Page 139 – Spectacle Theater

TIME AND TEMPERATURE score LA PERLE / THE PEARL

Posted on October 7, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

LA PERLE (THE PEARL), 1929
Dir. Henri d’Ursel
Belgium. 33 min.
Silent with a live score by TIME AND TEMPERATURE

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18TH – 8PM & 10PM
One night only!

Val Glenn (aka TIME AND TEMPERATURE) stops through on her most recent tour to provide an all new, haunting and beautiful score to the criminally unheralded slice of Belgian surrealism that is d’Ursel’s LA PERLE.

What begins as simply as a man attempting to purchase a string of pearls for his fiancee quickly becomes a strange journey home as he discovers doors leading to forests, living photographs, and a mysterious seductress that finds him at every turn.

Despite it being released almost 85 years ago, LA PERLE is strikingly ahead of it’s time. While we live in what often feels like a cinematic recycling bin, filled to the brim with tepid “re-imaginings” and “loving homages” have replaced genuine ideas. Callbacks in 1929 were downright unheard of, so the references to the works of Man Ray or Buñuel and other visually familiar cues found in LA PERLE were (are) exciting. The whole of Belgian surrealism owes much to those that came before, but the world is no worse off for it.

Join Spectacle and TIME AND TEMPERATURE as we celebrate this unsung gem for one night only in the most holy month of Autumn.

Val will have her tour cassette Fur on Fur (and other merch) for sale at both performances.

HYMNS OF THE GOLDEN BAT

Posted on October 3, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

HYMNS OF THE GOLDEN BAT
In Search Of The Original Caped Crusader

Various. 100 minutes.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24TH – 8PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Consistent with SPECTOB3R’s enveloping mist of strange-smelling macabre, please join us for a one-off tribute to Japan’s Ōgon Batto (alias Fantaman / Fantasmagórico / Phantoma.)

A flying, self-teleporting and invincible “god of justice” (whose family is originally from Atlantis), the Bat was frozen in an Egyptian sarcophagus for two thousand years before being rediscovered by a little girl and announcing himself – reanimated by her tears – as a “protector of the weak.” Wraithlike and never not grinning, the Bat strikes fear into the hearts of his enemies and metes out punishment before retreating to his maximum security hideout somewhere in the Japanese alps in a snap.

Although the Bat first became famous across Japan for his appearances in manga, his initial origins are something of a mystery. It has been proposed that the Bat was adapted from a series of no-name pulp novels reaching back to the era of World War I; alternately, some have theorized that the Bat was born in a type of serialized Japanese street theater called kamishibai, appearing on watercolor-painted slides run in and out of a portable stage.

Whatever his true origins, it’s worth remembering that the Bat always existed as an image first – a visual punch to the brain, really – with any number of plots and stories conveniently wrapped around him. By the 1950s and 60s, the Bat was a force for Japanese pop culture, and soon fans were clamoring to see him emblazoned on both big and small screens. Priming audiences for the Bat’s hugely successful anime series on Saturday morning TV, Toei released Hajime Satô’s brassy, shimmering widescreen Golden Bat in 1966.

Slathered in lush you-can’t-make-this-up eye candy, the film sits at the zenith of gonzo postwar Japanese phantasmagoria. Chock full of laser beams, spaceships, teleportations, photon-clones, giant drills, a space-crab villain with two giant iron vice-grips for hands, a sinister cult of scarred-flesh mutant scientists and the Bat’s unstoppable prowess in hand-to-hand combat, Golden Bat is unmissable for fans of Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider or Ishirō Honda’s masterful space opera Gorath. (With a very young Sonny Chiba!)

Prior to Satô’s film, we’ll be hopscotching around the Bat’s mysterious perennial appearances/evaporations in the anime world over the last five decades as well – because some legends never die.

(Poster by Andrew “Drinkman” Cimelli)

CHROME CANDLES VIEWING HOUR: An A/V Salon

Posted on October 3, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

MONDAY, OCTOBER 21ST – 8PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

A new series! Artists include:

> Eric Barry Drasin
>> Sofy Yuditskaya
>>> Chris Jordan
>>>> Matthew Romein
>>>>> Grayson Earle

+++ curated by Eric Barry Drasin

Chrome Candles Viewing Hour is a beta-space where artists working in experimental audiovisual performance can exhibit work. The purpose of the beta space is to provide a discerning but open context to perform works in progress, discuss work, and receive valuable feedback.

The emphasis for this salon is experimental video and sound performance, live cinema, and interactive instrument design. We are interested in works centered around performers utilizing and building interfaces to generate and manipulate media in real-time.

The format will include performances and artist talks about process and performance techniques.

We hope to stimulate conversation about how we can push the boundaries of our work into new directions, in a context that is conducive to the presentation of audiovisual and new media performance.

AN EVENING WITH TOMMY TURNER

Posted on October 1, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19 at 7:00 and 9:30 PM

Two shows! One night only! Turner in attendance for discussion at both shows with Rebecca Cleman, Distribution Director, Electronic Arts Intermix

Tickets available at the door

Spectacle is pleased to welcome Tommy Turner for a very special screening of works made in the mid-1980’s and the Brooklyn premiere of his latest video, THE BLACK KNIGHTS OF SKILLMAN. Among the other work, we’re pleased to offer a pristine, restored 16mm presentation of WHERE EVIL DWELLS, made in collaboration with David Wojnarowicz.

An artist working in print, performance, photography, and film, Turner is considered a key figure of Downtown No Wave Cinema. The New York native rose to prominence through his zine Redrum and collaborations, both in front of and behind the camera, with David Wojnarowicz and Richard Kern. In the mid-1980’s, Turner directed a number of arresting small gauge films that have in the intervening years only gained the ability to inspire shock, awe, revulsion, and — depending on the audience member’s orientation — deeply satisfying laughter. In a cinematic oeuvre running approximately feature length, his subject matter has touched upon Satanism, family dysfunction, heresy, taxidermy, addiction, dismemberment, dumbshit rock ‘n’ roll, arcane mysticism, torture, Evangelicism, murder, and misspent teenhood, all rendered in sadistically graphic detail that verges between clinical detachment and sardonic irreverence.

Among them is WHERE EVIL DWELLS (Super 8-to-16mm, 1986, 31 min.), co-directed with Wojnarowicz. The pair of friends became fixated on the recent story of Ricky Kasso, teenage heavy metal fan and self-described “Acid King” of Northport, Long Island, who became the subject of media hysteria when he committed the pseudo-ritual-satanic murder of a fellow teen in the woods while wearing an AC/DC t-shirt. Shooting off a script based on interviews with Kasso’s friends, the pair ultimately edited their footage into a 30-minute “trailer” that represents an anarchic, assaultive, and wildly expressionistic take on what Wojnarowicz described as “the imposed Hell of the suburbs.” It’s complemented by a spectacular title song by Wiseblood (a collaboration between Roli Mosimann of Swans and J.G. Thirlwell of Foetus) and distorted hard rock radio jams.

In the unsettling, absurdist SIMONLAND (Super 8-to-video, 1984, 11 min.), made with Richard Kern, a televangelist leads his studio audience and isolated viewers through a psychotic game of Simon Says with grotesque results. THE MAGICIAN (Super 8-to-video, 1998, 9 min.), shot with Rick Rodine, features a chaotic melange of documentary, performance, and found footage to riff on the destruction of elements fire, water, air, and earth.

The program culimates in the Brooklyn premiere of THE BLACK KNIGHTS OF SKILLMAN, an HD experimental narrative shot on location at Flynn’s Garden Inn, a neighborhood pub in Sunnyside, Queens, located around the corner from Turner’s current residence. Cast with a colorful selection of roughneck regulars and freaks, SKILLMAN is an off-the-wall, gory gangster fantasy that is as much a neighborhood portrait as a journey into Hell. Having more in common with Blood Feast than Cheers, SKILLMAN has the feel of a collaborative effort while maintaining Turner’s distinctive signature.

The films in this program are graphic and disturbing. Audience discretion is strongly advised.

STARTS WITH DAD: HALLOWEEN SCARY DADS

Posted on September 30, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

STARTS WITH DAD: HALLOWEEN SCARY DADS!
One night only!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 8:00 PM

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.

This month it’s Halloween, so expect a whole new slate of short films SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, AT 8 PM. All the spooky Dads will be out. The theme is Advance and Ascent… into hell, probably. We expect fright and other loathsome feelings to prevail. But, as usual, Starts with Dad is all about the unexpected.

You can 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.

If you’d like to make something for our next screening contact Will at wswelles@gmail.com for additional details. Or just come and watch all the films. Some very well may be creepy, but all will be created by creeps, for creeps.

INTO THE THIRD DIMENSION WITH ZOE BELOFF (16mm in 3D!)

Posted on September 30, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

INTO THE THIRD DIMENSION WITH ZOE BELOFF

CHARMING AUGUSTINE (2005) in Stereoscopic 16mm!
SHADOW LAND OR LIGHT FROM THE OTHER SIDE (2000) in Stereoscopic 16mm!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 8:00PM

One night only! Director Zoe Beloff in attendance!

Spectacle is proud to welcome back Zoe Beloff, whose Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society Dream Films combined found footage, early Freudian analysis and the history of Coney Island into a series of films by turns hilarious, poignant and mysterious. She returns with further journeys into possession, hysteria and the virtual with two 16mm films in 3D! Rarely seen in this format, this is an opportunity to experience these films as originally intended, an opportunity not to miss.

CHARMING AUGUSTINE, 2005
Stereoscopic 16mm B/W, 40 min.

Beloff’s works regularly combine historical research and flights of imagination, both of which play into Charming Augustine, an exploration of the effect the invention of motion pictures had on psychology. Augustine, an inmate at the Parisian asylum the Salpetriere, suffers from hysterical attacks of a very theatrical nature. Over the course of the film, what begins as a medical document of a patient’s attacks changes into a subjective examination of her own experience as she becomes the “star” of the film at a time when notions of how cinema works had yet to be codified, finally concluding with her removing herself from the role she had created. Utilizing the stereoscope format similar to daguerreotype images, the viewer looks into a world where Sarah Bernhardt, D.W. Griffith and Eadweard Muybridge find connections in ways we in the 21st century might not otherwise find.

SHADOW LAND OR LIGHT FROM THE OTHER SIDE, 2000
Stereoscopic 16mm B/W, 32 min.

Inspired by Elizabeth d’Esperance’s autobiography, this investigation of spiritualism, projection (in multiple senses) and the virtual looks at how subjective notions of insanity can be. It’s also a look at the parallels between early cinema and stage magic, as “spook shows” incorporated lenses and projections to create the illusion of spirits interacting with the living. A young girl conjures imaginary friends, finding companionship until she is declared mad, later discovering her madness has a home in the vast spiritualist movement of the late 19th century. Compiled from magic lantern slides, stereoscopic recreations of documentary films and glass negatives, Shadow Land examines the female medium from both the passive sense (in that women were considered ideal subjects for possession due to their “docile” nature) and active, even transgressive sense (much of spiritualism connected with sexuality in ways terrifying to Victorian sensibilities).

MISS MUERTE (AKA THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z)

Posted on September 30, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

MISS MUERTE (AKA THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z)
Dir. Jesus (Jess) Franco, 1966
84 min. France/Spain.
In French with English subtitles.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 28, 8PM

{*NOTE*: This screening was originally scheduled to have been presented by author/Illustrator/scholar Tenebrous Kate—of the web comic Super Coven and the film review site Love Train For The Tenebrous Empire—but her flight yesterday was unfortunately cancelled. She will be with us again soon!}

Taking cues from Feuillade and Franju, 1966’s MISS MUERTE—known to American audiences as THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z—is Jess Franco’s take on his often-examined “mad scientist rejected by the medical community is avenged by a love one, mostly through sexy cabaret numbers” theme, and one of his most succinct and accessible introductions to his work. Dr. Zimmer creates a mind control machine which his fellow scientists reject as mad, causing him to die of a heart attack. His death is avenged by his daughter Irma Zimmer (Mabel Karr), who uses the device to brainwash go-go dancer Nadia (Estella Blain) and use her to seduce and murder everyone she considers responsible for her father’s death. With dialogue by Oscar-winner (and Bunuel collaborator) Jean-Claude Carriere, MISS MUERTE is certainly a film for fans of such films as Les Yeux Sans Visage, but there’s plenty of characteristic Franco touches, from death by poisoned fingernails to Miss Death’s spider costume. With Franco regular Howard Vernon as one of the dismissive scientists and Franco himself as Inspector Tanner (it’s not really a Franco movie if he doesn’t at least have a cameo) and shot in beautiful black and white, this film is one Franco fans definitely won’t want to miss, but anyone looking for Halloween creeps should definitely find what they’re looking for here.

WHEN MICHAEL CALLS on 16mm!

Posted on September 29, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

WHEN MICHAEL CALLS
Dir. Philip Leacock, 1972
USA. 73 mins. 16mm.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 5 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

There was a time in the universe, specifically 1972, when a TV movie starred Ben Gazzara and Michael Douglas. Together!

An ABC Movie of the Week, the plot concerned a woman Helen (Elizabeth Ashley) who begins to receive creepy phonecalls from her died-too-young nephew. “Auntie-my-Helen, why didn’t you pick me up? Am I DEAD?!” Her ex-husband Doremus (Gazzara), still hanging around because of joint custody of their daughter, and Craig (Douglas), brother of Michael, step up to try to figure out who can be making the calls. It goes beyond being a cruel prank when some of the locals wind up dead, by bee attack or other gruesome ways, and other secrets are unearthed about the death of Helen’s sister and Michael’s disappearance. The dread of the unknown caller and potential inherited insanity have most definitely been plot points in Law & Order or some other TV craptrap, but this movie has a frankness about it that is hard to come by in popular media these days. It is also genuinely creepy, and a bunch of fun. Come watch it with us on 16mm film!

OCTOBER MIDNIGHTS!

Posted on September 29, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4: SPECTOBER ROULETTE: HALLOWEEN EDITION
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5: SHINOBI INFERNO

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11: MANDATORY MIDNIGHT: BLOODSUCKERS FROM OUTER SPACE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12: HORROR BOOBS

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18: DR. BLOODBATH (BLEEDING SKULL MIDNIGHTS)
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19: OGROFF (BLEEDING SKULL MIDNIGHTS)

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25: A POLISH VAMPIRE IN BURBANK
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26: THE THIRD ANNUAL SPECTACLE SHRIEK SHOW

SPECTACLE ROULETTE: HALLOWEEN EDITION
Dir. ???, 19??/20??.
????. ??? min.
In any number of languages.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4 – MIDNIGHT

If there are two things we love at The Spectacle they’ve got to be desperate games of chance where there can be no winner AND Halloween! So with that in mind…

IT’S SPECTACLE ROULETTE: HALLOWEEN EDITION!

Here’s how it works this time, similar rules EXCEPT, everything must be HALLOWEEN and or MONSTER related! Aerobics tapes for poltergeists, Yetti skate videos, Zbigniew Cybulski as Dracula, America’s Funniest Home Exorcisms – YOU BRING THE CRAZY, WE BRING THE CANDY CORN!

Here’s the the breakdown:

The first 6 people to show up with a movie will be given the chance to lobby by showing 5 minutes of that (HALLOWEEN AND OR MONSTER RELATED) film. After all 6 are shown, everyone votes and that’s what we watch!

If you want to participate, please do the following:

1. Show up at least 15 minutes BEFORE midnight with your proposed film. (Either a DVD or digital copy!)

2. Be prepared to introduce your 5 minute clip and lobby hard for your candidate.

3. COME CORRECT. Bring the craziest (HALLOWEEN and or MONSTER related) thing you can find, no half-steps!

4. Tell your friends/ have a jack-o-lantern carved in your soul!

Come get HALLOWEEN STARTED EARLY at SPECTACLE ROULETTE: HALLOWEEN EDITION!

SHINOBI INFERNO (AKA THE SHINOBI INFERNO: NINJAS IN HELL)
Dir. Hibachi Chicken Films, 1997
USA. 57 min.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5 – MIDNIGHT

“SHINOBI INFERNO tell(s) the tale of a man turned ninja who is forced to fight his way out of hell. Along with the ninja clan, he eventually must confront Satan in order to save the planet. These are the times of high adventure!” – courtesy HCF

They say “time heals all wounds.” They also say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” They clearly were thinking about the MIDNIGHT programming at the SPECTACLE THEATER as they etched those sayings into the sides of caves and temples – particularly when we unearthed (i.e. finally unpacked that last U-Haul box in storage) and presented DEVILHELM. Yes, DEVILHELM, only one of two shot-on-video epics about ninjas vs. demons to come out of pre-Y2K Southwest Ohio. Why one out of two? Because DEVILHELM has a damn PREQUEL and it’s COMING TO SPECTACLE THIS SPECTOBER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ZOMG it totally makes sense we’re showing this. Because it’s like DEVILHELM except like it’s all way more scrappy crappy, but like they go apeshit even harder and like !!!. Dude it’s like some shirtless bro-cult suburban backyard ethnographer’s WET DREAM. Checklist: the rundown EP MODE image quality desaturates and dreamily smears like Gen X’s version of sepia-tone; the WTF sampling of various uncited genre films and popular music pops ecstatic dissonance between the homemade and the million-dollar made; the macabre chewed-paper duct tape panty hose costumes evoke Rebecca Horn armed with smokeless tobacco and Black Cat firecrackers.

Why bother spending your garbage-bagged precious teenage years raiding and re-enacting someone else’s magnum opus? Blow that shit up and CREATE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE. Just don’t call it THE SHINOBI INFERNO: NINJAS IN HELL because that shit is TAKEN.

Warning: Scenes contain use of strobe lights.

MANDATORY MIDNIGHTS

Feeling left out? Can’t find common ground with your kids during those long, awkward dinners of meatloaf and self-loathing? Criminally unversed in the works of David A. Prior? Missing all those CANDY SNATCHERS references around the water cooler? Be honest, would you even be able to recognize an INTREPIDOS PUNK if you saw one?

Feeling woozy, it’s getting dark, this is the end…

NOT QUITE.

The Spectacle Presents MANDATORY MIDNIGHTS (aka Turkish Netflix)! Fall in love for the first time or all over again with the best of Spectacle Midnights! Every month The Spectacle is showcasing one of our beloved midnight classics like ROCK N ROLL HOTEL, KILLER WORKOUT, HOLOGRAM MAN and so many MORE!!! Don’t yawn your way through another screening of Rocky Horror, half heartedly throwing rice and lip syncing through tears of boredom. Come get kicked in the chest by the AMERICAN HUNTER and lose a quart of blood to a BLOODSUCKER FROM OUTER SPACE!

You haven’t seen a Spectacle Midnight until you’ve seen it twice! Come Get Weird and Stay Weird at MANDATORY MIDNIGHTS!

BLOODSUCKERS FROM OUTER SPACE
Dir. Glen Coburn, 1984.
USA. 79 min.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11 – MIDNIGHT

In BLOODSUCKERS FROM OUTER SPACE a strange and eerie wind is blowing across the plains of Texas, and not the metaphorical kind. Local folks are being transformed into depraved, insatiable bloodsuckers by an extraterrestrial force found in the very air they breath and it’s up to a young would-be artist and his Camaro-driving cohort to stop them — in between hits of nitrous oxide, of course.

Texas has long been a hotbed for weird and inspired horror (Tobe Hooper) and low-budget insanity (Larry Buchanan) and BLOODSUCKERS FROM OUTER SPACE is no exception. Combining lonesome landscapes of Nowhere,
Texas, with parodic humor, sex, recreational drug use, martial arts, splatter, a rocking title song, and the occasional aside to the camera, Glen Coburn’s Bloodsuckers From Outer Space is low/no-budget regional horror at its finest. Come check out the film that put Texas on the map!

HORROR BOOBS BIRTHDAY BASH
Matt D’s 32nd Birthday

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 – MIDNIGHT

Spectacle Theater welcomes their favorite group of perverts back with open arms and full palms… we’re talking about us and we’re talking about jerking off, duh! This October 12th marks the 2 year anniversary of Horror Boobs Hosted Midnights at the Spectacle Theater as well as Horror Boobs main man Matt D’s 32 Birthday and this time we promise a viewing experience unlike none other! A loving tribute to one of our favorite forms of film the Horror Anthology with… The Ultimate Horror Anthology! We’ve taken some of our favorite segments from some classic (and some not so classic) horror anthologies and sewn them together into one big lumbering Franken-FILM! Monsters, Murder and Maybe a bunch of BOOBS… Who are we kidding? There will definitely be a bunch of BOOBS! So come down and celebrate the beginning of Horror
Boobs’ Terrible Twos at Spectacle with a never before seen mind melting original composite Horror Anthology. Bring presents or forever be a dick!

BLEEDING SKULL WEEKEND!
Book Launch & Screening: DOCTOR BLOODBATH and OGROFF
October 18th & 19th! MIDNIGHT

This weekend’s witching hours are very special indeed, creeps! Spectacle is proud to team up with BLEEDING SKULL (BLEEDINGSKULL.COM), the authority on trash-horror cinema from the VHS gutters, as they host 2 special screenings to celebrate their new book, BLEEDING SKULL! A 1980s TRASH-HORROR ODYSSEY.

Join authors Joseph A. Ziemba and Dan Budnik in person as they present DOCTOR BLOODBATH and OGROFF, projected from VHS!

BLEEDING SKULL! A 1980s TRASH-HORROR ODYSSEY features 300 in-depth reviews of movies that have escaped the radar of people with taste and tolerance. BLACK DEVIL DOLL FROM HELL, A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER, HEAVY METAL MASSACRE, THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY — this book gets deep into no-budget horror, from shot-on-video revelations (DOCTOR BLOODBATH) to forgotten theatrical casualties (FROZEN SCREAM). Jam-packed with rare photographs, advertisements, and VHS sleeves (most of which have never been seen), BLEEDING SKULL! is an edifying, laugh-out-loud guide through the dusty inventory of the greatest video store that never existed.

DOCTOR BLOODBATH
Dir. Nick Millard, 1988
VHS

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18 – MIDNIGHT

Gordon runs a health clinic that specializes in abortions. After each operation, Gordon visits the patient’s home and murders them. Nick Millard’s methods (terrible compositions, non-stop jump cuts, complicated plotlines about nothing in particular) reject convention and the world-at-large. This 60 minute SOV opus caps off a long legacy that repeatedly transformed mundane elements into exhilarating, anti-human events. Did you know that abortions are achieved by waving an ear-flushing kit in front of a vagina?

OGROFF
Dir. Norbert Moutier aka N.G. Mount, 1983
VHS

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19 – MIDNIGHT

Ogroff is a WWII veteran who wears a metal mask and ski cap. He murders anything that enters his magical forest. This includes a lumberjack and a Volkswagen Bug. A plotless slasher perversion from the foothills of France, OGROFF is a benchmark in the halls of accidental, no-fi surrealism caught on Super 8/video/whatever. If you agree that the epitome of life-enhancing cinema may lie somewhere between Eric Rohmer’s MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S and Doris Wishman’s A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER, Ogroff is your man.

A POLISH VAMPIRE IN BURBANK
Dir. Mark Pirro, 1985
USA, 84 minutes.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 – MIDNIGHT

In the Mad Libs tradition of film titling, A _____ _______ in __________ is one that usually yields some great, or at least memorable, results ( A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, An American Werewolf in London). So it’s no surprise that A POLISH VAMPIRE IN BURBANK is about as memorable and great as a Super 8 feature film can get. Part early Woody Allen gag film, part Playboy cartoon, part Nathan Schiff and Nanni Morretti, and owing an openly expressed debt to the work of John “The Schlocktapus!” Landis, Pirro’s POLISH VAMPIRE is a Petrie dish full of horror film, B movie and comedic cross contamination which faces vampire cinema inundation and takes the next logical step: reflexive vampire film with vampire protagonist.

Oh, and it’s very, very cheap. Like $2,500 cheap. Like so cheap EDDIE DEEZEN walked off the set. Yeah, too cheap for Eddie fucking Deezen.

At first glance A POLISH VAMPIRE IN BURBANK appears to be another filmic curio so abominably cheap that it’s enough to stare at the big beautiful super 8 grain and contemplate the phenomenological there-ness
of it all (see DRACULA DIRTY OLD MAN for more). But like all great no budget films, the coarseness of the materials and method fuse with authorial ingenuity and passion, and quickly Pirro reveals himself to be a filmmaker with a voice and A POLISH VAMPIRE ends up being an oddly tender film experience. And maybe what’s even more odd, this film was seen by A LOT of people and made a A LOT of money (relatively speaking) owing to the then hungry and booming home video market.

Mark Pirro ( taking over after Mr. Deezen split) plays Dupah, a young vampire who’s content to watch TV all night in his bat spangled pajamas. Dupah’s hollow cheeked vampire daddy decides it’s time for Dupah to start fending for himself though and make that painful transition into vampire-adulthood. So Dupah cruises LA and meets a nice young lady, Delores, who just happens to LOVE vampire movies! But Dupah isn’t the old school lady killer his dad is, he’s sensitive and just can’t seem to bring himself to bite Delores. A gag-filled misadventure follows in LA’s moribund world of swinging singles as Dupah tries to follow his heart and his fangs, all before sunrise!

This is no budget super 8 horror comedy at its finest! The legendary A POLISH VAMPIRE IN BURBANK! Only at The Spectacle! Only at MIDNIGHT!

STRONGMAN w/ Director Zachary Levy!

Posted on September 29, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

STRONGMAN
Dir. Zachary Levy, 2011.
USA. 113 min.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 8:00 PM
One night only! Director Zachary Levy in attendance!

Strongman tells the story of Stanley “Stanless Steel” Pleskun, “The Strongest Man in the World at Bending Steel and Metal”. A man who can lift dump trucks and bend US pennies with his fingers, but struggles daily to transcend his chaotic New Jersey home life. Aging parents, an alcoholic brother, a timid beauty of a girlfriend, show-biz agents and strength rivals; pressure mounts on Stan as he feels time slipping away. However, what starts as a portrait of an eccentric outsider soon becomes a deeply universal story about trying to find a better life in the scraps of modern times.

This screening is in conjunction with the October 15th release of Strongman on DVD, available here.

“an outsider tale of lilting poignancy” New York Times

“I watched with quiet fascination” – Roger Ebert

“A strange and strangely beautiful movie” John Anderson, Variety