We know them by a few different terms: peplum films, sword and sandal films, neo-mythology historical epics. Call it what you will, the genre takes historical/mythological/biblical stories, fills them with as much cast-of-thousands epicness as they can afford for epic battle scenes and high melodrama. Mastered by the Italians, they’ve long been overlooked and ridiculed despite Hollywood aping this basic model every single summer. No more! Not on our watch! Behold in awe: ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

NEFERTITI, QUEEN OF THE NILE (Nefertite, regina del Nilo)
Dir. Fernando Cerchio
Italy, 1961

SATURDAY, JUNE 3 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, JUNE 10 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY JUNE 22 – 10 PM 

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It all starts so simply: in ancient Egypt, Tumos the sculptor (the great Edmund Purdom! PIECES! THE FIFTH CORD!) is in love with priestess-to-be Tenet (Jeanne Crain of STATE FAIR and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN). Simple, right? Not when high priest Bekanon is set on keeping them apart! Did I mention Bekanon is played by Vincent Price? VINCENT PRICE! Bekanon splits up the couple, throwing Tenet in prison and condemning Tumos, who flees to the desert to gather help and hear revelations of the future. Meanwhile, Bekanon tells Tenet that he’s…her FATHER, and so gives her the name by which history would know her…NEFERTITI, QUEEN OF THE NILE!

That’s just the start: from here we have double-crosses, prophecies, lion maulings, the destruction of false idols and, perhaps most importantly, plenty of sardonic Price monologues. Director Fernando Cerchio was well-prepared for this kind of historical spectacle, having directed CLEOPATRA’S DAUGHTER and GODDESS OF LOVE earlier, and all of his stars make the most of the larger-than-life drama. Sword and sandal fans expecting something like the Firesign Theatre’s HERCULES’ BIG ARMS might hope for two hours of swordfights, but while there’s action aplenty it’s much more of a historical epic.

HERCULES (Le fatiche di Ercole)

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HERCULES UNCHAINED (Ercole e la regina di Lidia)
Dir. Pietro Francisci, 1959
Italy, 97 min
In English (dubbed from Italian)

FRIDAY, AUGUST 4 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 – MIDNIGHT

Beginning directly where HERCULES left off, the whole gang is at it again, this time from a story (*very* loosely) adapted from Sophocles’ final play, OEDIPUS AT COLONUS, in which Oedipus, in exile after his eye-gouging mother-fucking tragedy, laments his sons Eteocles and Polynices fighting over control of Thebes. Here, Hercules gets in the middle of all this, which seems a bit realpolitik for The Herc, but worry not; before he can get very far he drinks from a poison fountain that erases his memory and is taken captive by Omphale, Queen of Lydia (played by Sylvia Lopez, who sadly passed away the same year this film was released). Omphale seduces and convinces Herc he’s her husband, and our hero spends plenty of time loafing around drinking wine and watching dancing girls. It’s kinda like Overboard! Meanwhile his long-suffering wife Iole (the great Sylvia Koscina of JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, JUDEX, A LOVELY WAY TO DIE), still in Thebes, tries to prevent being flung to the wolves by the scheming Eteocles. Will Thebes fall? Will Iole live? Will Hercules stop taking naps?

Savage Steve Reeves is back for his second and final turn as Herc, and if anything he’s even more of a lovable oaf, fighting curses, palace intrigue, endless spear-carriers and hangovers with perfect hair and pecs for days. Director Pietro Francisci and cinematographer Mario Bava make the most of every location, and the technicolor caverns where Omphale’s licentious ritual dances are not far at all from BLACK SUNDAY’s Technicolor tableaux. There’s a song near the beginning that’ll make you think we fell into a Western, a duel for the future of Thebes and a final everything-and-the-kitchen-sink battle where Herc whips people with chains and destroys entire buildings. Everything you could want from a Hercules film! ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

KINDAR THE INVULNERABLE
Dir. Osvaldo Civirani, 1965
Egypt/Italy, 97 min
In English (dubbed from Italian)

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 5 PM

In the wake of Steve Reeves in HERCULES, Italian directors set out to find every musclebound New York lug they could put in body oil and beat up spear-carriers, and so Mark Forest (known to his family in Brooklyn as Lou Degni), after stints as a gym owner, a bodybuilder and a member of Mae West’s troupe of musclemen, became quite the rage in Rome. From 1960 to 1965 he did eleven peplum films, concluding with KINDAR THE INVULNERABLE.

The sword and sandal film will always be linked to Italy, but there’s something special about seeing a film set elsewhere, in this case Egypt (as the closing shots at Luxor will make clear). Like many blues singers to come, lightning struck the birthing bed on the day Kindar was born, the sultan’s son, destined for greatness — until Lil’ Kindar gets Kindarnapped by a desert bandit who raises him as his own! Kindar’s troubled youth takes a drastic turn when, about to raid a village, he falls for a villager named Kira (and who could blame him, as it’s none other than Rosalba Neri (LADY FRANKENSTEIN, Franco fave MARQUIS DE SADE’S JUSTINE, THE DEVIL’S WEDDING NIGHT)!

With plenty of action and some really beautiful set pieces (Kindar sneaking into the city at night is particularly lovely), KINDAR does stray a bit closer to a superhero film than a traditional peplum, but so what? Not even an iron maiden can stop him! Arguably Mark Forest’s best film, it’s an excellent close to this summer’s installment of ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

THE AMAZONS (Le guerriere dal seno nudo)
Dir. Terrence Young, 1973
Italy, 102 min.
In (dubbed) English

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM

“All men are repulsive in mind and body! Their hands are coarse and rapacious!”
It’s hardly a shock to discover the seventies awash in films ostensibly about Amazon tribes as pretext for contemporary thoughts on the battle of the sexes. In that not-always-proud tradition director Terrence Young (WAIT UNTIL DARK, DR. NO, THUNDERBALL) and writer Robert Graves (most relevantly I CLAUDIUS, also the amazing THE SHOUT) walk the fine line between bold peplum extravagance and winking smirks with THE AMAZONS, a film known in Italy as Le guerriere dal seno nudo, or The Warriors With The Naked Breasts.

We begin with the tribe performing feats of strength to decide who will be the next Queen (the price of admission? A man’s head!) .The challenge is decided when Antiope (Alena Johnston in one of her few roles) defeats rival Oreitheia (Sabine Sun of WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT, MR. FREEDOM and THE BITCH WANTS BLOOD) and becomes queen, capped with a speech about the absolute inferiority of the failed male race that’d make a great trailer all by itself. Unfortunately for the new queen, the yearly Procreation Celebration (which is to say the only time the women come into contact with men that doesn’t lead to a pile of headless bodies) is coming up, and between discovering that even a Queen can have strange unseemly desires and Oreitheia’s plans for a coup things get complicated in a hurry.

Midnighters will take special note of two names: the astonishing Helga Line (from Spec faves CHINA 9 LIBERTY 37, HORROR EXPRESS and HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB) and Eurohorror royalty Rita Calderoni among the Amazons. There’s a Riz Ortolani score, which is almost always a thing to celebrate, but to be honest there’s a constant level of goofery that feels more like incidental music from Green Acres than anything approaching the dramatic. That said, with an obviously lavish budget, some fantastic stunt/fight scenes, multiple nude fights to the death and whiplash changes in tone, it’s a film that shows a whole different side to the sword and sandal school. ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

BUMMING IN BEIJING
( 流浪北京)
dir. Wu Wenguang, 1990
70 minutes.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 24 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28 – 7:30 PM

“In 1990, Chinese documentaries were almost exclusively stodgy, didactic talking head affairs broadcast on state-run media. Then Wu Wenguang’s BUMMING IN BEIJING came out, kicking off an entire independent documentary scene in the country. Shot directly before and after the Tiananmen Square Massacre on cameras taken from a government TV station, BUMMING IN BEIJING follows five broke bohemians (including future art stars like Zhang Dali, long before they found fame) in grimy late 80s Beijing. Shot in a vérité style that would soon be adopted by a new generation of filmmakers, the movie includes an onscreen mental breakdown, a time-capsule view of the emergence of the country’s avant-garde, and proof that the hippest place in China used to be KFC.” – Aaron-Fox Lerner, Time Out Beijing Film Editor

“The prolonged moments of near silence in BUMMING IN BEIJING produce the aesthetic effect of outlasting the remembered roar of government tanks.” – Ernest Larsen, Art In America

Aaron Fox-Lerner is the Film editor for Time Out Beijing and Shanghai. His writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Puritan, Bound Off, Indie Wire, and other publications.

This Summer, in conjunction with Anthology Film Archives’ SIMIAN VÉRITÉ series across the water, Spectacle goes bananas with a selection of C-sides from the eternal struggle between primate and man – culminating in a shocker of a midnight that must be seen to be believed. This is MISSING LINKS: the high-chimpact series you didn’t know you needed.

SHAKMA
aka TERROR IN THE TOWER
dir. Tom Logan / Hugh Parks, 1990.
USA/UK, 101 min.

MONDAY, JUNE 5 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 9 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 20 – 10 PM

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“The world’s most aggressive primate just got mad!”

What better time than 10pm on a weeknight for a failed experiment? Moments after using a power drill to graft a microchip onto a baboon’s heart, it’s Friday – and so a plucky group of horny and misguided researchers decide to go after-hours LARPing in the lab. Trouble is, the baboon has been flooded with steroidal enyzmes, and he’s out for revenge. Leading a sundry cast of lowercase-E expendables, Roddy McDowell lends simian blessings to a gruesome and hardheaded terror-jaunt equal parts “man vs. nature” and haunted house. But the real star is the indestructible SHAKMA, played by a small co mpany of real (and presumably authentically angry) baboons. Take it from us: this is one you do not want to miss.

O TRAPALHAO NO PLANATO DOS MACACOS
(aka BRAZILIAN PLANET OF THE APES)
Dir. J.B. Tanko, 1976
84 minutes. Brazil.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.

MONDAY, JUNE 5 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 13 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 16 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 19 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 30 – 7:30 PM

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The title of this film translates to something like “the bumbling ones on the plateau of the apes”; indeed the film is but one of many in the 30+ title O TRAPALHAOES saga, which can be taken to mean “pranks”, “shenanigans” or “pratfalls” – in essence, anything that isn’t helping. Starring legendary Brazilian comedians Dedé Santana, Mussum and Didi Mocó, O TRAPALHAO NO PLANALTO DOS MACACOS’ is a surprisingly earnest (and indefatigably goofy) recreation of the original PLANET, wherein a band of idiot heroes end up “liberating” a simian populace that hates them – save for one comely philosopher-queen chimpanzee. (The old discourse about humanity’s true origins haunts PLANALTO just as intently as it does the priori APES movies.) The inevitable bloodbath that follows is leavened with low-budget tension, including over two dozen return-insert shots of the same clock strapped to a stick of dynamite during one ape leader’s speech, and a hidden bag of black pearls stowed near the hot air balloon our heroes need to return to Earth. (Or was it Earth all along?) Slather that over a sizzling psycho-novo soundtrack – replete with guitar loops that play against whole 20 minute set pieces – and trust us: you won’t want to miss this one.

A*P*E
Dir. Paul Leder, 1976
87 minutes. United States/South Korea.

TUESDAY, JUNE 20 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 27 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 29 – 10 PM

FIRST SCREENING WILL BE IN 2D.

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Jack H. Harris also gave his impeccable imprimatur to this brain-breaking Korean KING KONG REMAKE cash-in (asterisks borrowed from M*A*S*H) about a 36 foot gorilla who goes berzerk on land after being forced to fall in love with Johanna Kerns (of GROWING PAINS fame.) Featuring spectacular battles with a great white shark and a mile-long serpent whose fiberglass just won’t quit, A*P*E* is the perfect refutation of the season’s fusillade of eyeball-flagellating pixel pumice. Thanks to our friends at Kino Lorber, Harris and Leder’s nonstop “How the hell does this actually exist?” viewing experience has been upgraded to three dimensions. Long before that pissed-off primate has flipped the bird to the nagging helicopter above (and thus, the audience ahead) you’ll be glad you believed us when we said: this is one of those you do not want to miss.

THE 🙊
dir. ????? ??????, 200?
93 minutes. USA.
In American English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 24 – MIDNITE – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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A loyal customer recently began querying us as to the worst film ever shown at Spectacle; some said (redacted) or (redacted), while memories of (redacted) or (redacted) were never far from our minds. No dreck connoisseur should miss the groundbreaking mystery feature (redacted) slated for June 24th. Directed by a leading man who was hot off a supporting role in one of the then-biggest franchises of all time, (redacted) concerns a hairy walker who summons another into his life during a long, hot New York City summer. For the writer/director/star it’s a triple-threatening debut that collapses boundaries between inscrutable Dada and the scorching animus of an incoming decade’s worth of toxic masculinity bro-comedies. And for the viewer? Trust us – you do not want to miss this one-time-only screening event.

TUESDAY, JUNE 6 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 13 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 19 – 10 PM

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REST IN PEACE
Dir. Rachel Amodeo, 1991
USA, 13 min.

APPLE BLOSSOMS
Dir. Lisa Barnstone, 2001
USA, 2 min.

TURN OF THE CENTURY (SELECTIONS)
Dir. Lisa Hammer, 1996-1999, USA.

DAME DARCY: A FILM PORTRAIT
Dir. Joel Schlemowitz, 2007, USA, 5 min.

RISQUE REVELRY
Dir. E. Steven Fried, 1996
USA, 3 min.

EXCERPT(S) FROM “78RPM”
Dir. Joel Schlemowitz, 2015
USA, 10 min.

At the Goth Bodega, MIDNIGHT is a state of mind.

MUTANT WAR (aka: MUTANT MEN WANT PRETTY WOMEN)
dir. Bret Piper, 1988
92 min, USA

FRIDAY, JUNE 9 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, JUNE 16 – MIDNIGHT

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Harry Trent (Matt Mitler) returns in the sequel to GALAXY DESTROYER that we threatened you with last month. After his defeat of the Pigmen (spoiler alert) the Earths remaining humans have accidentally rendered it a treacherous wasteland. Harry and his team rove the dangerous terrain doing “hero stuff” and eventually set out to free a cavalcade of enslaved humans from (if you can believe it) evil mutants. Midnight movie stalwart Cameron Mitchell (RAW FORCE, FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND, HOLLYWOOD COP) joins the cast this time around as Reinhart Rex. More melting heads, stop motion spacecraft, and tripped out visuals than you can shake a stick at. (No sticks allowed in the theater.)

Once again Pipers love of practical effects shines through in a film that could have potentially gone on to influence such snarky superhero fare as GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY and the Fallout game series. Hard to say. One thing’s for certain, you don’t wanna miss this one.

PHANTASMAGORIA
Dir. Cosmotropia de Xam, 2017
70 min, Germany/Poland/USA (in English and German with English Subtitles)

SATURDAY, JUNE 10 – 10PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 17 – 7:30 PM (If your bedtime is 9, this is the MIDNIGHT for you!)
FRIDAY, JUNE 30 – MIDNIGHT

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US Radio KRAK reporter Diane Cooper travels to Europe to investigate strange occurrences with people becoming delusional in a small town. After mysterious encounters with a local girl, dreams and reality begin to melt into one.

From Cosmotropia de Xam, the enigmatic and brilliant creative force behind Mater Suspiria Vision and Phantasma Disques, comes Phantasmagoria, a gory, psychedelic tribute to 70s Euro-Horror, Underground and Art films, filmed at the original locations of David Lynch’s Inland Empire in Lodz, Poland.

ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN
aka SCREAMERS
aka SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK
aka L’ISOLA DEGLI UOMINI PESCE
dir. Sergio Martino, 1975
98 minutes. Italy.
In English.

FRIDAY, JUNE 23 – MIDNIGHT

“BE WARNED: You will see a man turned inside-out!”

We are thrilled to invite beloved Italian filmmaker Sergio Martino (of YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, and HANDS OF STEEL) to Spectacle for a summertime screening of ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN (also known as SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK, and reedited/rereleased in the States as SCREAMERS): a tale-of-terror period piece concerning a shipful of swarthy convicts who break free and attempt to colonize a remote tropical island. Little do they realize, the atoll is overrun with the horrifying/nominal fishmen, victims of experimentation at the hands of a plummy Dr. Moreau type played by Joseph “CITIZEN KANE” Cotten. What ensues is a Lovecraftian sike-out as gnarly and ludicrous as it is astonishing to witness, chock with lush Atlantan locales, an impeccable ensemble of hang-wrung performances and dotted in an ensemble of rubbery aquatic murderers kept just out of frame until Martino’s shattering final 40 or so minutes. You already don’t want to miss this one!