MONDAY, APRIL 8TH – 7:30PM MONDAY, APRIL 22ND – 10PM
Hoda (the luminous Samia Gamal) quits her job as Cairo’s most famous bellydancer to marry Mamdouh, a handsome young surgeon. Their life together is pure bliss until his voluptuous nurse Yolanda (Italian-born international icon Dalida), drives herself between the two of them against Mamdouh’s wishes. Hoda finds bitter consolation for her jealousy in booze and nicotine, a dependency made worse by Mamdouh’s airheadedness and their extended family of mistake-prone friends.
Laden with eyepopping bellydancing, stark visuals, Mack Sennett-worthy pratfalls and an explosive lead performance from Gamal, A Glass and A Cigarette deserves recognition as a top-quality Nasser-era tearjerker. The film is both moving and weirdly mischievous, bridging the pageantry of classic Egyptian cinema with the compromised compassion of its 50s European cousins.
SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY
Dir: Jesús “Jess” Franco, 1970.
74 min. West Germany/Spain.
In German with English subtitles.
In response to the automatic cuts implemented by the 2013 budget sequestration, the American Hunter is on his forced pay furlough for the month of April. In his place, we present to you:
SATURDAY, APRIL 6 – MIDNIGHT
Earlier this week, Spectacle was greatly saddened by news of the passing of Jesús “Jess” Franco (b. 1930) at age 82. Over half a century, Franco was a prolific and highly influential director of over 200 films variously comprising sexploitation, horror, giallo, cannibalism, vampirism, zombies, spy sagas, jungle adventures, exorcism, war, Nazism, surgical horror, nunsploitation, hardcore, and more, in countries including Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Belgium. Parsing through sheer multifarious, multicultural, and multitudinous breadth of his filmography is, at at minimum, the job for some sort of perverted Cinema Studies PhD candidate. Suffice to say, he is an exuberant genius whose work continues to earn the fancy of intrepid cinephiles who aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty.
In memoriam of Franco’s life and career, we invite longtime fans and newcomers alike to enjoy 1970’s SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY, determined by group consensus of Spectacle programmers to be the maestro’s quintessential film. As Danny Shipka, PhD (–wha…?) writes, “Franco [takes] the standard revenge picture to new surrealistic heights” in this psychedelic sexploitation chiller starring muse Soledad Miranda. Emotionally shattered by the death of her research doctor husband, goaded to suicide by his peers over controversial stem-cell research, she recomposes herself into a cold killing machine, seducing and destroying those she holds responsible. Featuring a funky electronic score, wildly indulgent zoom shots, and suffused with an unsettling erotic distance and all-consuming weirdness, it contains all of Franco’s signature tropes with no shortage of sweet, bloody murder.
As we say here at midnight, “Get Weird Tonight, Stay Weird Forever” — thank you for making our lives stranger, Jesús Franco.
Edgar Wallace Weekend of Mystery Presents:
CREATURE WITH THE BLUE HAND
(aka The Bloody Dead)
Dir: Alfred Vohrer, 1967.
84 min. West Germany.
In German with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH – MIDNIGHT
The proto-giallo classic in its original, uncut German-language version!
Klaus Kinski stars twice-over as a pair of possibly evil twins, one of whom— but which?— has recently escaped from an institution for the criminally insane. Coincidentally, a mysterious caped killer begins stalking his estate, clutching victims one-by-one in the grip of its BLUE STEEL CLAW!
Director Alfred Vohrer is perhaps the greatest, and certainly one of the most prolific, practitioners of the krimi film, which became the primary influence on the giallo explosion. Creature with the Blue Hand is adapted from the work of Edgar Wallace and full of byzantine twists and insane red herrings while being just as lurid and Gothic as its Italian progeny.
In the U.S., it became a cult favorite though late-night television broadcast in the 1970s, dubbed into English and alternately chopped for violence or padded out with additional gore from unrelated movies. This evening we present the full, untouched German-language version, which totally slays.
Edgar Wallace Weekend of Mystery Presents:
DER HEXER
Dir: Alfred Vohrer, 1964.
95 min. West Germany.
In German with English subtitles.
SATURDAY, APRIL 13TH – MIDNIGHT
The Edgar Wallace Weekend of Mystery continues with another Alfred Vohrer helmed action-mystery! This time around, Vohrer splashes some eye-popping color in the title sequence and goes for a fast, fun, stylistically wild caper filled with laughs and ingenious twists.
The sister of a well known criminal genius, Der Hexer, is murdered, and now Scotland Yard is hot on the trail of the killer and Der Hexer, whom they suspect has returned from exile to seek revenge.
Who is Der Hexer? Will he be caught? Will the killer be found? The perfect late night mystery!
Twists, action, a jazzy score, nude photos and some ridiculous POVs- Vohrer pulls out all the stops in this murder filled romp set in fake-ass, swinging London! It all adds up to some Diabolik, Fantomas-style fun in Der Hexer!
In crisp, beautiful black and white!
Troma Entertainment Presents:
THE DEMON LOVER
Dir: Donald G. Jackson & Jerry Younkins, 1977.
76 min. USA.
FRIDAY, APRIL 19TH – MIDNIGHT
Just when you thought you’d reached the final room in the funhouse of bad moviedom, a door opens and you find, The Demon Lover– The Room 101 of crap cinema.
Laval Blessing (a man who clearly owns every Grand Funk Railroad release, as well as numerous live bootlegs) is having youngish long hairs over to his place for some casual occult parties. The group is there for kicks and not some “metaphysical bullshit,” but Laval goes too far, the group rebels and then one of the cinema’s gnarliest devils starts killing people.
Oh, and there’s karate too, lots and lots of karate.
This unheralded masterpiece is like getting into a custom van adorned with a beautifully detailed painting by Frank Frazetta and taking a huge bong rip while listening to Blue Oyster Cult. The Demon Lover is a window to a different, dumber time, and man, is it fun.
Featuring Leatherface himself, the totally imitable Gunnar Hansen!
Come see this ever quotable extravaganza that will burn itself into your brain and never leave, like a kind of crappy tattoo of the grim reaper on a Harley sportster.
NIGHT OF THE HOWLING BEAST
Dir: Miguel Iglesias, 1975.
87 min. Spain.
SATURDAY, APRIL 20TH – MIDNIGHT
Noches De Naschy is dedicated to showcasing the films of Spanish horror icon and horror cinema’s most prolific Wolf Man, Paul Naschy.
The beloved, barrel chested Naschy was a renaissance man who turned his childhood love of gothic horror and fantasy into his life’s work. Naschy painted his monsters with a sense of romantic tragedy, leaving behind a wonderfully rich and surprisingly personal filmography.
Here’s Naschy in one of his most colorful, entertaining, action packed films, duking it out with another hairy legend, The Yeti! Night of the Howling Beast is a comic book come to life, filled with creatures, combat, romance and danger, with serial style adventure and wonderfully colorful lighting that recalls Mario Bava at his most sumptuous and playful.
Waldemar Daminsky, the sad-eyed lycanthropic Polish count, heads to the Himalayas in search of the Yeti but contracts werewolfism, escapes sexual imprisonment in a cave and falls in love, again, all en-route to a toe to toe showdown with the Sasquatch of the east!
Come see Waldemar Daminsky WOLF OUT as a GOOD GUY in arguably Naschy’s most fun fantasy adventure, and the film that landed his hairy butt on the legendary Video Nasties list!
Splatterdays Presents:
BONE SICKNESS
Dir: Brian Paulin, 2004.
98 min. USA.
FRIDAY, APRIL 26TH – MIDNIGHT
Alex is very sick with a very rare disease that makes his bones painfully brittle. He’s bed-ridden and under the constant care of his loving but overworked wife Kirsten.
But, Kirsten has help by way of Alex’s life long best friend Thomas. Together, they believe they have found a way to counteract the disease… by feeding Alex the grinded-up bones from the corpses that Thomas butchers at the mortuary where he works.
Everything is going well, but the trio soon finds out that their homeopathic remedy returns life and strength to more than just Alex.
As the butchered corpses from Thomas’s mortuary return from the dead to take revenge on those who would consume them, a shocking revelation threatens to fracture the bonds between the two best friends.
Can Alex and Thomas rise above their infighting in order to save their lives and the lives of the ones they love?
No, they can’t. Everyone is slaughtered.
XTREME VIOLENCE AND GORE
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HOTEL
Dir: Richard Baskin & Paul Justman, 1983.
85 min. USA.
SATURDAY, APRIL 27TH – MIDNIGHT FREE!
Join Spectacle for another FREE monthly screening of a mythical cinematic orphan…
Birthed from the 80s neon Hollywood womb and shuttered away almost immediately,Rock ‘N’ Roll Hotel is a product of MTV-inspired music video excess and absurdity that has all but vanished into pop culture oblivion.
The story follows a young trio of musicians, played by Rachel Sweet, Matthew Penn (son of Arthur) and Judd Nelson, called The Third Dimension. They enter a battle of the bands in an old hotel called the Rock N’ Roll Hotel. However, rival band The Weevils are intent on stopping the young band from winning the contest and taking the title for themselves…
Essentially one of the first feature-length music videos, the film was produced in Richmond, VA, shot in 3D, filled with musical numbers, written by Russ Dvonch (Rock ‘n’ Roll High School), co-directed by Paul Justman (Standing In The Shadows of Motown) and featured 80s cable icon Colin Quinn as a local DJ… man, where has this film been for the last 30 years?
Victim to a trainwreck of a film production and a botched release, the film was lost for decades… until a VHS copy was found buried in the set designer’s closet. Read more about the bizarre history behind the film here.
This film has only ONE COPY IN EXISTENCE and we have it! Can you handle Judd Nelson shredding guitar while blazing along an open highway in the first 10 minutes of the film?!
If you still don’t believe the hype, see it for FREE and tell us we’re wrong.
MONDAY, APRIL 15TH – 8:00PM and 10:00PM TWO SETS! ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THE HANDS OF ORLAC (IN 3D)
Dir. Robert Wiene, 1924
An abstract re-rendering by Spectacle’s Jon Dieringer
Music by SLEEP ∞ OVER
Paul Orlac (Conrad Veidt) is a world famous concert pianst. En route home from being on tour to the waiting arms of his loving wife Yvonne, Orlac is gravely injured in a train wreck that threatens the loss of his titular hands. Yvonne begs Dr. Serral to save them and the good doctor obliges. He replaces Orlac’s ivory ticklers with those of condemned murderer Vasseur. The surgery is a success but Orlac immediately senses something not quite right. When he discovers where his new hands came from he vows never to touch his beautiful wife again. They fall into poverty with Orlac unable to play and Yvonne seeks help from her father-in-law. He is cruel to her an denies her any support. Yvonne returns home and asks Orlac to go speak with his father. When he arrives to see his father, he is dead. Vassuers fingerprints are everywhere and what follows is a harrowing tale of blackmail and murder. Is Orlac the killer? Or are more sinister forces at work?
Four years after working together on THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, director Robert Wiene and Conrad Veidt reunite and set the screen ablaze. Join us for an evening featuring a special anaglyph 3D re-cut from Spectacle’s Jon Dieringer and a live score from Austin’s psych/dream/ether/lo-fi/true-mage pop band SLEEP ∞ OVER as they pass through our fair borough on their most recent tour.
Glasses will be provided.
One night, two sets, three dimensions – not to be missed.
Nikos Nikolaidis (1939-2007) is one of Greece’s most masterful and subversive filmmakers, yet his work remains inexplicably neglected abroad. Best known in the States for his transgressive, kinky horror-noir pastiche SINGAPORE SLING, his distinctive oeuvre encompasses many works embraced by radicals, outcasts and misfits, while earning an unexpected place within the pantheon of critically acclaimed national cinema of his native country.
Screen Slate and Spectacle are proud to spotlight two of Nikolaidis’s misanthropic early works: THE WRETCHES ARE STILL SINGING and SWEET BUNCH. Both are unavailable outside of Greece despite SWEET BUNCH recently being included in the Greek Film Critics Association’s list of its all-time top ten films. Steeped in nostalgia, cynicism, perversity, and vintage rock ‘n’ roll, they offer a perfect entry point into Nikolaidis’s warped world.
We gratefully acknowledge the participation of the artist’s son, Simon Nikolaidis, for providing these stunning 2K restorations as-yet unshown anywhere in the world.
THE WRETCHES ARE STILL SINGING
Dir: Nikos Nikolaidis, 1979.
123 min. Greece.
In Greek with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH – 10PM MONDAY, APRIL 22ND – 7:30PM
In this perverse and darkly comedic elegy for an apolitical generation’s spiritual death, a group of friends in their 40s gather to try to rehash the glory days of their old gang, The Wretches, and lament lost friends. It bears a superficial resemblance to The Big Chill, which it pre-dates: a killer soundtrack packed with 50’s rock and R&B, a return to youthful games, and earnest revelations—but that’s where the similarities stop.
Opening with the solitary host’s suicide and apparent rebirth, it continues as the three fellow Wretches show up one-by-one and their strange gathering takes on a purgatorial character. Fracturing time, perverting language into a code of pop culture-referencing in-jokes, and full of stark narrative ruptures and abject disregard for conventional morality, THE WRETCHES ARE STILL SINGING presents an alternately buoyant and vile universe of ghosts, regrets, and fatalistic jokes.
According to the director, it’s perceived immorality and sympathy toward faded revolutionaries provoked the film’s theatrical banishment by the right-wing government; only after left-wing critics rallied to its cause was the film available to be shown, garnering best picture awards from the Athens Film Critics Association and the Thessaloniki Film Festival. These are the film’s premiere New York screenings.
SWEET BUNCH Dir: Nikos Nikolaidis, 1983.
154 min. Greece.
In Greek with English subtitles.
New restoration presented in HD.
SUNDAY, APRIL 7TH – 8PM SUNDAY, APRIL 21ST – 8PM
Nikolaidis’s most acclaimed film charts a string of increasingly bizarre circumstances in the lives of four misanthropic housemates. An episodic, surreal, and offbeat paranoid epic in the spirit of Celine and Julie Go Boating, SWEET BUNCH weaves various plot strands as the characters cheat, steal, sleep, swindle and dance their way to oblivion, represented here by an extreme climax that clarifies the title’s allusion to Sam Peckinpah.
Veering between magical effervescence and hard-bitten cynicism, SWEET BUNCH is a neon-bathed yowl from a generation born into immediate obsolescence; what Vrasidas Karalis calls “an elegy and farewell to the innocence of a forgotten generation through poetic realism and colorful expression.” It’s further distinguished by nimble performances; a rich pop soundtrack; deftly choreographic sequences that would make Scorsese blush; and vintage-vortex production design encompassing offbeat knicknacks, Victorian junk, and jukejoint neons.
In it’s most recent list the Greek Film Critics Association (PEKK) ranked SWEET BUNCH among the country’s ten greatest films, and its idiosyncratic influence lingers in the work of Athina Rachel Tsangari and Giorgos Lanthimos. Nevertheless, SWEET BUNCH remains unavailable on DVD outside of Greece and has not been shown in New York in nearly 13 years. Here’s your chance to catch up on a national classic all-too overlooked outside its borders.
This April, Big Shot Movie Club presents a series of practical films. Films that teach us a skills and examine the process of how things are made. In this series, we learn how to make ends meet, how to feed ourselves, and how people persist, day in and day out, in this complex world.
SALESMAN
Dir: Albert and David Maysles, 1969.
85 min. USA.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17TH – 7:30PM SATURDAY, APRIL 27TH – 10PM
In the late 60s, filmmaking team Albert and David Maysles traveled back to the Boston neighborhoods they grew up in to make a film about a group of door-to-door Bible salesmen.
Following them from house to house, to a company meeting in Chicago, and on a business trip to sunny Florida, the resulting picture is an intimate look into the everyday triumphs and tragedy of men who typically pass in and out of our lives. Specifically focusing on the beleaguered Paul Brennan – AKA “The Badger” – the Maysles’ signature verite style brings a sympathetic, yet darkly humorous tone to this document of the ways we get by.
“… It’s such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what’s called cinema vérité or direct cinema” -Vincent Canby, The New York Times
DAGURRÉOTYPES
Dir: Agnès Varda, 1976.
80 min. France.
In French with English subtitles.
TUESDAY, APRIL 2ND – 7:30PM WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17TH – 10PM
Agnès Varda was firmly establishing herself as the godmother of the French New Wave in 1975 when she released her first feature length documentary,Daguerréotypes.
The film chronicles the daily lives of the shopkeepers on Rue Daguerre, where she has lived for more than 50 years, teeing up the title’s (admittedly decent) pun. A lesson in resourcefulness and shooting what you know, she had to power her camera with a cord running out of her house and along the road, limiting her subjects to the stores within 50 yards of her home. The film rises above it’s simple premise and offers a unique glimpse into a lifestyle not viable today – that of the small shopkeeper.
As in many of her later documentaries, Varda turns the camera on intimate subject matter to reveal a more universal picture of people at work.
“Agnès Varda has shown an extraordinary gift for capturing the theatricality of the mundane…” -Melissa Anderson, The Village Voice
OXHIDE II
Dir: Jiayin Liu, 2009.
132 min. China.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
TUESDAY, APRIL 2ND – 10PM SATURDAY, APRIL 27TH – 7:30PM
In Oxhide II, a family sits together at the table making dumplings. The repeated movements and collective concentration are mesmerizing as the action unfolds in real time. A static camera cuts only eight times, moving around the table in forty five degree angle intervals, giving new perspective to the landscape of knives, vegetables, bowls and busy fingers that inhabit the exaggerated wide screen. A mother, father, and daughter (played by director Jiayin Liu and her parents) adeptly prepare the filling and stuff the dumplings over the course of more than two hours.
Through the mundane and understated, the intricacies of a family dynamic become apparent resulting in a meticulously formalist film that is also surprisingly warm and personal.
“Oxhide II is unpretentiously inventive, quietly virtuosic.” -David Bordwell
