwear, headbands, pastels, and, above all, intensely flashing images thereof.