Weird Wednesday

Australian Surfing Movies!

2011-11-14T14:06:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate enough to attend the Brisbane International Film Festival representing Fantastic Fest. While I was there I saw a hugely entertaining and thought-provoking program of surf films. These are my jet-lagged notes on them.

Each ride is thrilling, unique and necessarily brief. Some surfers seem to exist in a state of grace for the duration of their ride. A great ride of three or four minutes can seem like an eternity in grace. It’s not surprising that the surfers who have found these moments of transcendence keep paddling back for more.

This year at BIFF I caught a few titles from the amazing “Let’s Go Surfing” program curated by Kate Howat. While I hope to catch up with all of the titles offered, the ones I saw were:

HIGH ON A COOL WAVE (1967): A Bruce Brown style ‘surfari’ film featuring several excellent but orthodox surfers traveling around Australia and to Hawaii, catching waves and competing in tournaments. This film seems to straddle a boundary line between the relatively square ‘weenie roast and longboard’ style surf movies of the mid-60’s to the brain melters that followed the psychedelic revolution. The theme song is from Jefferson Airplane’s “After Bathing At Baxter’s” and several other heady tracks from the likes of Paul Butterfield and Ravi Shankar are intercut with more traditional jazz and bossa nova tunes. The narration, reminiscent of a newsreel, has some unexpected cosmic and poetic shadings to go with its dachsund jokes and generous appraisals of young women on the beach.

DOGS RUN FREE (1972) By 1972, surfing and surfing films had been drinking the electric Kool Aid for several years and it shows. In DOGS RUN FREE, (shot on Super 8!) there is zero technical polish at all, a cameraman muddles around in the water filming the prodigiously gifted Michael Peterson blurrily riding some killer tubes and then turns his camera on anti-Vietnam War protests. As raw documentation it is interesting. It lacks style but not charm.

MORNING OF THE EARTH (1972) This is the big one. Psychedelic consciousness drips off of every frame of this movie. Even a cockfight observed in Bali is given the full stroboscopic treatment. There are scenes of endlessly curling waves in bold solarized color, Aquarian travelogue footage of Hawaii and Bali, some great sunset lens flares, and sequences showing the planing and shaving of a short board but mostly this movie is ride after brilliant ride by eminent surfers including the seemingly divinely inspired Michael Peterson, set to a ripping soundtrack of progressive rock and freak-folk music which plays continuously throughout. These surfers climb Everests of blue glass and are borne down by the very hand of God. It’s amazing. If you are bored by this, and many will be, you’re probably not high enough. Really. Watching this without psychedelics or strong weed is a little like watching a 3D movie without glasses. I didn’t have anything beforehand but my body must have been able to pull from some deep-tissue reserves because I totally felt it. MORNING OF THE EARTH is so not for everyone but if you are able to appreciate the music and images of the era on their own terms it may really, really be for you.

SEARCHING FOR MICHAEL PETERSON (2009) Virtually every Australian surfing tournament during the early and middle ‘70s was won by the enigmatic Michael Peterson. He was a surfer of such profound talent - genius, really - that the only real controversy in surfing circles was about who will finish second. His desperate shyness led him to become a kind of mystery man. Competitors recall Peterson seeming to magically appear in the water, not even bothering to enter tournaments but winning anyway and then disappearing without collecting his prize money. On the water his fluid cutbacks and climbs are bold, audacious yet entirely in balance. You can’t help but laugh when you see how smooth and cool he is. Like the work of all geniuses, we see it and say “Of course!” when only a second before we could never have conceived it. Tragically (you knew that was coming, right?) after leaving surfing, Peterson succumbed to schizophrenia and after leading cops on a harrowing cross-country chase he was imprisoned in a mental hospital where he received shock treatment. At the end of the film we see crude camcorder footage of Peterson with his mother who still takes care of him. He is heavy and lost. It’s over for him but he still haunts the beaches, gazing off into the distance.

A non-film highlight, not only of the retrospective, but of my trip to Oz and my life in general, was the Surfin’ Saturday program of music and discussion. The songs were provided by the great Peter Howe and Tim Gaze, whose soundtrack music for MORNING OF THE EARTH has more or less reshaped my ears. They are still in excellent form and played a 40 minute set of music that gave me an intensive appreciation of the spiritual and musical values of Soul Surfers. The discussion period afterward with HIGH ON A COOL WAVE star and surfboard innovator Bob McTavish, DOGS RUN FREE filmmaker Gil Scrine and PALM BEACH writer/director Albie Thoms was tantalizingly brief, but it probably would have been too brief at 2 hours, so I was grateful for what I got.

As a sidebar to LET’S GO SURFING there was a SILENTS OF THE SURF program featuring a restored Annette Kellerman film and a retrospective screening of several Albie Thoms shorts and his feature PALM BEACH, which touches somewhat on surfing culture. All of these were truly fascinating but not strictly germane to these notes.

September & October WW Titles and Writeups

2011-08-26T16:25:00.001-07:00

Rugged.

Austin pals, join us at the Ritz every Wednesday night for rare 35mm film screenings of some of the greatest exploitation and pulp films ever made. And the screenings are only $1 thanks to our pals at I Luv Video!

SKATETOWN USA

Dir. William Levey 1979, PG, 98 min, 35mm

RZ 9/7

"The Rock and Roller Disco Movie of the Year!" Roller disco epic starring Scott Baio, Maureen "Marcia Brady" McCormick, Flip Wilson and most importantly Patrick Swayze, in his first film, as tough-guy skate gangster Ace Johnson. Swayze heavily outclasses the material here. Most actors would (and in fact do) approach this movie with little effort, but Swayze attacks the part like it’s the role of a lifetime. To impress the ladies, teen Greg Bradford takes on Swayze in a roller rink turf war. Their skate-off has to be seen to be believed, and it escalates from there into a full scale disco war on wheels. And if you're expecting disco mercy, you don't know Swayze. With a supporting cast that includes Ruth Buzzi, midget Billy Barty, Ron "Horshak" Palillo, and Dorothy Stratten. You probably want to get to the theater early for this one, because unless there's a nuclear war or something, it's going to fill up fast. From the director of BLACKENSTEIN and WHAM BAM THANK YOU SPACEMAN. (Lars)

THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

Dir. Francis D. Lyon, 1969, R, 95 min, 35mm

RZ 9/14

One actor I can never get enough of is Adam West, who became a self parody even more quickly than William Shatner. And like Shatner, he always approaches a part in the broadest possible way. Outside of the BATMAN series, West has played few leads, which is unfortunate because he can be a very entertaining performer. Here he’s supernaturally tough and cool as a former mercenary who’s trying to walk the straight and narrow as a nightclub owner until he gets drawn back into the killing business by some unsavory mob types. There’s also an anti-communist, pro-CIA slant to the plot which feels very ‘50s, even though this was made during the sick sick sixties. With the beautiful Nancy Kwan, Robert Alda and a cast of familiar faces, as well as some raging live musical numbers. Not to be confused with Mario Bava’s earlier film of the same name. (Lars)

LASERBLAST

Dir. Michael Rae, 1978, PG, 85 min, 35mm

RZ 9/21

The best escapist films are the ones that allow us to vicariously live out our fantasies. Who of us wouldn’t want to find a high-tech alien laser blaster in the desert and use it to turn everything and everyone that offends us into sky-high fireballs? And I’d like to take a second here to amplify the fact that when something blows up in this movie (and it will), it does so in a gargantuan, endlessly billowing cyclone of deadly flames, a veritable demonstorm of earth-rendingly explosive combustion sending monstrous mushroom clouds a thousand feet into the air, not only destroying all life in the vicinity, but also any conditions that might support life in the future. But back to the plot: when ostracized teen Billy finds an alien amulet and laser weapon in the desert he can’t believe his luck, but soon the alien radiation warps his brain and he becomes a green-faced killing machine who turns his suburban hometown into a postapocalyptic ruin as he settles petty teenage scores with deadly force and an overkill ratio of about one thousand billion to one. Prepare for explosion after explosion after deeply satisfying explosion. As far as we’re concerned, the environmental devastation caused by the production of this film was WORTH IT! (Lars)

SEX DEMONS

Dir. Jess Franco 1974, R, 98 min, 35mm

RZ 9/28

Nunsploitation’s finest hour and a half. The great, misunderstood, but undeniably gifted Jess Franco is the most prolific filmmaker of all time (over 200 so far and still cranking them out). And for as long as he’s been making movies he has been derided, dismissed and most of all ignored by virtually all mainstream critics. But such notables as Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Pedro Almodóvar and Quentin Tarantino have sung his praises and over the past few years his inexpensive and surreal visual aesthetic has gained him many new adherents. Make up your own mind about Franco: genius, hack, or both but by all means don’t miss it. It’s a visually arresting, delirious kaleidoscope of sex, torture and sacrilege replete with the foxiest nuns you’ve ever seen, all set to the accompaniment of grossly incongruous screaming psychedelic guitar music. (Lars)

KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE

Dir. John Landis, 1977, R, 83 min, 35mm

RZ 10/5

“This movie is totally out of control.” From John Landis and the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team who brought you AIRPLANE and THE NAKED GUN comes a movie that has more real laughs per second than just about any other film. In form KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE is mostly just a jammed-together panoply of blackout comedy sketches and bits, but they’re really good ones, particularly the centerpiece, A FISTFUL OF YEN, which brilliantly parodies Bruce Lee’s ENTER THE DRAGON. Occasionally a joke falls flat, but there’s always another one waiting in the wings. With an all-star cast of dozens including, briefly, Donald Sutherland, Leslie Nielson, George Lazenby and Jerry Zucker as the Beaver. Laughs! You’ll have them. (Lars)

JAILBAIT BABYSITTER

Dir. John Hayes, 1977, R, 74 min, 35mm

RZ 10/12

This movie has the best taglines. “She’s underage, illegal, and she’s in your bedroom.” “She’ll give it all, but one thing she can’t give is legal consent.” “What she’ll do will get you 25 long years.” “Why does the girl you always desired have to be jailbait?” As you can tell from the verbiage, JAILBAIT BABYSITTER is a film of weighty issues and tender concern for social ills. It’s also a king-size barrel of yuks. Bring the whole family to see this cautionary tale about a young, innocent girl who falls in with the wrong crowd and is soon up to her budding pubescent breasts in trouble – sexy trouble. Supposedly featuring John Goodman’s first screen appearance. I didn’t spot him the first time around, maybe because I was looking at all the boobies. This time, I’ll pay much closer attention. Together we’ll spot that son of a bitch. I promise. (Lars)

KILL & KILL AGAIN

Dir. Ivan Hall, 1979, PG, 100 min, 35mm

RZ 10/19

Monumental follow-up to the brain-leeching martial-arts non-classic KILL OR BE KILLED. This time elfin ass-kicker James Ryan plays a roving international problem solver with superpowers and an endless supply of clever one-liners. There's another karate-obsessed supervillain who's organizing another tournament of death. And once again Ryan must assemble a team of colorful characters to defeat the madman the only way he understands, using the same kind of slow, clumsy, exceptionally ungraceful karate that made the first film's action sequences so edge-of-your-seat unexciting. Fortunately, what KILL AND KILL AGAIN lacks in genuine excitement it makes up for in laughter. Like when the statuesque blonde "martial artist" Kandy Kane explains that her father was kidnapped because he had developed a potato-based fuel so powerful that "one year's crop could provide enough gasoline to drive every car in the world to the moon." A very special experience. Don't miss unless you're in the habit of missing unmissable stuff. (Lars)

VAMPYRES

Dir. Jose Larraz 1975, R, 87 min, 35mm

RZ 10/26

When selecting a horror movie to watch, you usually have to choose between high style and lowbrow thrills. Generally, the well made, atmospheric fright film doesn’t bother much with sex and gore, preferring to achieve its effects with subtlety and taste. VAMPYRES is special because it gives you both. It is genuinely frightening and at the same time it gives you more sex and blood than even the lowliest drive-in trash. The plot is rudimentary to the point of silliness: in rural Britain, a pair of gorgeous young women pose as hitchhikers, lure single men to their ancient labyrinthine castle, and drain them of their vital fluids. When a young couple camps on their estate they begin to suspect something odd is afoot and they investigate. Director Jose Larraz, a Spaniard, flirts with bad taste in a way that no British director would and he makes England look strange, forbidding, and even exotic. Originally rated X, the film contains very strong scenes of sex and violence, so stay home with your mommy if you can’t handle it. (Lars)

Weird Wednesday July & August 2011 Titles and Writeups are here!

2011-06-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

Robert Duvall shooting Timothy Carey in the fucking hand, from THE OUTFIT.

Beginning this July, Weird Wednesday will no longer be at midnight. It is moving to the 10pm round of shows. It’s still at the Ritz and it’s still only $1, but it will be earlier so more of you can enjoy the peerless selection of classic exploitation films on 35mm film. Showtimes will vary based on the other movies playing so check drafthouse.com for actual times. Special thanks to I Luv Video for making Weird Wednesday possible.

AVENGING DISCO GODFATHER

July 6, Dir. J. Robert Wagoner, 1979, 93 min, R, 35mm, $1

"Put your weight on it!" This is the legendary hardcore anti-PCP movie from Dolemite himself. The late Rudy Ray Moore created a stage persona straight out of the gaudy style of the Chitlin' Circuit entertainers of his youth and combined it with the folk poetry of the black south. It served him well as a stage comic and when he took it to the screen in the film DOLEMITE he became an underground hero. After the admittedly rough first movie with its hilariously poor kung fu sequences, his subsequent films had slightly better production values. They also got really, really weird. In AVENGING DISCO GODFATHER, Moore plays a ex-cop disco impresario who changes out of his gold lame jumpsuit hit the streets and get revenge on the drug dealers who trashed his nephew Bucky's brain with PCP. There's less overt comedy and more of what appears to be an attempt at gritty realism. Thankfully, it's unbelievably hysterical. The scenes of drug-induced hallucinations and the tour of the PCP ward at the local hospital send this movie into the stratosphere of strangeness. Bring your own angel dust! (Lars)

RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP

July 13, Dir. Arthur Dreifus, 1967, 87 min, NR, 35mm, $1

“The most shocking film of our generation! Meet the teenyboppers with their too-tight capris... And the pot-partygoers - out for a new thrill - a new kick! ” Hilariously misguided and fun “expose” of the youth problem. This is definitely a bad movie but as bad movies go it’s sublime. Gorgeous Mimsy Farmer (THE ROAD TO SALINA), a walking tornado of virginal innocence and sex appeal if there ever was one, plays the estranged daughter of police captain Aldo Ray. When she falls in with the wrong crowd of hot-rodding, pot smoking kids, there’s going to be trouble on the Sunset Strip. This movie is ludicrously old fashioned (producer Sam Katzman had been in the business since 1914) but it’s also strangely vital and exciting. A lot of the credit goes to Mimsy, whose LSD freakout dance sequence is a highlight of human history. If there was a drug that could make life exactly like this movie I would smoke it every day. Featuring The Chocolate Watchband, The Standells and The Enemies. Plus King Of Fuzz Davie Allan brings his guitar to the party. Miss this and you’re just stupid! (Lars)

PINBALL SUMMER

July 20, Dir. George Mihalka, 1980, 88 min, R, 35mm, $1

You know this type of movie. In the early to mid '80s they were all over the pay-cable networks - teen comedies that featured no actual teenagers and very little that would be recognized as comedy outside a kindergarten or head trauma ward. A few of these T&A comedies were better than expected and a some were even worse. PINBALL SUMMER may actually be the worst of this sad lot. It makes HOLLYWOOD HIGH look like BRINGING UP BABY. But even a three-legged dog has its own eccentric charm. Like the earlier WW favorite SUPERVAN it attempts to capitalize on a marginal fad, in this case the short-lived pinball craze that swept the world for about three months in 1979. It's all there: the nerds, the threatening biker gang, the two cool dudes who just want to have fun and of course the gum-smacking girls who rip their tops off for no reason at all. (Lars)

MR. SCARFACE

July 27, Dir. Fernando Di Leo, 1976, 85 min, R, 35mm, $1

Casual brutality alternates with vulgar comedy in one of the most entertaining Italian crime movies ever made, as should be expected from Fernando Di Leo, the grand master of the form. Jack Palance plays a bad, bad man who runs a neighborhood crime syndicate in Rome. But when a series of small outrages escalates to an all-out war he proves no match for a couple of slacker kids (Harry Baer and Al Cliver) with a dune buggy and an over-the-hill consigliere (the great Vittorio Caprioli) who still remembers the old days and the old ways. While not a comedy as such, this film contains more laugh out loud scenes than all but the very best comedies. But it also delivers shocking, intense violence and a pungent ambience redolent of sleazy pool halls and greasy hair tonic. I can’t recommend this movie highly enough. This is pulp art at its very best. (Lars)

TRUCK TURNER

Aug 3, Dir. Jonathan Kaplan, 1974, 91 min, R, 35mm, $1

If there’s a better blaxploitation movie than TRUCK TURNER we haven’t found it - and we’ve looked! Isaac Hayes turns on the charm as a legendary bounty hunter with a short temper. When he takes down a psychopathic pimp named Gator, he inadvertantly creates a power vacuum in the Los Angeles prostitution scene. Then Gator’s bottom woman Nichelle (“Lt. Uhura”) Nichols (who should have gotten the Oscar, seriously) offers Gator’s orphaned whores to any mack who can take down Truck Turner. Soon there’s an open war in the streets between the wisecracking, beer-guzzling Turner and a coalition of over the top pimps, the most dangerous being Yaphet Kotto’s intense Harvard Blue. Every line of dialogue in this movie is suitable for framing. With over 75,000 instances of the N-word, and the most creative use of profanity in movie history. To top it off, there’s an Isaac Hayes score and Scatman Crothers as an elderly, but still active, pimp. It just can’t get better than this. It can’t! (Lars)

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN

Aug 10, Dir. Piero Schivazappa 1969, 108 min, R, 35mm, $1

It's movies like this that make me want to pack up my belongings, grow a little bitty mustache, put on a white linen suit and move to Europe. I can pretty much guarantee that you'll never see an S&M soap opera like this rolling out of Hollywood anytime between now and the first extreme snowboarding championship in Hell. Bodacious Dagmar Lassander stars as an ingenue learning the ropes (literally) from satanic Phillipe Leroy, whose whole crib is like Six Flags for perverts. The door into and out of the sex gym is in the shape of a giant vulva between two giant sculpted legs! Now that our whole country seems to be slipping into some kind of Puritan Dark Age, those of us with sex drives need to pick up the slack for the rest of America. Won't you join us in our crusade? (Lars)

THE OUTFIT

Aug 17, Dir. John Flynn, 1973, 103 min, R, 35mm, $1

One of the greatest crime films ever made, THE OUTFIT has lingered in a sort of semi-obscure twilight for far too long. Like John Flynn's other great movie ROLLING THUNDER, THE OUTFIT is built on great performances. Robert Duvall shows why he's an actor's actor as he plays a man avenging his brother's death at the hands of the mob. He teams up with his former partner Joe Don Baker to rob the mob at their card games and collection points until he collects an amount of money he deems sufficient for his loss, or until they pay him off. It may sound like a simple enough plot, and it is, but Duvall's character study of a tough con detached from his moorings and doing what he has to do is masterful. He's like a walking suit of armor with no man inside it. The supporting cast includes many noir stalwarts such as Robert Ryan, Elisha Cook, Marie Windsor, and in fact most of the cast of Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING. The great cinematic madman Timothy Carey is memorable as a low-level mob enforcer who gets dealt with by Duvall in a very personal way. (Lars)

Special thanks to Warner Archive for making this screening possible. Check out their selection of this and other classic films now on DVD at www.wbshop.com.

JULIE DARLING

Aug 24, Dir. Paul Nicolas, 1981, 35MM, 100 Min, R, 35mm, $1

“She’ll blow you - then she’ll blow you away!” I’ve never had kids and I never will. I’ve watched enough movies to know they’re bad news. Even if they aren’t possessed by the devil, they still learn to hate you and all you stand for - even as they eat all your food and wreck your sex life! If I ever waver in my determination to remain child-free, I’ll just thread this movie up and feel my testes retract. An otherwise unknown actress named Isabelle Mejias gives a performance to remember as a daughter with a serious daddy hang up. There’s not a huge volume of physical violence in the film but the spriritual violence wrought by the cunning and manipulative teenager is hellishly intense. Starring Anthony Franciosa as the lucky dad and Teutonic Amazon Sybil Danning as the girl’s unfortunate new step-mom. It’s only appropriate to warn you that the wrong-meter goes into the red here several times, which is just where we like it! (Lars)

CHOOSE YOUR OWN WEIRD WEDNESDAY

Aug 31, 35mm, $1

YOU MUST CHOOSE! Since its inception, the Weird Wednesday Choose Your Own Adventure Night has been a virtual guarantor of cinematic strangeness far beyond even our own Wildest Dreams. Here's how it works: we pull three movies from the vaults, I'll fill you in a bit on the details, then you, the audience, will choose the movie by applauding. As always, we have some awesome movies set aside for just such an occasion. Choose Your Own Weird Wednesday is one of the great, though irregularly scheduled, traditions of this series. Some of the best, wrongest and just plain awkward moments in my life (Anybody remember the chugging magenta meat of COUNTRY HOOKER?) have been at Choose Your Own Weird Wednesday nights. This year make your voice heard! And don't come sniffing around looking for hints about which movies will be in the mix 'cause I'll just make some shit up. (Lars)

Coming to Weird Wednesday in May and June!

2011-04-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

In Lycanthroscope! MAY 18!

THE LOVE BUTCHER

Dirs. Donald M. Jones & Mikel Angel, 1975, 85 min, R, 35mm

RZ 5/4

“I am Lester! And I am ALIVE!” Uncut, pure insanity. A totally unknown actor named Erik Stern gives the performance of a lifetime as Caleb, a nearsighted, hunchbacked gardener who silently absorbs the abuse of his female clients by day, then returns at night as his handsome “brother” Lester to seduce and kill them. Without Stern’s go-for-the-throat magnificence in the dual role, this would be a fairly tired exercise in misogyny and warmed-over Hitchcock, but Stern totally redeems the material. For whatever reason, this was his Moment. The great spotlight of destiny shone on him just this one time and he rose to the occasion like a champion. You won’t believe your eyes and ears as Stern/Lester puts on different disguises, with corresponding accents, to get close to his prey. Witness Lester as a Puerto Rican door-to-door record salesman (he describes one LP as “a real gasolino”), a Texas cowboy, and a naughty British plumber. Stern does it all except pop the popcorn. (Lars)

COP KILLERS

DIR. WALTER CICHY, 1973, 93 min, R, 35MM

RZ 5/11

Nihilist whitesploitation from the makers of FLESH GORDON. This movie was apparently intended to be a Peckinpah-esque existential ballet of bullets and bloodshed and while it doesn’t succeed exactly, it creates its own world of pain and psychosis. The plot concerns a pair of drug middlemen who won’t let anyone stand in their way as they move a shipment of cocaine through the desert. Not only do they kill many cops, they also badly mistreat an ice cream vendor. Along the way they abduct an innocent girl, rant, destroy a bunch of stuff and even provide a quick and instructive tutorial on how to snort coke. This one’s pretty special. A little sunbaked slice of hell, just for you. (Lars)

WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS

Dir. Michel Levesque, 1971, 85 min, R, 35mm

RZ 5/18

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, filmmakers could pretty much assume that their audiences were just as ripped out of their minds on dangerous drugs as they themselves were. This accounted for some pretty strange movies. But nothing you've seen can prepare you for the classic WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS. It’s equal parts Antonioni and Famous Monsters Of Filmland. And not only does this movie have werewolves and bikers (the motorcycle gang is called The Devil's Advocates!), it also has satanic monks, a snake dance, tons of improvised dialogue, some of the craziest, greatest music ever and, best of all, some incredible, death-defying stunts. In fact, one really gets the impression that the stunt-men took over the production midway to stage some sort of drugged-out festival of danger. I don't know what was going on in these stuntmen's lives but they seem totally indifferent to death. There are a couple of scenes where a burning stuntman runs around for like three or four minutes, being consumed by ten foot flames. Now that's commitment to the arts! (Lars)

TRADER HORNEE

Dir. Jonathan Lucas, 1970, 84 min, X, 35mm

RZ 5/25

The late, great producer/writer David F. Friedman, who died earlier this year, was a true legend of showmanship. He was the standard bearer and keeper of the torch of classic exploitation films. Though he ground out cheap films designed to play for one week and vanish from town in a haze of disrepute, he was always mindful of the need to have fun. TRADER HORNEE (the E’s are silent, by the way), is a skin-flick, of course, but it’s also a very funny, juvenile comedy in the mold of classic Mad Magazine. It’s a parody of jungle films, the once-popular sub-genre of adventure films that brought us the likes of Tarzan and Jungle Jim. Customarily in these imperialist fables, a white child is lost in the wilds of deepest Africa and grows up to become the ruler of the superstitious natives. Here the casual racism of these movies is lampooned by jive talking, watermelon-eating natives who do song and dance routines. You won’t believe it. Terrible jokes fly at you relentlessly until you have no defense against them and are forced to laugh, just to keep from crying. (Lars)

SHOOT

Dir. Harvey Hart, 1976, 99 min, R, 35mm

RZ 6/1

In the golden days of the ‘70s there was a whole film industry in Canada based around government incentives and tax shelters; we know it now as the Canucksploitation era. Through some difficult to understand financial mechanism, outside investors put funds into Canadian productions that were sure to lose money and they benefited from it somehow. I didn’t say I understood it, but there’s no doubt that some extremely obtuse and unmarketable films were made around that time, and this is one of the best. A bunch of 50-ish National Guardsmen and war veterans (among them Cliff Robertson, Henri Silva and Ernest Borgnine), all upstanding pillars of their small town community, go on a hunting trip together. They encounter another group of hunters in the forest and are fired upon unexpectedly. They shoot back and kill one of the rogue hunters. When they return home, their daily lives are turned asunder by paranoia, strife and the reawakened primeval bloodlust that lurks in all men’s souls. The only thing that will make their lives normal again is more killing. This movie is tremendously strange. It must have alienated every audience member who bought a ticket to see it, as it’s mainly just a bunch of brooding, intense scenes of macho middle aged men sweating, shooting guns and talking about killing. This is not for everyone, but it fits my tastes like Canada fits atop America - as its jaunty, perplexing hat. (Lars)

CAT MURKIL AND THE SILKS

Dir. John A. Bushelman, 1976, 102 min, R, 35mm

RZ 6/8

A really gritty, nasty juvenile delinquency docudrama that cuts like a switchblade. A jarring film in a lot of ways, it’s also one of the most entertaining movies in the genre. It takes place in and around one of those southern California high schools that are so familiar from a million T&A comedies, and the soundtrack is reminiscent of yacht rock, but when the violence and brutality start - school’s out! There’s a hand-wringing veneer of social concern here but unlike a lot of other movies that address teenage crime there’s no pretense that these kids are merely misunderstood, tarnished little angels who need a spanking and/or hug. No - these teenagers are demons who have escaped from Hell and set up shop in Santa Monica. With great, letter-perfect dialogue and a killer twist ending. (Lars)

HOOCH

Dir. Edward Mann, 1977, 96 min, PG, 35mm

RZ 6/15

Here’s a regional North Carolina moonshine movie that, by all rights, shouldn’t be any good at all but amazingly it works. Gil Gerard, later famous as TV’s Buck Rogers, plays a good old boy who loves the high-life, or what passes for it in his backwoods town. When he begins distributing moonshine, it stirs up trouble with the local godfather, who brings in a trio of New York mob enforcers led by Danny Aiello to put Gil out of business. There’s your plot. It’s nothing special. But there’s a perverse sense of humor at the heart of this film. Writer/director Edward Mann was no dummy. He had a long background writing comic strips and directing theater. The gags he sets up are of a high quality and the film has a lighthearted charm that’s never insulting or treacly. It’s just pure hicksploitation goodness from beginning to end. (Lars)

DELIVER US FROM EVIL

DIR. HORACE JACKSON, 1977, 96 min, PG, 35MM

RZ 6/22

Part of the joy of Weird Wednesday is the thrill of uncovering little known exploitation auteurs. A good example of a director who developed his own unusual style in the golden age of the ‘70s is Horace Jackson, whose movies are bitter, declamatory social tracts about life in the ghetto. They’re all essential viewing for fans of yelling. This film has the guts to take a stand against the kind of dope-pushers who stand around outside elementary schools and hook 7-year-olds on dangerous drugs. The hero is a recovering psychotic who teams up with a committed teacher and a cute kid in a wheelchair to take on the neighborhood menace. It’s all played very seriously and earnestly but inevitably the ridiculousness seeps in around the edges and reaches critical mass before you know it. (Lars)

GIRLS AT THE GYNECOLOGIST

Dir. Ernst Hofbauer, 1971, 95 min, X, 35mm

RZ 6/29

What do you expect us to do, NOT play this? While it may sound particularly harrowing and clinical based on that title, this is another one of that endless “sex report” series from Germany, and like all of them it’s actually pretty tame. These films masqueraded as socially responsible exposes about the issues of the day, but were of course just excuses to show sex and nudity. Here the framing device is a gynecologist’s stories about his clients and their wacky vaginae. If you find sexism and rampant bad taste amusing - and we do - this ought to stirrup a few laughs. Sorry! (Lars)

Weird Wednesday - New Titles and Writeups

2011-02-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

TROUBLE MAN, How's this for a still?

Amazingly, it's our 10th Anniversary. I can scarcely believe it. In this calendar we'll have some old favorites as well as some super-strong movies you've likely never seen before. Also, my long dream of showing THE ROAD TO SALINA is about to come true.

SNAKES aka FANGS aka HOLY WEDNESDAY

Mar 2, Ritz, Dir. Art Names, 1974, R, 83 min, 35mm

To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Weird Wednesday, we are bringing back the ultimate Weird Wednesday movie. In the words of Snakey Bender, "Nobody messes with my Wednesdays!"

Total madness! This is an exceedingly odd rural snake-revenge movie that's oh so much more. A seemingly harmless old kook named Snakey (Les Tremayne) operates a reptile farm on the outskirts of a small town. As usual in movies of this type, he is pushed over the edge by a series of outrages and he kills off half the town with his snakes. Sounds commonplace, but it’s not. What makes SNAKES extra special is all the perverse little sick touches. For example, the prim local schoolmarm uses Snakey as a reptile pimp for her sick sex thrills, the brother and sister grocers seem to have an incestuous relationship, Snakey likes to strip his victims down to their underwear and best of all, John Philip Sousa marches blare throughout the movie like some sort of demented leitmotif. But the thing that pushes this into heaven territory is Snakey's habit of ranting about Wednesday. It seems that Snakey's favorite day is Wednesday and if you mess with Snakey, it had better be on one of the other six days of the week. See it for yourself if you don't believe me. It's incredible! (Lars)

TROUBLE MAN

Mar 9, Ritz, Dir. Ivan Dixon, 1972, R, 99 min, 35mm

This is a superlative blaxploitation film. Most of the black action films of this era were either low-budget wonders with a lot of heart or bloodless studio efforts dressed up with a little velour and chrome. TROUBLE MAN combines the professional polish of the latter with the solid legitimacy of the former. The brilliant stage actor Robert Hooks plays Mr. T, a sort of black godfather who holds court in his pool hall as a combination President, Pope and Chief Fixer. Though blessed with looks, intelligence and tremendous wealth, his most notable feature is his supernatural coolness. When something needs to get done--say, a slumlord needs to be chastened, or a sum of money recovered, or a double-crossing chump slaughtered in his penthouse--T gets it done without raising an eyebrow. Director Ivan Dixon, like Hooks, had been a color-line breaking pioneer in the theater, film and television, and his style is as sharp and clean as the crease in T’s slacks. With Paul Winfield, Julius Harris and Ralph Waite. The soundtrack by Marvin Gaye is a work of absolute, undeniable genius. (Lars)

BMX BANDITS

Mar 23, Ritz, Dir. Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1983, PG, 88 min, 35mm

Director Brian Trenchard-Smith has been turning out low budget films for a lot longer than most Weird Wednesday attendees have been alive. He has worked in nearly every genre, created a few genres of his own and always managed to put forth at least a solid product. In fact, the mantle of professional competence rests so easily on his brow that he usually has time to give us a little something more than we expect. So this PG-rated kids film featuring Nicole Kidman in her first role is somehow more than the sum of its parts. Bike chases that would normally be done in paint-by-numbers style by bored hacks emerge as pure cinema as Trenchard-Smith applies the techniques and experience he’d honed to perfection in such ragers as THE MAN FROM HONG KONG and STUNT ROCK. Of course it’s silly--it’s about three kids who find a case of stolen walkie talkies and enlist the aid of Sydney’s BMX community to fight the mob--but it has a kind of tough sweetness too. The material with the young heroes is never condescending (Kidman in particular is excellent) and the action sequences have the ramshackle chaotic energy of the silent cinema. That’s a compliment. (Lars) Special thanks to Severin Films for making this screening possible. We'll be giving away copies of their new Blu-Ray/DVD edition of BMX Bandits to a few lucky audience members.

BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS

Mar 30, Ritz, Dir. Andy Milligan, 1970, R, 79 min, 35mm

Andy Milligan made films cheaper than anybody else before or since. He delivered 35mm feature films (blown up from 16mm) on budgets of under $10,000 apiece. At those prices a distributor didn't have to wait very long to start turning a profit. So Milligan got a chance to make some of the strangest, most personal exploitation films of all time. He produced, wrote, shot, edited, directed and even made the costumes for all his movies. His casts consisted largely of prostitutes, drug addicts and other street people. Whatever bad things might be said about Andy Milligan's films, they all come straight from the heart. And Andy Milligan's heart was a tiny, black, malformed thing that pumped hate instead of blood. His movies are venomous parcels of filth, made by a miserable person and depicting the continuing adventures of hateful people whose entire reason for living is to make others suffer. Milligan's characters can barely get through a simple expository scene without bickering and ranting. This relentlessly misanthropic outlook makes Milligan's films sublimely entertaining to people with a very dark and depraved sense of humor. BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS is Milligan's version of the Sweeney Todd story - about a murderous barber who plies his trade with a straight razor. The blood and gore are plentiful but insignificant compared to the spiritual violence the characters inflict on one another. As Michael Weldon has famously written: "If you're an Andy Milligan fan, there's no hope for you." (Lars)

THE ROAD TO SALINA

Apr 6, Ritz, Dir. Georges Lautner, 1970, R, 96 min, 35mm

It’s a classic psycho-noir premise: drifter (Robert Walker Jr.) wanders into a rural Spanish cafe and finds himself mistaken for the prodigal son of a delusional widow (played by Rita Hayworth, no less.) While he can understand the mother’s will to believe, why does his “sister” (the unbearably luscious Mimsy Farmer) never bat an eye when her “brother” comes home. Most wanderers would pack their bags and move on when the true dementia of the little outpost became evident, but the home cooking and the (exceeding) closeness of the familial bonds conspire to water the seed of doom already lurking in our hero’s bosom. Unlike most noirs, which take place in a world of black and white and chiaroscuro, THE ROAD TO SALINA is bright and sunlit, full of brilliant organic life and bursting with sex. It treads the line between art and exploitation and finally makes the whole question of high and low seem frivolous. The brilliant freak-prog score by Clinic and Cristophe lends an air of desperate longing and madness to the film. One of my 3 or 4 favorite movies of all time. Period. (Lars)

THE SIX THOUSAND DOLLAR NIGGER

Apr 13, Ritz, Dir. Rene Martinez Jr., 1979, R, 80 min, 35mm

We can’t believe the title either. But that’s why they called him Wild Man Steve! We all love the late great Rudy Ray Moore but he wasn’t the only funny comedian working the black comedy circuit. Get ready to laugh your ass off at the equally great, equally late Wild Man Steve. The wi-i-i-ild man can say pretty much anything and make it funny. He has a slow, stoned delivery that makes even the stupidest dirty jokes gut-bustingly hilarious, like Bill Cosby after a head injury. Unbelievably, this is an actual WILD MAN STEVE STAR VEHICLE! It’s about a midget mad scientist (with a full-sized D-cup girlfriend) named Dr. Dippy who helps the mob develop a formula that makes users super-strong, bulletproof, and, after about two days, super-dead. Obviously it’s hard to get sensible people to sign up for this treatment, so the mobsters grab the nearest wino, played to perfection by our Mister Steve. Steve is beyond hilarious, ad-libbing like crazy, stepping all over his costars’ lines. He even gives a little speech in favor of legalizing pot that’s a small masterpiece of reason and logic. We’re still on the lookout for the sequel, AIN’T THAT JUST LIKE A HONKY? (Lars)

THE SAVAGE SEVEN

Apr 20, Ritz, Dir. Richard Rush, 1968, NR, 94 min, 35mm

When the biggest, baddest biker gang in the southwest moves into an Indian reservation, there’s going to be trouble. Director Richard Rush’s two biker movies, this one and HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS, are the gold standard for biker gang movies. Rush’s working method seemed to be: work up a relatively simple plot, make sure the key scenes get covered, then turn the actors and stunt guys loose to improvise fights, motorcycle mayhem and character bits. Only the most judicious director could pull off such a strategy and not end up with a boring, chaotic mess. But Rush, with the help of his actors and stunt people, many of whom, in the time honored tradition of the western, were one and the same; gives us both dramatic tension and hell-raising good times. The hand-held camerawork by Laszlo Kovacs has the immediacy of documentary filmmaking, and many of the motorcycle stunts look like suicide attempts. With the true kings of biker movies, Adam Roarke, Robert Walker Jr., Penny Marshall, Max Julien, Larry Bishop, Chuck Bail, Duane Eddy, Bud Cardos and Austin’s own Gary Kent. (Lars)

GAME SHOW MODELS

Apr 27, Ritz, Dir. David N. Gottlieb, 1977, R, 88 min, 35mm

I suspect that we’ve all harbored the suspicion that beneath the plastic, phony exterior of the television game show there simmers a red-hot cauldron of S.E.X. Are we lucky enough to finally have a movie that takes us behind the glamour of a successful game show? Surely we’ll see the sexy casting process and find out what lurks under the toupee of that seemingly genial host (played by Roger Corman regular Dick Miller). Actually we won’t. GAME SHOW MODELS is a patch-job. It combines an unfinished American Film Institute funded movie called THE SEVENTH DWARF with nudity filled scenes of a raunchy fictional game show hosted by Miller. It’s plenty weird though. With soul singer Thelma Houston, film Critic Charles Champlin, Afro-Cuban jazz legend Willie Bobo, Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith and a lengthy mime interlude. Enjoy. (Lars)

I love this print inspection report

2011-01-28T11:34:00.000-08:00

Thanks to projectionist Sara. This should give you an idea of the way most of these prints look by the time they've settled down with us.

I have left out the title of the film to protect the innocent, though needless to say I will be playing it anyway:

flat, mono, 4 enormous reels

This print is not in good condition. All reels are severely warped at the heads. It is extremely faded and very red in color. There is excessive splicing throughout; it is especially bad on reels 1 and 2. Reels 2 and 3 have a lot of perf damage and tears that have been repaired. There is some minor edge damage here and there. All reels are scratched, primarily toward the heads. Some of these scratches are deep/green. Additionally, there is some speckly emulsion damage in a few spots. None of the original heads and tails are still with the print and they all seem to be from various sources, some in other languages. Reel 5 looks as though it suffered an accident of some sort and consequently segments of this film may be missing. There's not really a way to check for incongruity without actually watching it through and it's certainly possible that it's only missing a few frames here and there. Some of the splices, however, connect different shots/scenes. There is a title card at the end that says "The End," which looks as though it was added as an afterthought.

Jan Feb 2011 Weird Wednesday Titles and Writeups

2010-12-08T11:05:00.000-08:00

THE BLACK GESTAPO

JANUARY 5, MIDNIGHT, $1

DIR. LEE FROST, 1975, 35MM, 88 MIN, R

Two of the greatest names in the history of exploitation cinema are Lee Frost and Wes Bishop. Although they made sleazy actioners on minimal budgets, their taste, wit and discretion really shine through in the final product. Always a barrel of laughs but never (ugh) “campy”, they really deliver in the sex and violence department too. Movies like THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, POLICE WOMEN, RACE WITH THE DEVIL, and DIXIE DYNAMITE will never be taught in film school, but they thrill and delight moviegoers whenever they're shown. THE BLACK GESTAPO is about the fictional Black Peoples Party of Watts, formed to drive white gangsters out of the community, which makes for a lot of violence and great dialogue. But in an unexpected Hegelian twist, the commandante of the Party (played by easygoing Charles Robinson aka “Mac” of NIGHT COURT fame,) becomes power-mad and wreaks even more havoc until the powerful, politically incorrect ending scorches all traces of reason from your skull. (Lars)

GET MEAN
JANUARY 12 MIDNIGHT, $1

DIR. FERDINANDO BALDI, 1976, 35MM, 84 MIN, NR

As the spaghetti western cycle reached its inevitable end in the 70's, the genre started getting weirder. Producers sought to prolong the formula by juicing it up with outside elements so audiences ended up with kung-fu westerns, sex westerns, many (bad) comedy westerns and this movie, about an American gunslinger who ends up fighting Vikings and Moors while trying to transport a Spanish Princess back to her rightful throne. The anachronisms are never explained or even alluded to. It's just a Spaghetti Western where the cigarillo-chomping man with no name wanders around medieval Europe fighting fur-clad barbarians with broadswords. Producer and star Tony Anthony was the last real Spaghetti Western star of the era. His other gimmick westerns included BLINDMAN, with Ringo Starr and COMIN' AT YA! in 3D. (Lars)

FLESHPOT ON 42nd STREET
JANUARY 19, MIDNIGHT, $1

DIR. ANDY MILLIGAN, 1973, 35MM, 80 MIN, R

Of all the well-known “cult auteurs”, Andy Milligan is possibly the most problematic. His films lack any production polish whatsoever; the camera moves and shakes wildly, the sound is bad and the music is just cuts from his record collection, haphazardly mixed. But the most commercially difficult aspect of Milligan’s films is their unrelenting misanthropy. Each film is like a hate poem to some aspect of human nature. FLESHPOT ON 42nd STREET is his final sexploitation feature and with it he completes his lifelong argument that sex is horrifying and degrading. As in all of his films, his grossly manipulative characters bicker endlessly and insult each other with special vehemence. Milligan himself was a walking colossus of hatred and bitterness, disliked and avoided by most of his peers but able to build a stock company of masochists who debased and degraded themselves onscreen for him. This is not for everyone but if you have a place in your shrunken heart for the blackest, darkest, most evil comedy in the world, this will move right in - and steal your TV set. (Lars)

CHARLEY VARRICK
JANUARY 26, MIDNIGHT, $1

DIR. DON SIEGEL, 1973, 35MM, 111 MIN, PG

Ever since we widened the scope of Weird Wednesday to include manly action and pulp films, we have presented such titans of testosterone as Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. Now add Walter Matthau to the list. CHARLEY VARRICK is another of the great outlaw classics of the ‘70s and it’s impossible to imagine anyone better for the role of the titular bank robber than the pooch-faced, slouchy Matthau. Billing himself “The Last Of The Independents,” Charley Varrick robs rural banks for a living and keeps moving, until one heist goes wrong and Varrick accidentally ends up with the mob’s money. The syndicate dispatches tough guy Joe Don Baker to recover the loot and the chase is on. A lot of people die, but the crafty Varrick always manages to stay a step ahead. Director Don Siegel was the absolute master at this sort of thing and he keeps the tempo high, the characters real and the action popping. Not to be missed. (Lars)

PENITENTIARY
FEBRUARY 2, MIDNIGHT, $1

DIR. JAMAA FANAKA, 1979, 35MM, 99 MIN, R

The story of boxer "Too Sweet" (Leon Isaac Kennedy), whose only way out of lockdown is by winning the big fight. Highly plausible scenario? Of course not. Entertaining? Oh hell yeah. Director Jamaa Fanaka specializes in the smuggler's approach to socially relevant film-making. He'll sneak some serious shit past you like a jailhouse shiv while you're looking the other way. And this film, enjoyable though it may be, scores some heavy points even as it entertains. He presents a nightmarish microcosm of American society where prison is an omnipresent threat in the lives of African American males, and where sports and entertainment are viewed as the only means of escape. A gritty, highly entertaining movie, with tons of great dialogue you'll be quoting for weeks. (Lars)

VIGILANTE

with Director William Lustig Live!
FEBRUARY 9, MIDNIGHT, $1

DIR. WILLIAM LUSTIG, 1983, 35MM, 90 MIN, R

Unfairly dismissed as a DEATH WISH ripoff by people who never got past the title and poster, VIGILANTE is a tremendous, gritty masterpiece of revenge cinema. When factory worker Robert Forster’s family is victimized by street criminals, he pursues the legal route through the justice system. But when a corrupt court turns the perpetrators loose he teams up with Fred Williamson’s de facto clean-up crew to drive the scum from the streets. Far more than just a button-pushing exercise in payback, VIGILANTE addresses the real issues, both social and personal, involved in taking the law in our own hands and Forster and Williamson give outstanding performances under the direction of William Lustig. Balance, pacing, action are all perfect here. If the climax of this movie doesn’t have you pumping your fist in excitement, you should see a fist doctor right away. (Lars)

LOVE ME DEADLY
FEBRUARY 16, MIDNIGHT, $1

DIR. JAQUES LACERTE, 1973, 35MM, 95 MIN, R

Just in time for two days after Valentine’s Day! Finally a film that takes a sympathetic view of necrophilia. This film examines California blonde Mary Wilcox’s little corpse-fucking “problem”, as if it were an afterschool special about a teenager who takes too many diet pills or something. In this movie, she’s driven to join a cult of devil-worshipping necrophiliacs by the intolerance of a few bluenoses. And really, why can’t we have more compassion for those who break into mortuaries and hump our recently deceased loved ones? Maybe if we all get together and watch LOVE ME DEADLY we can get over our silly Victorian hangups about sex with the dead! (Lars)

BLACK COBRA
FEBRUARY 23, MIDNIGHT, $1

DIR. JOE D’AMATO, 1976, 35MM, 98 MIN, R

Every night before I lie down to sleep, I say my prayers. I thank God for the birds and the flowers and the morning dew and puppy dogs... But mostly I thank God -- at length -- for Laura Gemser, star of BLACK COBRA. Miss Gemser was positively heaven-sent for the sex-film explosion of the ‘70s: lithe, dark-skinned, with doe-eyes and movements as graceful as a lily in the breeze. She may well have been the most beautiful actress of the ‘70s -- period. But her career track led her to star in some of the most perverse films ever made. Her Black Emanuelle knockoff movies more than made up for in kink what they lacked in glossy production values. The director she collaborated with most fruitfully was Joe D’Amato, a filmmaker of sporadic brilliance whose talent really came to life with the addition of Gemser. BLACK COBRA is one of their best collaborations, and my personal favorite. Gemser plays a stripper with a python act who has a very strange effect on two brothers -- sleazy charmer (and her real life husband) Gabriele Tinti and the late, great Jack Palance, as a bizarre, ranting snake fetishist. With an ending that will leave you speechless. Music by Piero Umiliani. (Lars)

November December WW Titles here

2010-10-22T15:07:00.000-07:00

BUMMER

NOV 3, $1, DIR. BILL CASTLEMAN, 1973, 35MM, 90 MIN, NR
Anyone who's spent any time at all around rock music knows one thing: bass players are the scum of the earth. Here's a movie with the courage to come out and say it. A small-time rock band with aspirations towards the big time is derailed by their psychotic four-stringer's crime spree. The electric bass may provide the bridge between the melody and the rhythm but if we have to put up with this sort of behavior we're better off without it! And this bassist is even worse than most. He's raping and killing all the groupies. A band this bad should be down on their knees thanking God every night for even having groupies at all, let alone groupies this hot. Fortunately Carol (ABBY: THE BLACK EXORCIST) Speed is on hand to take care of business in the explosive, double-barreled ending. Fuck Bass Players! (Lars)

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE
NOV 10, $1, DIR. JOSEPH W. SARNO, 1974, 35MM, 105 MIN, NR
Nobody made adult movies like the late, great Joe Sarno. Starting in the mid-60’s, Sarno created his own unmistakable style of stylish, ultra-imaginative psychodramas. Regular Weird Wednesday viewers have seen some pretty over-the-top sex movies but there aren’t many sex movies that work on you like this one. Sarno, master of the kinky situation, concocts a whopper: a pair of swinging couples, neighbors; are dreading the arrival of their new houseguest, the attractive mother of one of the wild wives. They’ll all have to stay dressed and stop their round-the-clock boneathon... or will they? The attention Sarno pays to characterization and context really pays off. It’s an amazing experience that should not be missed. Bring a date, a raincoat, or both. (Lars)

IMPULSE with Director William Grefe Live!
NOV 17, $1, DIR WILLIAM GREFE, 1974, 35MM, 84 MIN, R
Director William Grefe will join us to tell us all about this all-time classic of Shatnersploitation. Certain stars loom so large in our personal mythology that we know them by one name. Think GARBO, BOGART, CAGNEY, and yes: SHATNER. A lot of people put down Shatner's acting but he's never boring to watch. Here he puts on an acting clinic, playing a murderous psychopath constantly on the verge of exploding. Shatner demonstrates fear, pain, dementia, demon rage -- the whole gamut of unsavory emotions, in his own inimitable Shatner way. It's always fun, when watching Shatner emote, to imagine that Captain Kirk has beamed into some sort of alternate reality. Here Kirk is transported into a metaphysical '70s South Florida, decked out in the finest polyester psycho-gear, and required to deal with a pulsing walnut-sized tumor throbbing against the aggression center of his brain. As you would expect, Shatner carries it off with all the wit and aplomb we expect from Our Greatest Living Actor. (Lars)

THUNDERBOLT & LIGHTFOOT
NOV 24, $1, DIR. MICHAEL CIMINO, 1974, 35MM, 114 MIN, R
At a time when he was the undisputed king of the silver screen, a box office draw beyond compare; Clint Eastwood began to strike off on his own and use his box-office clout to get some pretty daring and personal films made. But no one could have expected this bizarre buddy film featuring Eastwood as an expert in military armament who teams up with a wild young fuck-up (Jeff Bridges) to commit crimes and settle old scores in the modern west. Writer-director Michael Cimino's conception of these characters is strange to say the least and this movie must have been a staggering blind-side to anyone who paid to see what they thought would be a standard-issue Eastwood action film. Loaded with quotable lines and weird visual setpieces, it's one of the outlaw classics of the seventies. With George Kennedy and Geoffrey Lewis as Eastwood's vengeful and greedy former partners. If you liked FREEBIE AND THE BEAN, this is the next dose of your medicine. (Lars)

BIG GUNS
DEC 1, $1, DIR. DUCCIO TESSARI, 1973, 35MM, 90 MIN, R
When we think of Europe in films we probably think of smooth-lined sophistication, an appealing mixture of old-world charm and modern taste. That's precisely what we get in the crime films of Duccio Tessari. Like protaganist Alain Delon, this movie is all coolness and style on the surface with a raging torrent of violence just below the skin. Delon plays the undisputed number one, class-A hitman in the world. When he decides to retire his employers decide to make it permanent. Needless to say it doesn't take and he gets really angry at them. He kills some people and looks really sharp doing it. This is one of the very best European crime films ever made, visually stunning and spiritually devastating. See it with someone you're secretly planning to kill! (Lars)

INVINCIBLE ARMOR
DEC 8, $1, DIR. SEE YUEN-NG, 1977, 35MM, 90 MIN, R
One of the most purely satisfying old school kung fu movies ever. INVINCIBLE ARMOR looks like it was made for about 10 bucks but the kung fu is unreal. The young fight choreographers Yuen Biao and Corey Yuen push the action into the stratosphere and stars John Liu and Hwang Jang Lee put on a demonstration of precision face-kicking that will have you spitting out teeth. The title refers to a form of kung fu that is invincible except for one vulnerable point. I won't spoil it for you but when you see the final reckoning you will probably lose your shit. This movie has a lot going for it but my favorite part of the film is Hwang Jang Lee’s perfect embodiment of the no-good, shit-starting, white-haired old man with the (almost) unbeatable kung-fu technique.(Lars)

CARNIVAL MAGIC with Special Surprises!
DEC 15, $1, DIR. AL ADAMSON, 1981, 35MM, 80 MIN, NR
If you’ve ever checked out our Weird Wednesdays, you’ve seen some pretty strange things. But unless you’ve sparked up the sherm with Bigfoot on the moon you’ve never seen anything quite as awe-inspiringly demented as this “inspirational” kids’ movie from the director of SATAN’S SADISTS and BLACK SAMURAI. Why anyone thought this was appropriate for kids we’ll never understand. Although it might be educational to see the lion tamer gratuitously slapping his girlfriend around or a woman apparently giving an ape hand-relief (we didn’t believe it at first either), we don’t know if we’d be prepared to field Junior’s many questions about the unsavory goings-on in the cheapest, most depraved carnival this side of Tod Browning’s FREAKS. It’s a sick world and this Wednesday we’re going to help spread the disease. Oh, and if you bring your kids to this you’re on your own. (Lars)

THE MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE
DEC 22, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. RICHARD PARISH, 1964, 35MM, 60 MIN, G
Special seasonal reprise of the Christmas-killing hit! Here it is: the evil holiday movie we've all secretly been waiting for. It made its producers wealthy men and turned a generation of children into santaphobic sociopaths. We are still paying the cost. It's a very strange film and we're not sure why anyone would make it, but two words come to mind: Malicious Intent. Why else would the young hero be abducted by a witch and forced to uh, plant Satan's magic seed in his backyard? The seed grows into a tree that gives him three wishes. Then the kid abducts Santa Claus, straps him to a chair and abuses him until he gets all the toys in the world. Plus there's a long race between a lawnmower and a turtle and more tomfoolery presided over by the powers of Darkness, including the appearance of a giant who says inappropriate things. We cannot be held responsible for any lasting trauma. (Lars)

THE DEAN'S WIFE
DEC 29, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. BENJAMIN ONIVAS, 1969, 35MM, 73 MIN, NR
I don't know what the sixties were really like but I'm pretty sure they weren't anything at all like this movie. Amid a backdrop of student protests the Dean's wife, played by the bodacious redhead Christine Murray, generously donates her time and affections to bettering the state of student/faculty relations. After several lively and spiritually uplifting scenes of the act of physical love, the action settles down to a party at the house of the Dean, where the depraved Professor Clove demonstrates his spanking technique for the benefit of the assembled guests and everybody (but the Dean) gets down and dirty. Pretty soon a bunch of radical students show up with their LSD and giant boobs, and the whole last reel is the Dean's big-breast-laden bad LSD trip. Should be shown to every college administrator in the country and the sooner the better. (Lars)

Sept Oct Weird Wednesday Calendar

2010-08-09T17:08:00.000-07:00

BOSS NIGGER
SEP 1, DIR. JACK ARNOLD, 1975, 35MM, RITZ
Can we even print that title? It must have been a really tough choice for exhibitors back in the day to decide whether or not to include the verbal equivalent of a thousand sticks of dynamite in their newspaper ads and on their marquees. But here you go. It's blaxploitation icon Fred Williamson in the old west. And you better believe The Hammer rights a few wrongs while he’s there. Williamson and his comic-relief sidekick D’Urville Martin play bounty hunters who become sheriff and deputy of a small racist town. It’s kind of like an ass-kicking, more serious version of BLAZING SADDLES. As a special bonus the bad guy is played by muscular reptile William Smith, who always charges into a role with maximum intensity. You'll have nightmares about him. Oh, and if you think the title is offensive, that's just an appetizer. This movie drops more bombs than the Screaming Eagles. Wait until you hear the theme song, it’s got like twenty or thirty in there. You won’t believe it. (Lars)

SEXUS
SEP 8, DIR. JOSE BÉNAZÉRAF, 35MM, RITZ
In the early 60s a lot of sleepy arthouse theaters suddenly started turning a profit. Instead of the 20 or 30 people who would trickle in to see GRAND ILLUSION and sip espresso, there were lines around the block to see Brigitte Bardot or Harriet Andersson show a little skin in subtitled European imports. As hard as it is to believe now, when we can watch donkey shows on our cellphones, this was the only way to see skin on screen in those days. So Joe Sixpack and Sal the plumber would sit and watch some of the most obtuse films ever made just to see the side of a boob. Pretty soon distributors and filmmakers were scrambling to meet the demands of exhibitors and audiences. SEXUS is a fake art film. It has all the handheld camera work and bongo playing you’d expect from a real art film but it exists for the sole reason of providing titillating scenes of sex and violence. The thing is, director José Bénazéraf draws strength from vulgarity and makes a film that, on balance, constitutes better art than a lot of the “real” art films it displaced. SEXUS is undeniably cheap and the siege/kidnap plot won’t win any awards for originality but it has a great visual vitality, almost every frame could stand alone as a work of art, and the score by Chet Baker is cooler than a polar bear. Almost by accident it is one of the best Beat Generation films. A rare treat for enthusiasts of cinema history, jazz music, naked women and wraparound sunglasses. (Lars)

THE BEES
SEP 15, DIR. ALFREDO ZACARIAS, 1978, 35MM, RITZ
As the world seemingly began falling apart in the '70s, a new kind of movie spectacle appeared to help audiences focus their anxiety and freak the fuck out together as a culture. These "disaster movies" as they became known depicted frightening scenarios ranging from the sinking of a luxury liner to a catastrophic high rise fire. And they were box office boomers for most of the decade. It shouldn't come as any surprise that low-budget filmmakers were waiting in the wings to foist inferior product onto unsuspected audiences whipped into a disaster frenzy. THE BEES is one of those cheap knock-offs but we wouldn't trade it for a dozen of the bloodless big-ticket spectaculars that spawned it. John Saxon brings his distinctive brand of macho confidence to the role of John Norman, the undisputed champion of bee experts on Planet Earth. He puts his superior bee knowledge to the test when a rare strain of killer bees escapes from an experimental killer bee facility. Fortunately he's able to develop a "gay bee serum" that turns bees gay. Ludicrous, wildly incompetent, wholly entertaining; this is a legendary classic of fun. With elderly John Carradine, who passed away shortly before his scenes were filmed but did them anyway. (Lars)

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE
SEP 22, DIR. JOSEPH W. SARNO, 1974, 35MM, RITZ
Nobody made adult movies like the late, great Joe Sarno. Starting in the mid-60’s, Sarno created his own unmistakable style of stylish, ultra-imaginative psychodramas. Regular Weird Wednesday viewers have seen some pretty over-the-top sex movies but there aren’t many sex movies that work on you like this one. Sarno, master of the kinky situation, concocts a whopper: a pair of swinging couples, neighbors; are dreading the arrival of their new houseguest, the attractive mother of one of the wild wives. They’ll all have to stay dressed and stop their round-the-clock boneathon... or will they? The attention Sarno pays to characterization and context really pays off. It’s an amazing experience that should not be missed. Bring a date, a raincoat, or both. (Lars)

TWILIGHT PEOPLE
SEP 29, DIR. EDDIE ROMERO, 1973, 35MM, RITZ
I’m glad nobody told Filipino B-movie god Eddie Romero that he should really have a budget if he wanted to make a movie about an island full of monstrous half-human, half-animal beasts. Then we’d be deprived of the spectacle of the ghetto goat-boy, the badly-conceived bat man or the embarrassed-looking panther woman (played by Pam Grier!). Also, Romero probably would have done something foolish with that extra money like hiring somebody other than John Ashley for the lead role. Ashley had parlayed a semi-successful stateside career as a teen actor and rockabilly singer into what passed for super-stardom in the Philippines, where he produced and starred in countless action and monster films as “the white guy”. He’s generally pretty bad, but he will start growing on you after a while, like an exotic island fungus. The whole film exudes an ambiance of sleazy tropical languor that’s quite appealing in its humid way. (Lars)

HOUSE ON STRAW HILL
OCT 6, DIR. JAMES KENELM CLARKE, 1976, 35MM, RITZ
Few actors have ever delivered as much lunacy on such a regular basis as Udo Kier. His performances as the lead fiends in BLOOD FOR DRACULA and FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN had made him one of the top maniacs on the scene long before he started making Lars Von Trier and Werner Herzog movies even stranger. Here he plays a misanthropic novelist who retreats to a rural farm to do a bit of writing and a lot of hetero sexing with his three beautiful women companions. Soon, he’s having vivid hallucinations and a bunch of people stop being alive! Promoted as a tour de force of Hitchcockian suspense, it’s not. But if you love watching that funny little man go berserk as much as I do, you’ll be here. (Lars)

VIOLENT CITY
OCT 13, DIR. SERGIO SOLLIMA, 1970, 35MM, RITZ
This colorful, violent noir, made by one of the most skillful Italian genre directors has a lot going for it. It's made in a pop art, post-POINT BLANK style; the pacing is clean and tight; the music is by Ennio Morricone; how could it get any better than that? Well you could sprinkle some Charles Bronson on that bitch. When it comes to ice-cold killing machines, Charles Bronson is the man for the job. He looks like a rage in a track suit. The plot is in the mode of Jacques Tourneur's OUT OF THE PAST with Bronson seeking revenge, killing a lot of people and acting smoother than Jason Statham’s balls. Telly Savalas plays the effeminate mob boss Bronson has to join up with. One of the best scenes in the film features Savalas offering Bronson a flowery cocktail. Not surprisingly Bronson refuses, and the tiny, underplayed way he turns his nose up at the drink is one of the best acting flourishes you'll see in a long time. Vicious, brutal, essential. (Lars)

WONDER WOMEN with Director Robert Vincent O’Neill Live
OCT 20, DIR. ROBERT VINCENT O’NEILL, 1973, 35MM, RITZ
As the weather cools off, we can warm ourselves with the tropical heat of this made-in-the-Phillipines drive-in exploitation classic. You can feel the warmth of the sun radiating from every island-lensed frame. Every cockfight, every weird hand-painted jeep, every purple, orange and green polyester shirt proclaims that the days are long, the UV rays are potentially deadly and that summer is roasting us with its awesomeness! This is possibly the oddest duck of all Filipino movies, and there have been some real mind-bogglers. This one stars lovely Asian-American Nancy Kwan as a transplant doctor who does a brisk business grafting the sex organs of healthy young male athletes onto the bodies of over-the-hill millionaires. She’s aided by a lightly clad army of sexy kung-fu amazons and Sid Haig as an effeminate penis salesman. Do I seriously need to keep typing? (Lars)

THRILL OF THE VAMPIRES
OCT 27, DIR. JEAN ROLLIN, 1971, 35MM, RITZ
The druggy surrealist sex vampire movies of Jean Rollin are considered a bit excessive by more traditional horror movie fans. Screw those mama’s boys. Jean Rollin's movies are so great I would personally go to war for them if I had to. For years I've gotten weird looks every time I rave about Rollin's Man Ray inflected pulp art masterpieces like THE NUDE VAMPIRE, CAGED VIRGINS, SCHOOLGIRL HITCHIKERS and this. Rollin's films are virtual encyclopedias of fetishistic sex and horror movie imagery, lashed together under the flimsiest dime novel pretexts of plot. But they garnered an enthusiastic following among students in Paris, who watched these bizarre films alongside the skid row popeyes in Pigalle nudie theaters. In this regard they form a continuity across generations with the silent serials of Louis Feuillade, which also had tiny budgets and played in flea-bitten theaters for enthusiastic audiences of pickpockets and Bolsheviks in the '20s. Featuring the gorgeous French sex star Sandra Julian (I AM A NYMPHOMANIAC) and a beautiful vampire who sleeps in a grandfather clock. Music by high school prog rock band Acanthus. An essential movie experience. (Lars)

July August Weird Wednesday Titles and Writeups

2010-06-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

Bad news for Michigan Phil. Freebie & The Bean.

THE MIAMI CONNECTION

July 7, Dir. Y.K. Kim and Woo-sang Park, 1986, 35mm, Ritz

Earlier this year at Weird Wednesday we presented a pretty astonishing film, NINJA TURF, a film that contains no ninjas at all but nevertheless thrilled the crowd with its depiction of immigrant street gangs and 35-year old high school students. The crowd was confused, many were angry, a few had blood streaming from their eyes. But we all knew we'd witnessed something. Now for those same people and also for those who missed NINJA TURF because they had to work or were pussies, we present the director's followup THE MIAMI CONNECTION. It also takes place among superannuated high schoolers and there's a lot of talk (and even a song) about ninjas but it remains to be seen whether any ninjas were actually persuaded to appear in this film. Part of us hopes not. After all, it's not ninjas themselves that excite us, it's the anticipation that ninjas might appear. (Lars)

GONE WITH THE POPE

July 14, Dir. Duke Mitchell, 2010, 35mm, Ritz

In what was believed for years to be his only movie as writer-director, MASSACRE MAFIA STYLE (aka THE EXECUTIONER), Duke Mitchell (aka Dominic Micelli) created a film about the mafia that crackled with vular authenticity. It's kind of an underground classic, showing small-time underworld hoods in much the same light as THE SOPRANOS did so many years later. Mundane details of criminal life were given the same weight as the machinations of a major racket. MASSACRE MAFIA STYLE, while not perfect, leaves the audience wanting more of Mitchell's odd world view. We're happy to report that Duke Mitchell's lost film GONE WITH THE POPE has surfaced. It's further proof that Mitchell is the cinematic poet of vinyl sofas, mustache wax and overloaded bullet squibs. The premise is brilliant, a hustling crook gets the bright idea to kidnap the pope and demand $1 ransom from every Catholic on the planet! Our knuckles are sweating with anticipation! (Lars)

HOLLYWOOD HIGH

July 21, Dir. Patrick M. Wright, 1976, 35mm, Ritz

70s teen sex comedies were never noted for high standards of writing, acting, editing or directing but HOLLYWOOD HIGH is a goddamn outrage. They say if you gave an infinite number of monkeys typewriters one of them would produce Hamlet. Well, if you gave three monkeys a camera, they could produce HOLLYWOOD HIGH and be done in time for lunch and a rubdown in the steam room. It's just uncommonly poor in every regard. But that doesn't mean it won't give you every bit as much entertainment as a movie made by people with IQs over 100. It's mainly about a group of teenagers who get high, drink a lot of beer and then look for a place to have sex. They made a whole movie about that. There's also a guy who's supposed to resemble the Fonz from HAPPY DAYS. He's called "the Fenz." Also, I have reason to suspect the guy playing the wacky retarded guy is actually retarded. Be warned. (Lars)

CANDY TANGERINE MAN

July 28, Dir. Matt Cimber, 1975, 35mm, Ritz

One of the all-time great blaxploitation classics. Though not as well known as the bigger-budget, studio-distributed hits like SHAFT and SUPERFLY, CANDY TANGERINE MAN was one of the most popular, widely seen independent movies of the '70s. It's a kind of Jekyll and Hyde story. The Baron is a middle-class suburban family man by day (he even mows the lawn), but when the sun goes down he's the king of pimps. His Rolls Royce even has ﬂames painted on the sides. No other movie, not even THE MACK, has presented such a colorful, fun, nasty view of "the life". Anyone who shows up for this one expecting to see a slick polished Hollywood showroom model will be disappointed. On the other hand, those who expect to see a wall-to-wall velour fashion show with a thumping funk soundtrack and nasty, mean-spirited dialogue straight out of Iceberg Slim will ﬁnd themselves aloft and aﬂoat on a purple-velvet, Hai-Karate-scented cloud nine. With ﬂames painted on the sides. From the director of THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA. (Lars)

MAKO: JAWS OF DEATH

Aug 4, Dir. William Grefe, 1976, 35mm, Ritz

Part of Alamo SHARK WEEK! August 2-8 at the Ritz! Ever since the colossal success of JAWS, there have been lots of movies made about the shark menace. The smell of money in the water drove producers into a rip-off frenzy, resulting in such immortal works as UP FROM THE DEPTHS, GREAT WHITE, MONSTER SHARK and their little homies BARRACUDA, ORCA and TENTACLES. MAKO: JAWS OF DEATH at least has an original angle on things. Richard Jaeckel plays a weird nature-loving guy in South Florida who has a psychic link with sharks. When he finds out they're being exploited by scumbag scientists who conduct illegal experiments on them, he decides to take a bite out of crime. More a portrait of Jaeckel's obsessive oddball than a shark movie at all, MAKO: JAWS OF DEATH has a lot of the steamy pulp energy that characterizes Florida movies. Everyone is covered with a thin layer of sweat and grime and most of the plot logic seems to have been boiled out of the mixture. With foxy Jennifer Bishop as one of those mermaids in a tank, Harold "Oddjob" Sakata and Milton "Butterball" Smith as "Butter". (Lars)

FREEBIE AND THE BEAN

Aug 11, Dir. Richard Rush, 1974, 35mm, Ritz

A buddy movie about two fascist cops in San Francisco. They violate the civil rights of everyone within a 400 foot radius, steal, extort, destroy a lot of private and public property, shoot and run over innocent bystanders. they're total fucking dicks and they're great. James Caan plays Freebie, who uses his badge to get as many perks as he can, and Alan Arkin plays Bean, a Mexican American (!) cop with a serious anger management problem. The film follows them through a typical investigation as they ruthlessly beat confessions out of suspects, perform illegal searches, shoot a nurse, ridicule a dentist and worse. While it may sound grim - it's not. It's hilarious. Caan and Arkin are relentlessly charming and funny, even as they shred the constitution and wreck dozens of cars. Director Richard Rush (THE STUNT MAN, PSYCH OUT) was basically given carte blanche to use San Francisco as his canvas, and he creates a subversive masterpiece that leaves audiences exhausted from laughing and cheering. (Lars)

VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS

Aug 18, Dir. Bert I. Gordon, 1965, 35mm, Ritz

Bizarre mod fantasy about a group of juvenile delinquents who take a growth potion created by young Ron Howard and become giant hellraising teenagers. It's a pretty extreme cautionary parable about the inevitable youth revolt that was already germinating fast in the initial wave of baby boomer puberty. But sociology aside, it's a lot of fun, there's a kind of careening irresponsibility in it all, as the young people literally walk all over the adult establishment. It's also sexy in that inimitable mid-'60s way. When the teenagers grow, they naturally grow out of their clothes so we're treated to the spectacle of radiant, healthy young 60 foot-tall beauties wearing a scrap or two of improvised clothing. Very loosely based on the story "Food Of The Gods" by H.G. Wells. Starring Beau Bridges, Joy Harmon, Tisha Sterling, Johnny Crawford and a raging young Toni Basil. (Lars)

CHOOSE YOUR OWN WEIRD WEDNESDAY

Aug 26

May/June Weird Wednesday Calendar

2010-04-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

From GRASP OF THE LORELEI.

Here's what's happening in May and June.

STINGRAY

MAY 5, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. RICHARD TAYLOR, 1978, 35MM, 100 MIN, PG

This regional car chase movie from the St. Louis area doesn't skimp on automotive action, humor or surprising violence. Chris Mitchum and Les Lannom play a pair of boring pals who save up their money to buy a red '64 Corvette, only to find that some hoods have stashed heroin and cash under the seat. They're also wrongly accused of being cop-killers so not only are the crooks after them, but the police too. Fortunately, as dull as the heroes are, the bad guys are great. Their leader, sexy foul-mouthed Abigail Bratowski (Sherry Jackson) is a machine-gun wielding psychopath who makes her entrance dressed in a nun's habit. Abigail's main enforcer is big William Watson, who looks like a sinister cartoon cheetah and seems to ad lib every single line he speaks. One of the best things about this movie is its crazy split personality - one minute you're watching a wacky car chase scored to tinkling piano music, the next minute cops are getting riddled with bullet holes. The other great thing about this movie is its truly superior car action provided by such top professionals as the King of stunt drivers Carey Loftin and Austin's own Bobby Sargent, who will be in attendance to give you some background about STINGRAY. Be there! (Lars)

MOONLIGHTING WIVES

MAY 12, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. JOSEPH SARNO, 1966, 35MM, 86 MIN, NR

There are a number of important sexploitation auteurs, brave souls who carved out something special and wholly individual in the world of adult films. The best known of these are Russ Meyer, Radley Metzger, Doris Wishman and our dear friend Joe Sarno. Sarno's specialty is erotic psychodrama. Even when his budgets are limited to the point of absurdity, he manages to create situations that are complicated, kinky, exciting, vaguely absurd and often pretty hot. In many sexploitation movies the plot is a utility, a desultory device for moving the action from one set-piece to another. With Sarno, the plot serves to place each situation in a deeper stratum of intensity, until the final, usually taboo-shattering encounter provides the climax of the film. Such is the case with MOONLIGHTING WIVES, the story of a suburban prostitution ring that masquerades as a late-night secretary service. If you like Sarno, don't miss this rare screening. And if you don't know his work yet, it's time to start your education. (Lars)

THE LONG GOODBYE

MAY 19, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ROBERT ALTMAN, 1973, 35MM, 112 MIN, R

Any 1973 theatergoer who bought a ticket for THE LONG GOODBYE expecting a leisurely rehash of private-eye movie cliches was certainly disappointed and, I expect, outraged. This is not so much an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel (itself a challenge to the commercially expected norm); it's also a gloss and critique on the whole myth of the sardonic but not quite cynical investigator who makes reluctant swoops from his perch on the margin of society into the corrupt milieu of the criminal classes high and low. The great director Robert Altman is assisted by screenwriter Leigh Brackett, who had written the definitive Raymond Chandler adaptation 27 years earlier: THE BIG SLEEP. This would be among her last screen credits and it's a classic. In choosing his leading man, Altman made a characteristically perverse selection: Elliott Gould, who as a Jewish New Yorker could not help but seem an outsider in the classically constrained world of Chandler's LA. The period was also shifted to the contemporary '70s, though some anachronisms remain, not least Marlowe himself. Together, Altman, Brackett and Gould deconstruct, distend, disentangle and re-entangle all the archetypal constructs of America's favorite detective. Like the very best adaptations, it dispenses with many of the events of the book but manages to retain the spirit. It's a savagely funny movie with support from Sterling Hayden, Henry Gibson, scandal figure Nina Van Pallandt and baseball player Jim Bouton. Years later THE BIG LEBOSWKI mined much of the same territory, and the two films are of a piece. Hugely, gigantically, unreservedly recommended. (Lars)

SWEET SUGAR

MAY 26, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. MICHEL LEVESQUE, 1972, 35MM, 90 MIN, R

From the maker of WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS comes a Women In Prison movie like no other. This one takes place in the sugar cane fields of the Caribbean. The expected cargo of beautiful women arrives and is mistreated in the accepted way until a rebellion erupts more or less on schedule, as these things go. In these particulars, it is pretty much just another WIP movie. Where it goes off the rails is in the character of the island doctor. Dr. John, as he's known, conducts a bewildering assortment of experiments on the prisoners. In one he throws dozens of housecats, supposedly injected with an aggression serum, at them. The cat hurling scene is hilarious, as the unfortunate actresses try desperately to mimic terror and the even more unfortunate cats try to get away from the insane filmmakers. Star Phyllis Davis is much too beautiful and talented for this kind of movie but that's life in Hollywood, and I'm too amused to complain. Recent Alamo guest Stephanie Rothman was one of the writers of this film and her sense of humor shines right through. (Lars)

CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN

JUNE 2, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. DAMIANO DAMIANI, 1971, 35MM, 101 MIN, R

Italian crime films of the '70s are an acquired taste, and happily many more people seem to be acquiring it. This is one of the genre's classics, written and directed by the great Damiano Damiani whose other films A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL and HOW TO KILL A JUDGE are similarly political in nature. Here Martin Balsam plays a police captain nearing retirement who has been unable to bring the worst criminals in his jurisdiction to justice by legal means. He teams up with young district attorney Franco Nero in an attempt to wade through the morass of official corruption and institutional putrescence, but all the while Balsam has his own means of working and his own dark secrets. The system is so rigged and so broken that even the most honest men end up crushed in its wheels. A gripping, violent, brilliantly enacted film that will rip your fucking heart out and eat it. Incredible. (Lars)

THE HITCHHIKERS

JUNE 9, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. FERD & BEVERLY SEBASTIAN, 1972, 35MM, 92 MIN, R

The delectable Misty Rowe, known fondly to some of us as one of the stars of the '70s hillbilly variety show HEE HAW, stars as a ripe young thing who gets tangled up with a Manson-family style band of bait-and-switch highway robbers. Unlucky drivers are enticed to stop by an abundant roadside display of feminine pulchritude, then relieved of their belongings and sent packing. Seems risky but then so is the stock market. There are lots of hippie songs about freedom and even a token biker named Rebel. Thankfully, Arkansas exploitation legends Ferd and Beverly Sebastian (GATOR BAIT, ROCKTOBER BLOOD) are at the helm and their easygoing, character-rich style is printed on every frame of film. I wish we could take the roof off the theater and watch this one under the stars like the drive-in audiences of the day, but I asked and we can't do that. (Lars)

GRASP OF THE LORELEI aka WHEN THE SCREAMING STOPS

JUNE 16, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. AMANDO DE OSSORIO, 1974, 35MM, 85 MIN, R

These European sexy horror movies of the '70s were sort of like a gift from God: an endless supply of beautiful actresses, healthy portions of surrealism and kitsch, all sewn up with an audacious sense of style and color. Logic went out the window (good riddance) and kinky cinephilia was the order of the day. THE LORELEI'S GRASP takes place in one of those ubiquitous "hot chicks only" boarding schools that seemed to pepper Europe in the '70s. Naked schoolgirls are being killed off at an alarming rate by a hideous beast with claws and green scales. The headmistress hires a greasy, polyester-clad macho man named Sigurd to track and kill the beast. Only the tiniest children and people with head injuries won't be able to figure out the identity of the monster. Could it be sexy Helga Line who wears a shiny green bikini and lives in an underground cave with her army of immortal bathing beauties? Yes. This movie has cheap gore, gratuitous nudity, great music, bad dubbing, and even a "fear flasher" to warn unusually sensitive audience members of impending unpleasantness. In other words: this movie is better than a crack milkshake. Don't miss! (Lars)

THE WILD ANGELS

JUNE 23, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ROGER CORMAN, 1966, 35MM, 93 MIN, R

Inspired by a photo in LIFE magazine of a garish Hell’s Angels funeral, Roger Corman set about revolutionizing American International Pictures with THE WILD ANGELS, which would go on to spawn the prolific biker genre of the 60’s & 70’s. Peter Fonda stars as brooding Angels chieftain Heavenly Blues. When his pal Loser (Bruce Dern) is shot by police, Blues attempts to bury him in a small town, but the locals resist, and a brawl ensues. Audiences and critics were alternately appalled and thrilled by the extensive drug use and violence, but beneath ANGELS’ leathery hide beats the heart of a Western, especially in its ruminations on personal freedom. The film helped boost the careers of co-writer Peter Bogdanovich, editor Monte Hellman, and gave Fonda the counterculture clout to later make EASY RIDER. Co-starring Nancy Sinatra (yes, that is an odd choice), the film is punctuated by the amazing fuzz-laden music of Davie Allan & The Arrows. (Lars & Kier-la Janisse)

PREACHERMAN

JUNE 30, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ALBERT T. VIOLA, 1971, 35MM, 87 MIN, R

One of the biggest regional drive-in hits ever, a movie that played the Carolinas and Georgia summer after summer for the better part of a decade. It’s a hicksploitation classic that deserves to be better known outside the stock-car circuit. Writer/Director Albert Viola plays Amos Huxley, a traveling preacher whose hankering for womenfolk, moonshine, and gambling (hereafter referred to as “the finer things in life”) keeps him on the move from one tiny dogwater hamlet to another, usually at the point of a double-barreled shotgun. This is pretty old-school stuff – Viola knows his Boccaccio, his Chaucer and especially his Moliere – but it works. It’s a very funny, very well made film, loaded with sex, sacrilege and good-natured depravity. (Lars)

March April 2010 Titles and Writeups

2010-02-08T20:00:00.000-08:00

There are guests and then there are guests. GROUP MARRIAGE April 14, with writer/director Stephanie Rothman in person. You're welcome.

MAD DOG MORGAN with Filmmaker Phillipe Mora In Person!

MAR 3, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. PHILLIPE MORA, 1976, 35MM, 102 MIN, R

One of the key movies in the birth of the Australian film industry, MAD DOG MORGAN is as wild, free and untamed as the pioneer Australian settler turned outlaw it celebrates. Dan Morgan was a real-life figure, a desperado who roamed the bush, committing robberies, drinking rum, killing people at the slightest provocation and generally behaving like a maniac. It should tell you a little about the Australian national character that he's regarded as a sort of folk hero. Obviously not just any actor could play the role, so director Phillipe Mora brought in the only actor who could embody Morgan's peculiar brand of apeshit craziness - Dennis Hopper. Hopper was dead-on perfect for Morgan but, unfortunately for the sanity of the cast and crew, he was also a committed method actor who insisted on getting into the role by drinking at least as much rum as the real Morgan and carrying loaded weapons everywhere. At one point during the shoot Hopper drunkenly took off in a car to visit the real Morgan's grave. He was picked up in the state of Victoria for drunken driving. When his blood alcohol content was measured he was declared legally dead. His producers got him out of jail but he was forbidden by the court to drive or even to be a passenger in a car in the territory! We are honored to welcome director Phillipe Mora to the Ritz to tell us more about this film and the bizarre circumstances surrounding its making. (Lars)

DR TARR'S TORTURE DUNGEON

MAR 10, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. JUAN LOPEZ MOCTEZUMA, 1973, 35MM, 88 MIN, R

If the experience of watching exploitation movies is like taking drugs, and it certainly is, then watching this movie is the celluloid equivalent of having a polar bear-sized dose of PCP injected directly into your brainstem with an industrial strength compressed air gun. If this sounds like a bunch of exaggerated fanciful talk to you then you haven’t seen DR. TARR’S TORTURE DUNGEON. Based on Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether”, it’s an amazingly baroque, surreal Mexican exploitation film about a vast, isolated asylum that has been taken over by its inmates. The film glides from one absurd, outlandish tableau to another with the logic and pace of an opium dream. Though it was considered too exploitative for arthouses and too artsy for grindhouses at the time of its release, we are happy to give this film the audience it deserves. Note: if you don't like horrifying shrieking chicken women, do us all a favor - STAY HOME! (Lars)

NO WEIRD WEDNESDAY MARCH 17 - SXSW

PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW

MAR 24, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ROGER VADIM, 1971, 35MM, 98 MIN, R

From director Roger Vadim (BARBARELLA) and writer Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek) comes a surprisingly dark, funny, sweet film, saturated with the golden light, color and sexiness of '70s California. Plot-wise, it's a murder mystery - beautiful young girls are turning up dead, the cops (led by Telly Savalas) are investigating, the football coach (Rock Hudson, who's great here) is a suspect. Interwoven is the story of a sexually frustrated male student's dalliance with his hot teacher Angie Dickinson. The story is well structured, the actors are top notch, but what makes this film really special is the French director's merciless insight into American social mores. He also captures some of the poetry of sexual desire in a way that few, if any, American directors can. A real, undeservedly obscure classic. (Lars)

DARKER THAN AMBER

MAR 31, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ROBERT CLOUSE, 1970, 35MM, 96 MIN, R

In the 60s and 70s a typical newsstand would feature rows of cheap, colorful paperback novels. There were tons of romances both contemporary and gothic for the women. And for the men there was "man-pulp," detective and adventure novels featuring lone-wolf alpha-dog heroes who typically travelled to exotic locations, engaging in fistfights, copulating freely with green-eyed lovelies and generally avoiding messy entanglements. Man-pulp was eventually usurped by espionage and military techno-thrillers for the few men who still read recreationally. DARKER THAN AMBER, based on a novel by John D. MacDonald, is one of the best man-pulp movies. The book is one of the long running and very popular Travis McGee series. McGee is a kind of proto-dropout "knight errant" who lives on a houseboat and could only be coerced into action by the death of a friend, a large sum of money or the pretty persuasion of a mini-skirted young lass in trouble. This movie captures the feel of man-pulp to a T. You can almost hear the pages turning. With Rod Taylor, Suzy Kendall and, most memorably, biker movie great William Smith who damn near rips Taylor's arm off in the climactic fight scene. This movie so impressed Bruce Lee that he insisted on director Clouse for his American debut ENTER THE DRAGON. (Lars)

SUPER FUZZ

APR 7, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. SERGIO CORBUCCI, 1980, 35MM, 97 MIN, PG

Outrageously stupid dubbed Italian comedy about policeman David Speed, played by comedy spaghetti western icon Terence Hill, who stands a little too close to an exploding nuclear missile. Just as in real life, the exposure to devastating atomic shockwaves and high levels of radioactive plutonium gives him super powers. He has telepathy, telekinesis, he can catch bullets in his teeth, jump through walls, fall from great heights with no consequences, walk on water, stop time and pretty much do anything else that's convenient for the plot. But his powers don't always work, which leads to some wacky complications - you're going to LOVE those wacky complications. With Ernest Borgnine as his by-the-book partner, who just gets all steamed up when Officer Dave won't follow the rules. This movie is dumb, but are you really all that smart? I mean, come on. (Lars)

GROUP MARRIAGE with Filmmaker Stephanie Rothman in Person!

APR 14, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. STEPHANIE ROTHMAN, 1973, 35MM, 85 MIN, R

From the maker of THE VELVET VAMPIRE and TERMINAL ISLAND comes a story of the liberated love generation. If it sounds like BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE, it is - but only just a little. There's a more immediate street-level feel to the film. For the super-low budget New World Pictures, the time between idea and screen was pretty brief, so the social commentary contained in these movies was still piping hot by the time it reached audiences. And Rothman was a magnificent message-smuggler - it's fascinating to see how feminine the viewpoint of the film is - and it what surprising ways this pleasing difference makes itself known. Rothman's TERMINAL ISLAND was about male/female partnership under strain from the outside. In GROUP MARRIAGE the conflict comes from within. It's pretty amazing to look back at these movies with their anarcho-communal message and realize that they played for every Jim-Bob who went to the drive in to see some skin. It's a brilliant way to sugar coat an agit-prop message that most viewers would never have swallowed otherwise. Isn't it time to bring Stephanie Rothman back into films and make her a four-star general in the culture wars for the good guys (and gals)? Featuring Claudia Jennings and some of the best bumper stickers in the history of cinema. (Lars) Make it a double feature with Stephanie Rothman's THE STUDENT NURSES, screening earlier. See below for details.

NINJA TURF

APR 21, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. WOO-SANG PARK, 1985, 35MM, 85 MIN, R

As the trailer says: "From the orient comes the attacker! The ninja has come to the city of night, where dreams become nightmares... where violence rules... where hope becomes despair. This is... NINJA TURF! A killer's paradise, ripoffs, a double cross that boomerangs, $800,000 in stolen money. Don't cross the Ninja, against anyone, against all odds. To the man they call the avenger, mercy is a dirty word. The one movie that breaks all the rules, defies all the conventions. The movie that kicks you in the FACE! NINJA TURF! Cross him - you're finished. Step on him, he'll bury you. See it at your own risk. NINJA TURF - it ain't no music video!" All of the above words are 1,000,000% true. This movie does break all the rules, like that rule that said all high school students have to be under the age of 35: SHATTERED. The rule that states that characters in a film should act and speak like actual human beings: DEMOLISHED. You know that other dumb rule about how a movie with the word "ninja" in the title should contain at least one ninja: REVOKED. And while NINJA TURF "ain't no music video", it does have one thing in common with a music video: there's only one damn song in the whole movie, and you'll get to hear it over 300 times! Mercy is a dirty word! So is FUUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKK! That's what you'll be saying after you get kicked in the face by NINJA TURF! (Lars)

THE CHEERLEADERS

APR 28, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. PAUL GLICKLER, 1973, 35MM, 84 MIN, R

Subversive sex comedy that depicts a surreal, absurd society in microcosm within a suburban California high school. The cheerleaders and football team are like an aristocracy withing the school. When one of the cheerleaders gets pregnant, the squad recruits an innocent new member (played by the lilting, sumptuous Stephanie Fondue) with only one provision: she must remain a virgin. The problem is, the comely new girl wants to become a cheerleader for the express purpose of getting laid. Something has got to give! Featuring that old stand-by of cheerleader movies, a plan to exhaust the opposing team by fucking them silly. Does that kind of stuff really happen? It's OK, you can tell me. (Lars)

Also, don't miss this very special presentation:

THE STUDENT NURSES with Filmmaker Stephanie Rothman in Person!

APR 14, 9:45pm, DIR. STEPHANIE ROTHMAN, 1970, 35MM, 89 MIN, R

This is a jaw-dropping social, cultural and political document about contemporary attitudes toward medical ethics. Oh, and there are sexy nurses too, you can't have one without the other. Like many films produced by Roger Corman's New World pictures it's kind of an ideological trojan horse. Men who were lured in by the sight of four doe-eyed young nurses on the poster ended up receiving a massive injection of social awareness courtesy of Dr. Stephanie Rothman, one of the few women working as a writer and director in the 1970's. While the novelty of a female working in what was perceived as a man's game has interest for us, her gender isn't even the most interesting aspect of Rothman's films - it's a sensitivity to all her characters, of both genders - her conflicts are always human, never schematic. This film is structured like a soap opera with several character arcs dramatically intersecting as we peek in on the day to day trials and tribulations of a group of student nurses. Rothman and company touch on themes that are still controversial today -- abortion, euthanasia, inequality of health care and more. The left-wing stance might seem strident if the film weren't so entertaining on its own terms. You'll enjoy it so much you won't even noticed you've been radicalized. (Lars) Buy your ticket for THE STUDENT NURSES and keep your seat for GROUP MARRIAGE at midnight at no extra charge.

January February Weird Wednesday Titles and Writeups

2009-12-08T11:24:00.000-08:00

It's going to be the best January and February ever! Celebrate Black History Month with BLACK CAESAR and don't forget to bring your sweetie to CRY OF A PROSTITUTE on Valentine's week.

POOR PRETTY EDDIE
JAN 6, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. CHRIS ROBINSON, 1975, 35MM, 92 MIN, R
Everyone who sees this stunning, brain-scraping masterpiece is amazed by it. It tells the story of Liz Weatherly, a famous African American singer played by Leslie Uggams, who sets out on a drive through Georgia to get away from it all. When her car breaks down in a rural area she gets a room at the only hotel in the area. The innkeeper, played by maniacal method actress Shelley Winters, keeps a tenuous hold on her much younger, handsome but evil country singer boyfriend Eddie. Within five minutes of her arrival, he's making advances to Liz and things go way downhill from there. When Liz tries to escape, her way is blocked and the local populace turns from creepy to unbearably horrifying. Directed by Chris Robinson and David Worth but the real MVP is editor Frank Mazzola (who also edited PERFORMANCE and DEMON SEED). He should have won at least an Oscar, and maybe even the Nobel Prize. With Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor and Ted (Lurch) Cassidy. One of the best movies of the '70s or ever. A truly unforgettable experience. AKA REDNECK COUNTY RAPE! (Lars)

KILL SQUAD
JAN 13, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. PATRICK DONAHUE, 1982, 35MM, 85 MIN, R
"12 Hands. 12 Feet. 12 Reasons To Die!" OK, so no prizes for originality in this movie about a group of veterans who get the old platoon back together to come to the aid of their sarge, who's been scammed out of all his money and crippled by bad guy Cameron Mitchell. It's one of the basic templates for shitty action movies. But the whole thing is so cheap and strange that it powers ahead of the pack and becomes really good and even oddly exciting. One of my favorite things about KILL SQUAD is that everybody knows martial arts - a little. They're all probably like green belts, but they're so happy to be in a karate movie that the whole thing has a kind of 'kids playing in the back yard' enthusiasm. So gather up all your friends; the black guy, the Asian guy, the muscleman, the other black guy and the guy with the beard; and come get some KILL SQUAD. (Lars)

LORD LOVE A DUCK
JAN 20, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. GEORGE AXELROD, 1966, 35MM, 105 MIN, NR
A quick glance at the marketing materials for LORD LOVE A DUCK would probably give the impression of another teen-appeal 60's beach party movie, but a closer look at the tagline, "An Act Of Pure Aggression" is sure to leave viewers confused. And sure enough, there's far more here than meets the eye. I'll just dive in. Roddy McDowall plays a sort of genie or guardian angel named Mollymauk, after a type of extinct bird. He magically appears to beautiful, mixed up cheerleader Tuesday Weld and offers to grant her wishes. They all come true - for instance she is cast in a movie called BIKINI WIDOW and lands the man of her dreams, but then they take a bad twist like the fingers on a monkey's paw. Along the way, every aspect of modern American society circa 1965 is bitterly ridiculed. And while such sitting targets as psychoanalysis, bikini beach movies and car culture weren't exactly sacred cows even then, the machine-gun quality of the satire and the churning bile underneath the humor is notable. Writer/director George Axelrod described it as "a non-optimistic get well card. LORD LOVE A DUCK is against teenagers, their parents, movies, cars, school and several hundred other things." The cast is brilliant, with Tuesday Weld in particular giving the performance of a lifetime. Also with Lola Albright and the great Ruth Gordon. (Lars)

LUNCH WAGON
JAN 27, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ERNEST PINTOFF, 1980, 35MM, 88 MIN, R
In 1980, fun was still a living, breathing thing - Sigh. This movie is the proof. When a trio of ridiculously attractive young women inherit a food cart they find themselves in a clash with a rival mob-controlled roach coach that's a front for gold thieves. LUNCH WAGON is a wild, cheap, anarchic explosion of pure fun. Roseanne Katon (THE MUTHERS) stars with her fellow Playboy playmate Pamela Jean Bryant and statuesque amazon Candy Moore (the model for the Cars' "Candy-O" album cover) as the lovable small business owners who prevail against the bumbling gangsters. The whole movie has the vivacious silliness of a silent Mack Sennett comedy; some gags work, some don't, but they keep flying at you and the good-natured vulgarity of the humor will win you over. Featuring the band Missing Persons (you'll get to hear their song "Mental Hopscotch" a LOT). The director was an Academy Award winner! So it must be good, right? Be there! (Lars)

BLACK CAESAR
FEB 3, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. LARRY COHEN, 1973, 35MM, 87 MIN, R
When writer/director Larry Cohen and star Fred Williamson set out to make a blaxploitation gangster movie they could scarcely have known how successful the fusion of genres would be. The fused figure of mobster and black avenger has become a cultural touchstone and echoes of BLACK CAESAR still resonate loudly today, especially in the indulgent crime fantasies of gangster rap. But even today, Fred Williamson's character Tommy Gibbs stands tall as the coolest mob boss of them all. BLACK CAESAR is a classical tragedy played out on the streets of Harlem, with Williamson bringing the swagger of James Cagney to the story of a kid with a chip on his shoulder who rises to the top of the heap to take the reins of his neighborhood crime syndicate, only to reach just a little bit too far. Williamson exudes pride and swagger - he has the magnetism of a great screen star - and he's a good enough actor to bring off the sufferings of a man who could rule the world but can't convince his mother to take his ill-gotten money. With a ridiculously brilliant score by James Brown, including the theme song "Down & Out In New York City". If you miss this, you're dumber than you look. (Lars)

CRY OF A PROSTITUTE
FEB 10, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ANDREA BIANCHI, 1974, 35MM, 97 MIN, R
American tough guy Henry Silva carved out quite a career in Italian crime films. His inscrutable, masklike face could suggest a gamut of emotions from rage to merciless psychosis. Here he adds another portrait to his gallery of unstoppable super killers as Tony Aniante, a Sicilian thug trained in the efficient crime methods of the U.S. mafia. When rogue mobsters develop a new technique of smuggling heroin in the bodies of dead children, Silva is brought in by the syndicate to clean up. He insinuates himself into the households of two rival Sicilian capos, then waits for is opportunity. By the time the blood finally stops flowing, both families are crippled and Silva reveals his true motivation. If you think the plot has very little to do with crying prostitutes, you're correct. The title refers to the wife of one of the bosses, a former streetwalker from the Bronx played by the beautiful Barbara Bouchet. Her brutal mistreatment at the hands of Silva pretty much destroys any audience sympathy for him, but he doesn't seem to mind. He still kills everyone in sight and looks cooler than Chet Baker smoking menthol cigarettes in a red Ferrari. From the director of BURIAL GROUND, STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER and MALABIMBA: THE MALICIOUS WHORE. (Lars)

TERMINAL ISLAND
FEB 17, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. STEPHANIE ROTHMAN, 1973, 35MM, 88 MIN, R
"Where society dumps its human garbage!" At some indistinct point in the very near future, which looks suspiciously like the early '70s, America has outlawed capital punishment. So murderers are sent to a blockaded island to fend for themselves. A new Darwinian social order asserts itself and the few women on the island have a pretty rough go of it - until they decide to fight back. This is very likely the first women-in-prison movie directed by a woman, but it's hardly a chick-flick. Stephanie Rothman, like so many other talented people in the movie business, was given her start in films by the great Roger Corman, who certainly deserves a statue in Hollywood, albeit an inexpensive one. Her films, while every bit as sweaty and violent as those of her male counterparts, always contain fascinating touches of feminine insight. Featuring the glistening naked torsos of Phyllis Davis, Barbara Leigh and Marta "Lost In Space" Kristen. Plus, look for Tom Selleck as a coke-snorting doctor. (Lars)

DELINQUENT SCHOOLGIRLS
FEB 24, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. GREG CORATINO, 1975, 35MM, 89 MIN, R
Not just politically incorrect and inexpedient, this movie is wrong. We won't attempt any grand pronouncements about its great sociohistorical merit. There are no excuses offered. It's a movie about three violently insane criminals who escape from an asylum and take refuge in what turns out to be a reform school for girls. The three psychos, a failed nightclub impressionist, a muscular baseball player and a comically mincing homosexual, are funny in a "so unfunny it's funny" way and the actresses playing the students vary from somewhat competent to obvious cue-card readers. It's one of those movies that makes audiences ask afterwards, "was that a real movie?" Strange, stupid, oddly amusing, really a one of a kind piece. The three convicts are played by busy actor Michael Pataki, pioneering black stuntman Bob Minor and Stephen Stucker, the funny gay guy from the AIRPLANE movies. AKA CARNAL MADNESS, BAD GIRLS, THE SIZZLERS and SCRUBBERS 2. (Lars)

Oh, and just so you can get "Mental Hopscotch" stuck in your head even before you see LUNCH WAGON, here it is:

Interesting CONVENTION GIRLS post from Temple Of Schlock

2009-11-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

If there's a better source of exploitation film ephemera than TEMPLE OF SCHLOCK, it must be on another planet somewhere.

Here's a transcribed article about Joseph Adler's CONVENTION GIRLS.

Enjoy. I'll be back next week.

What the shit?!

2009-10-21T18:22:00.001-07:00

This is the actual Turkish poster for BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA! Unbelievable!

November December WW Titles and Writeups

2009-10-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE
NOV 4, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ROBERT ENDELSON, 1977, 35MM, 82 MIN, R
Supposedly, audiences who watched Dali and Bunuel’s 1929 film UN CHIEN ANDALOU actually rioted in the aisles. If that’s true, I wonder what happened in theaters that played this incredibly inflammatory masterpiece of race revenge. The crowds, black and white, must have torn the screens out and flipped over the popcorn machines like Detroit police cars. Even now the film is infuriating - three escaped convicts - a Latin, an Asian and a white supremacist (played by William Sanderson with intense energy) invade the middle class home of a black doctor and his family. As the siege wears on, the audience is given no relief. Sanderson and his cohorts do bad (REALLY bad) things and the hateful language and attitudes cross all limits of acceptability. And then the tables turn. The third act of the film is one of the most satisfying and morally ambivalent displays of pure payback ever devised. It’s primal. You’ll find it impossible not to cheer as the head of the family gets revenge on the racist scumbag and his cohorts. As uncomfortable a viewing experience as the first hour of FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE is - and oh boy, is it ever - the excitement and audience solidarity of the final half hour makes it all worthwhile. You may forget to breathe. A legendary film that cannot - must not - be missed. (Lars)

CONVENTION GIRLS
NOV 11, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. JOSEPH ADLER, 1978, 35MM, 80 MIN, R
On the surface this is one of those ‘70s ”group of girls” movies, inspired by the success of New World Pictures’ nursesploitation movies. There were tons of films that followed the day to day problems and concerns of a group of shapely nurses, cheerleaders, student teachers etc. Finally the interesting and talented Florida exploitation director Joseph Adler (SCREAM BABY SCREAM) got around to making one about the hookers who populate trade shows and industry functions. That’s the starting point, anyway. On a deeper level it’s about integrity and the pride of doing a good job. Rather than simply serving as a backdrop for sexploitative highjinks, the toy convention is at the core of the film. The hero of the piece is a dollmaker who refuses to sell out to a dark toy conglomerate, and it’s not hard to make the case that he’s like a film maker who does the best he can under every circumstance - like Adler himself. The story arcs that illustrate the central conflict of the film are tied together by the prostitutes who attend the convention and weave in and out of the various relationships. It’s a really good film, with more similarities to Altman than to the usual flesh pageants of the era. (Lars)

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
NOV 18, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. SAM PECKINPAH, 1974, 35MM, 112 MIN, R
“You two guys are definitely on my shit list” - Warren Oates. Sometime around the time this film was made, director Sam Peckinpah went completely insane, making this one of the few examples of that fleeting and wonderful thing - a truly psychotic work of art. The great Warren Oates stars as an American pianist wasting away in a Mexican whorehouse bar. When two leisure-suited bounty killers approach him looking for a pimp named Alfredo Garcia who has impregnated the teenage daughter of a powerful man, Benny asks around, finds out that Garcia is already dead and concocts a plan to dig up the corpse, remove the head and collect the reward. Along with his prostitute girlfriend, he hits the road on his doom-laden journey. As you might guess, all hopes are shattered and Oates ends up alone, carrying the rotting head of Alfredo Garcia in a bag across the desert as the killers pursue him. But like Peckinpah, he delivers. The reaction of El Jefe to Oates’ delivery of the head is pretty much exactly what the reaction at studio headquarters must have been when Peckinpah delivered this film. ‘70s existential malaise at its best! (Lars)

DR. DEATH, SEEKER OF SOULS
NOV 25, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. EDDIE SAETA, 1973, 35MM, 87 MIN, R
This dark, sick black comedy is almost totally unknown but it’s a classic waiting to be discovered. A man whose wife has died in a car accident broods over her death without relief. Finally he approaches a shady charlatan who dresses flamboyantly, calls himself Doctor Death and claims he has the power to bring the dead back to life. The grieving widower makes a deal with the “doctor” that he soon comes to regret. Things go from bad to worse to hopeless to brutal and it gets more ridiculous as it gets more awful. The excellent actor John Considine plays the velour-clad “mortality pimp” Doctor Death with real conviction. It’s a broad performance, but not exactly tongue-in-cheek. His full-blooded approach to the character turns what could be a pretty silly melodrama into something better. Most of the other performers go about their work with the lassitude of soap opera actors, which only sets off Considine’s fine work to better advantage. If your heart is as black and shrunken as mine, you won’t want to miss this. (Lars)

THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN
DEC 2, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. MENG HUA HO, 1977, 35MM, 90 MIN, PG
Holy mackerel! This cheap Hong Kong rip-off of KING KONG is totally out of control. If an all-star team of the best comedy writers of all time got together and wrote a script about a prehistoric ape man and a beautiful blonde jungle woman, it would be just like this movie - only not as funny. It’s hard to describe exactly what makes this such a joy - I think it’s partially the cultural disconnect between the Chinese filmmakers’ worldview and the end product, which is clearly designed for export to western markets. The parts just don’t snap together correctly. Scenes that would be mild cliches in an American film become towering comic set-pieces here. Witness the scene in which Chinese tough guy Danny Lee and wild-girl Evelyn Kraft frolic together with her pet leopard. I think I see what they were going for, but the result is so, so much more. I’ve never been so close to throwing up from laughter as when I first saw this film. You should totally watch it! From the director of OILY MANIAC and THE RAPE AFTER. (Lars)

PART TIME WIFE
DEC 9, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ARTHUR MARKS, 1975, 35MM, 90 MIN, R
Some of the best, most vigorous and intelligent films of the drive-in era came from writer/producer/director Arthur Marks. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Marks was careful not to insult his audience. He probably could have gotten away with much less and still scored at the box office. But he gilded his action thrillers, sexy melodramas and blaxploitation movies with little grace notes and winks at the discriminating film-goer. We’ll always be grateful to him for BONNIE’S KIDS, THE ROOMMATES, J.D.’s REVENGE, FRIDAY FOSTER and others. This rarity stars the great Keenan Wynn as a rich patriarch who returns from Las Vegas to his family home with a glamorous new wife in tow. Not surprisingly, she’s a ho - and Wynn’s two sons (Andrew Robinson and Peter Hooten) are soon involved in a pitched contest with each other and with their pop over the sexy trophy wife. Made during Marks’ busiest period, we’re eager to see how down and dirty it gets. (Lars)

THE SILENT PARTNER
DEC 16, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. DARYL DUKE, 1978, 35MM, 106 MIN, R
Movie production and distribution is a shady netherworld. The money for films has come from every quarter, from international prostitution and blackmail to Nazi gold. But the most frequently used extra-revenue stream was and is, government subsidies and tax shelters. In the ‘70s, Canada had a whopper of a shell game going. Producers were able to make films in Canada and, through a system of write-offs and reporting irregularities, they could turn a profit even on unsuccessful product. The resulting films, international coproductions mostly, are now known fondly as Canuxploitation movies. Not all Canuxploitation films were tax dodges, but many were. I’m not 100% sure about THE SILENT PARTNER, and I don’t much care, because whatever the circumstances of its creation, it is one of the best movies of the ‘70s. Elliott Gould stars as a bank teller who spies a way to steal a lot of money from his till and get away with it. The problem with his plan is that he antagonizes a real bank robber, who’s also a real mean dude (played brilliantly by Christopher Plummer). Plummer, who has cased and robbed the bank in the guise of a department store Santa, puts the pieces together fairly quickly and starts to make Gould’s life a living hell. But Gould, a chess enthusiast with a mind for strategy, counters every move. Soon the two man are involved in a real life game with their lives and freedom at stake. The tension ratchets up to an unbearable intensity before the sublime conclusion. Written by Curtis Hanson and directed by Daryl Duke (PAYDAY). With large Canadian funnyman John Candy in a small role. (Lars)

THE MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE
DEC 23, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. RICHARD PARISH, 1964, 35MM, 60 MIN, G
Special seasonal reprise of the Christmas-killing hit! Here it is: the evil holiday movie we’ve all secretly been waiting for. It made its producers wealthy men and turned a generation of children into santaphobic sociopaths. We are still paying the cost. It’s a very strange film and we’re not sure why anyone would make it, but two words come to mind: Malicious Intent. Why else would the young hero be abducted by a witch and forced to uh, plant Satan’s magic seed in his backyard? The seed grows into a tree that gives him three wishes. Then the kid abducts Santa Claus, straps him to a chair and abuses him until he gets all the toys in the world. Plus there’s a long race between a lawnmower and a turtle and more tomfoolery presided over by the powers of Darkness, including the appearance of a giant who says inappropriate things. We cannot be held responsible for any lasting trauma. (Lars)

POLK COUNTY POT PLANE
DEC 30, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. JIM WEST, 1977, 35MM, 90 MIN, PG
Special “High For The Holidays” edition of Weird Wednesday. How hard could it be to make a movie? That’s what a bunch of state legislators from Polk County, Georgia thought. So they cracked open their piggy banks and made this mind-numbingly inept “action” movie based on a true occurrence in the legendary annals of Polk County history. Not only are the real dope traffickers, Oosh and Doosh (really!), making their screen debuts, unable to convincingly portray hardboiled drug smugglers (they seem like big kids with porn ‘staches), they seem genuinely unable to convincingly portray human beings at all. No matter. If this movie was one-tenth as much fun to make as it is to watch then they all had a blast. Featuring some truly harrowing stunts and the slowly encroaching charm of Oosh and Doosh, which becomes irresistible by film’s end. A legendary motion picture you’ll remember forever. (Lars)

Jess Franco at Fantastic Fest!

2009-09-11T17:13:00.000-07:00

Fantastic Fest and Ain't It Cool News Present Jess Franco and Lina Romay Live In Person.

Join one of our favorite directors for a rare screening series and Lifetime Achievement Award presentation.

September 28-30, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar Austin TX

For almost 50 years Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco has been making his own kind of cinematic poetry, steeped with themes of sex, violence, jazz, and subversive black humor. He has made around 200 feature films, though no one can say exactly how many. Once an obscure but busy man, he has become a well-known and respected figure over the past ten or so years as DVD audiences have joined earlier admirers like Fritz Lang and Orson Welles in acclaiming Franco's talent and vitality. Last year he was awarded Spain's highest film honor, the Goya Award and the Cinematheque Francaise devoted a season to his work.

Fantastic Fest is deeply honored to present its first Lifetime Achievement Award to Jess Franco. We will screen a selection of three of Franco's finest works. We will also be graced with the presence of his muse and inseparable collaborator Lina Romay. This will be Jess Franco's first ever North American film festival appearance.

This series is made possible by Ain't It Cool News.

Schedule of screenings

Monday, 9/28 7:15 pm VENUS IN FURS with Award Presentation

Dir. Jess Franco, 1969, 35MM, 86 min.

A young jazz musician finds the body of a beautiful woman he saw at a party the previous night washed up on the beach near Istanbul. He thinks back to the mysterious circumstances of the party and the strange people there. Later, in Rio he sees the woman again, and falls in love with her. A kaleidoscope of psychedelic and sexual imagery follows. Based on a plot idea by jazz great Chet Baker. Starring Maria Rohm, Klaus Kinski, James Darren, Barbara McNair, Dennis Price and Margaret Lee.

This screening is free for Fantastic Fest badgeholders. A limited number of tickets will be sold to the general public. Click here for tickets.

Tuesday, 9/29 7pm SUCCUBUS

Dir. Jess Franco, 1968, 35MM, 91 min.

SUCCUBUS is like the shiny side of the REPULSION coin, as we see into the half-dream/half-real life of a vivacious sexpot (Janine Reynaud) whose nightclub act depicts sexualized torture on stage. As we follow her through Lisbon and Berlin, through encounters with lesbians, sadists and little people, we begin to see signs that she is carrying her work home with her. Surreal, at times pretentious, but always compelling and new, even Fritz Lang liked this movie - he called it "a beautiful piece of cinema." We are indebted to another well-known admirer of this film for the loan of the print: Quentin Tarantino. Featuring Jack Taylor and Howard Vernon.

This screening is free for Fantastic Fest badgeholders. A limited number of tickets will be sold to the general public. Click here for tickets.

Wednesday, 9/30 6:45pm THE BARE BREASTED COUNTESS

Dir. Jess Franco, 1973, 35MM, 82 min.

Jess Franco directs his muse Lina Romay in this surreal story of a beautiful female vampire who consumes the sexual effluvia of her victims. This is one of the best Franco films of his most hyper-prolific period. Romay burns up the screen and Franco is at his most austere and poetic. Unforgettable music by frequent collaborator Daniel White helps to create a timeless atmosphere for the bloody, sexy pas de deux between Romay and her metaphysical paramour Jack Taylor. Also features Franco himself in a major role.

This screening is free for Fantastic Fest badgeholders. A limited number of tickets will be sold to the general public. Click here for tickets.

Additionally, there will be a special pre-festival screening of Franco's classic EUGENIE, THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION on Wednesday September 23 at Midnight at the Ritz (320 E. 6th St.). This warm-up screening is part of the long-running Weird Wednesday series, Admission is free for Fantastic Fest badgeholders and $1 for the general public. Mr. Franco will not attend this screening. For full details about this screening click here.

All screenings except EUGENIE, which takes place at the Alamo Ritz, 320 E. 6th Street, will take place at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, 1120 South Lamar Blvd. in Austin TX. Fantastic Fest badgeholders will receive first priority of admission. Any additional seats will be made available to the public.

Very special thanks to William Lustig and Greg Chick of Blue Underground; David Gregory of Severin DVD, Ant Timpson, Quentin Tarantino, Daniel Lesouer and the Cinematheque Francaise.

September October WW Titles and Writeups

2009-08-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

Sponsored by the great I Luv Video!

TEEN LUST SEPT 2, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. JAMES HONG, 1979, 35MM, 89 MIN, R
Holy shit! This outrageous farce, directed (and possibly written) by longtime character actor James Hong, is like a wholly American distillation of late-period Luis Bunuel. Good taste is roughly elbowed aside and black-humored perversity reigns inside as we are introduced to lovely young Carol (Kristen Baker), a police academy cadet who has family problems. Her gross father is always on the make for her, her mother drinks like a sailor on a three day shore leave, and her model-airplane obsessed retarded brother wants to marry her. Fortunately she has her police work, which largely consists of dressing like a hooker and being groped by perps, that is when she’s not being groped by the other cops. Her problems aren’t confined to home and work though, even when she tries to spend a little quiet time with her hot-rodding boyfriend, she’s dragged from the car by a gang of amorous 8 year olds (while the theme from THE PEOPLE’S COURT blasts on the soundtrack). When she seeks religious counsel, the family priest tells her he’s gay, and that “all Hitler needed was a hug”, which only serves to confuse her. But the confusion is just beginning as things really get strange. (Lars)

HELLS BLOODY DEVILS SEPT 9, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. AL ADAMSON, 1970, 35MM, 92 MIN, PG
Al Adamson is at it again. The man who brought us CARNIVAL MAGIC, DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN and THE DYNAMITE BROTHERS is back. This time it’s with a movie advertised as a biker movie. But, truth be told, the bikers are just tacked-on set dressing for an otherwise difficult-to-market movie about Nazi counterfeiters. If you can figure out what’s going on in this movie you should go to Washington and get shit straightened out because you’re a genius. Fortunately there are a lot of unintentional laughs and one absolute skull-mashing cameo appearance. As a couple of the characters enjoy a little Kentucky Fried Chicken, an uncomfortable looking Colonel Sanders shows up and makes small talk about chicken for a minute or so and then disappears! It’s that kind of a movie. The biker action was filmed at the Spahn Ranch, home of the Manson Family. With Broderick Crawford, John Carradine, Jack Starrett and Adamson favorite Vicki Volante. (Lars)

TEXAS LIGHTNING SEPT 16, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. GARY GRAVER, 1981, 35MM, 91 MIN, R
As the theme song says: “Rodeo and cattle herding, cheating on your wife - free-for-alls and barroom brawls, they’re all part of life... Time for you to grab a gun and put away your toys. The game that you’re about to play just ain’t for little boys.” The poster for TEXAS LIGHTNING promises a souped-up, fast paced action movie along the lines of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT. That’s what the producers wanted, anyway. What they got from wild man director Gary Graver, was a story of generational discord along the lines of classical tragedy, with fine performances from Cameron Mitchell and Maureen “Marcia Brady” McCormick. So to appease the drive-in crowd they added some bad gags, a wet T-shirt contest and turned the film into one of the most mind-scrapingly inappropriate things imaginable. Somehow, it works. Graver, a talented cinematography who worked with everyone from Orson Welles to Al Adamson, was a party maniac. When McCormick was at the theater last year she recalled waking up naked in bed with Graver, actress Claudia Jennings and a massive pile of blow. That’s the life! (Lars)

EUGENIE, THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION SEPT 23, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. JESS FRANCO, 1970, 35MM, 87 MIN, R
This year Fantastic Fest welcomes hugely prolific auteur Jess Franco, a man who has carved out a special place in film history with his wholly uniqueoeuvre of sex films.We will show a selection of Mr. Franco’s films during Fantastic Fest and present him with our first Lifetime Achievement Award. This special pre-Fantastic Fest presentation was made possible by the generous cooperation of Blue Underground. The works of the Marquis De Sade have provided the spark of inspiration for some of Jess Franco’s most memorable works. This film, made during his fruitful association with English producer Harry Alan Towers, is among Franco’s best, and one of his own favorites. It’s the story of a teenage girl, played by the lovely Marie Liljedahl, who enters the cruel and corrupting orbit of her father’s mistress and her slightly insane half-brother when she visits their secluded island retreat for a weekend. The adventurously shot film, full of lugubrious set pieces, is a joy to behold. The gorgeous psychedelic dream world Franco creates makes the viewer feel the blood-racing excitement of sexual abandon, an uncommon achievement in sex films, as anyone who has laughed and yawned through a number of them will assent. Featuring Franco regulars Maria Rohm, Paul Muller, Jack Taylor and Christopher Lee, who later claimed he didn’t know it was an adult film. (Lars)

S&M HUNTER SEPT 30, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. SHUJI KATAOKA, 1986, DV, 61 MIN, NR
An encore Fantastic Fest presentation. Since its inception, Fantastic Fest has provided a forum for screenings of the most outrageous Japanese “pink films.” In the world of the ”pinku eiga”, filmmakers are essentially turned loose with a small budget. As long as the resulting film contains the requisite amount of sex and nudity (i.e. a LOT), the creators can seemingly get away with just about anything. Last year, S&M HUNTER shocked and awed a Fantastic Fest audience of jaded international sophisticates, who thought they’d seen it all before. S&M HUNTER is an exercise in manga-style outrageousness guaranteed to offend everybody. The black-clad S&M Roper is a kind of bondage super hero who has a supernatural genius for tying women up in configurations that leave them helplessly aroused. When the all-girl gang The Bombers, kidnap a man for their personal sex toy, S&M Hunter accepts a mission to infiltrate The Bombers’ hideout and show them the ropes. It should be noted that S&M HUNTER is a hugely politically incorrect film, loaded with swastikas, delirious patriarchal anxiety, Catholica used for sexual purposes and worse, but few will be able to resist its spiraling craziness for long. The climax, in which the rope-mad antihero employs a 200 foot tall construction crane to execute his bondage masterpiece has to be seen to be believed. Not for the weak! (Lars)

UNHOLY ROLLERS OCT 7, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. VERNON ZIMMERMAN, 1972, 35MM, 88 MIN, R
Gorgeous Claudia Jennings lit up our screen a few months ago as the revenge-obsessed Cajun wildcat Desiree in GATOR BAIT. Her nearly wordless portrayal of a quasi-mythic swamp wraith is memorable, but audiences could be forgiven for thinking her a limited actress. However, in the rollerderby classic UNHOLY ROLLERS she turns in what a very impressed Roger Ebert called the “hardest, most vicious female performance in a long time.” She plays the kind of Barbara Stanwyck/Joan Blondell gum-chewing working class heroine that Hollywood excelled at depicting before the Production Code stepped in and made screen women all soft and wifey. Here Jennings rises from a dreary life working in a cat food factory to become a rollerderby queen who skates to win, no matter what the script says. She drinks cheap beer, curses like a sailor and generally doesn’t give a fuck. Sadly, Jennings, who died in a 1979 car crash, didn’t get any other parts this good. Written and directed by Vernon Zimmerman, who later made the excellent FADE TO BLACK and provided the screenplay for TEEN WITCH. Edited by Martin Scorsese. (Lars)

WILD PUSSYCAT OCT 14, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. DIMIS DADIRAS, 1968, 35MM, 88 MIN, R
From Greece comes this amazing, kinky, violent psychosexual soap opera. When good girl Nadia investigates her sister’s death she finds out that sadistic pimp Nick is behind it all so she straps on the leather and whips and beats him at his own game. Full of unspeakable perversions, dark secrets, two-way mirrors, orgies and 40-weight sleaze. There’s even an adorable pussycat, who purrs and licks her paws as the worst kinds of depravity unfold in front of her. Sounds great, huh? But for me the best part of this movie is the CONSTANT cigarette smoking. A rare treat that you won’t find anywhere else. Who else is bringing you Greek S&M revenge movies? It seems like a good opportunity to formally beat our chests and announce that when it comes to providing high quality sexploitation cinema we are the alpha gorillas. Other theaters around the country may chew the bamboo and act tough but they know that if they try to come near our females they will be beaten senseless with a thighbone. (Lars)

MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH OCT 21, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. ROGER CORMAN, 1964, 35MM, 89 MIN, NR
The best of Roger Corman’s seminal Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. This is the biggest, most lavish of all the American International Poe pictures, and all the pretty colors and extravagant sets certainly enhance the entertainment value, but it could have been filmed on black and white super 8 film and it would still be a joy to behold, thanks to the great Vincent Price. He is at his eye-rolling, emotive best here as a feudal count, who throws huge, depraved parties for the local debauched nobility. When the plague arrives, in the form of a Bergmanesque hooded figure dressed all in red, the count throws the biggest masquerade ball of all with the stipulation that no one wear red, and raises the drawbridge to keep the contagion at bay. Will a red-clad emissary of death find his way into the party? What do you think? Filmed in England as a tax dodge, with many fine English actors including Patrick Magee, Hazel Court and Jane Asher. The spectacular art direction is by longtime Corman cohort Daniel Haller and the excellent cinematography is by Nicolas Roeg. (Lars)

THE VELVET VAMPIRE OCT 28, MIDNIGHT, $1, DIR. STEPHANIE ROTHMAN, 1971, 35MM, 80 MIN, R
Stephanie Rothman has provided some of the most memorable Weird Wednesday movies: THE STUDENT NURSES and TERMINAL ISLAND, and this is possibly her weirdest - a one-of-a-kind aquarian sex-vampire epic. Though made in America, the film incorporates a lot of the techniques we associate with artsy European horror movies - an emphasis on storytelling through color, slow psychedelic dissolves, and that old standby: abundant nudity. There’s a school of thought that horror movies need a strong sexual component, whether explicit or sublimated, or they just don’t have the desired impact. Clearly Rothman has attended a few classes herself as this movie is all about vampirism as a sexual dynamic. And Celeste Yarnall as the bloodsucker of the title provides a clear sexual focus for this movie about a vapid bleached blonde California couple who find themselves ensnared in a vampire’s desert lair. Better than you’d expect and possibly the only vampire movie to successfully incorporate dune buggies. Featuring a completely unexpected cameo appearance by legendary Delta bluesman Johnny Shines, who performs “Evil Hearted Woman”. (Lars)

Coming soon to Weird Wednesday

2009-08-09T13:00:00.001-07:00

Christina Lindberg - Holy Shit!

2009-06-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

Last week's special screening of THE SWINGING COEDS was pretty special. The midnight, SCHOOL DAYS, less so though it did have its moments. It had been a while since I'd seen Christina Lindberg on the giant screen and it made me reflect: HOLY JESUS FUCKING CHRIST SHIT! For any of you out there who like looking at beautiful, delectable things, Miss Lindberg is composed of them. Don't miss SWEDISH WILDCATS on July 15!

Weird Wednesday July August titles announced

2009-06-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

Lady T. All you need.

All shows for the July/August calendar are now up and on sale.

Click here to read them all.

Coming soon to Weird Wednesday this July

2009-05-29T17:03:00.000-07:00

Can you name this movie?

Back from the edge

2009-05-16T12:41:00.001-07:00

Whew. For the folks who look in on this blog occasionally, I really must apologize. Immediately after getting the May/June Alamo calendar together I left on a giant West Coast tour. Upon getting back I was swamped, sick and exhausted. I hope to begin making regular posts again. For now, here's a great GIRL FROM RIO poster, because I'm tired of looking at the reproachful face of Larry Hagman.

Larry Hagman speaks out about LSD, Keith Moon and SON OF BLOB

2009-03-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

I talked to Austin American-Statesman writer Chris Garcia a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned he was going to interview Larry Hagman. I recommended he ask about SON OF BLOB and sure enough he did. In fact he read Hagman my fabrication-riddled writeup too. Yeesh!

Anyway, here's the article. Be sure to read the part about Robert Downey Jr.

CINEMAPOCALYPSE Poster! Hope you like Werewolves and Anarchy!

2009-03-07T16:29:00.000-08:00

Whoah, Johnny Sampson came up with a raging poster for Cinemapocalypse 2009.
This guy can bring the werewolf! Yow! Buy one for your home, car or business at Mondo Tees.

Cinemapocalypse is coming!

2009-03-06T10:11:00.000-08:00

This April 16-25, Fantastic Fest presents EIGHT HUGE NIGHTS of white-hot exploitation thunder at some of the finest screening venues in the west!!! Austin's Original Alamo Drafthouse Weird Wednesday programmer Lars Nilsen and Terror Tuesday curator Zack Carlson will bring the rampaging Cinemapocalypse road trip to the Pacific Coast, and will be presenting rare and absolutely unseen treasures from the American Genre Film Archive's top secret subterranean 35mm archive, each film destined to peel the hair from your eyeballs, scorch the skin on your cortex and make you sterile for ninety weeks. From manic hicksploitation epics to bloodthirsty shoestring goreblasts, each movie is a railroad spike through the heart of limp modern cinema. Join us in shattering the wall between you and THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE!!!

Special thanks to American Genre Film Archive for making these screenings possible!

Fantastic Fest takes place from September 24 through October 1 in Austin. If Cinemapocalypse is your cup of tea, Fantastic Fest is a whole pot of it.

S C H E D U L E :

Thursday April 16
PSYCHOSEXUAL MANIACS Triple Feature!
at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles

JULIE DARLING
Dir. Paul Nicolas, 1983, 35mm, 100 min, R - NOT ON DVD!
I’ve never had kids and I never will. I’ve watched enough movies to know they’re bad news. Even if they aren’t possessed by the devil, they still learn to hate you and all you stand for - even as they eat all your food and wreck your sex life! If I ever waver in my determination to remain child-free, I’ll just thread this movie up and feel my testes retract. In this cinematic curio - kind of a cross between a Lifetime Original Movie and a Spaghetti Western, an actress named Isabelle Mejias gives a performance to remember as a daughter with a serious daddy hang up. There’s not a huge volume of physical violence in the film but the spriritual violence wrought by the cunning and manipulative teenager is hellishly intense. Starring Anthony Franciosa as the lucky dad and Teutonic Amazon Sybil Danning as the girl’s unlucky new step-mom. It’s only appropriate to warn you that the wrong-meter goes into the red here several times, which is just where I like it! Director Paul Nicolas also made CHAINED HEAT, my pick for greatest Women In Prison movie of all time. Be here! (Lars)

POOR PRETTY EDDIE a.k.a. REDNECK COUNTY RAPE
Dir. Chris Robinson & David Worth, 1975, 35mm, 92 min, R
This goodtime backwoods holocaust is both an exploitation masterpiece and a searing assault on all races, genders, social classes and good taste. Respected singer/actress Leslie Uggams dives deep into the cinematic netherworld as road-weary celebrity Liz Wetherly who stops off at a rural hotel for a little R&R…which in this case stands for Rape and Revenge. After being violated by the psychotic Elvis-obsessed hotel handyman, Liz finds little sympathy from the sheriff (DR. STRANGELOVE’s Slim Pickens) or the assorted colorful locals, including Shelley Winters, consummate hillbilly Dub Taylor and Ted “Lurch” Cassidy. Unable to break free of the community’s filth-caked grip, she spirals ever deeper into the tangled web of paranoia, hatred and mental illness that the entire local populace feeds on like an anguish buffet. Most notable is the film’s inevitably brutal climax, a perfectly composed extermination of the human spirit like nothing you’ll ever experience again. (Zack)

PSYCHO FROM TEXAS
Dir. Jim Feazell, 1981, 35mm, 94 min, R - NOT ON DVD!
Already a cult favorite among the most discriminating hicksploitation connoisseurs, this cheap, sleazy slice of lone-star low-life is finally poised to infect the rest of the country. All Texans are familiar with this film but the very mention of its title is oddly taboo. It's a little like the mentally deficient cousin with the weird ears who lives in the basement and eats bugs. We just don't talk about it. Well, maybe now's the time to start because there's a lot to love about this movie. The titular psycho, Wheeler, is one of the most memorable characters in regional filmdom. John King III deserved an Oscar for his performance as the mommy obsessed killer with the weird laugh and the unorthodox fried chicken eating technique. But it may be Tommy Lamey as Wheeler's toothpick-worrying sidekick Slick who provides the most memorable moments in the film, notably a long foot chase that takes up probably a third of the run-time and provides laughs galore - as you'll see. PSYCHO FROM TEXAS features more scummy dialogue, K-mart fashions, mean rednecks, continuity lapses, incongruous BOING sound effects and country cuties than any film you can name. Do not miss! (Lars)

New Beverly Cinema
7165 West Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
www.newbevcinema.com

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Friday April 17
BARREL OF MONKEYS Double Feature
at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles

SURF 2 - END OF THE TRILOGY
25th ANNIVERSARY SCREENING!
Dir. Randall Badat, 1984, 35mm, 91 min, R - NOT ON DVD!
One of the supreme party romps of the genre’s defining decade, here is a No Rules celluloid powerhouse that doubles as a 300-fisted beachfront avalanche of insanity! Honestly, this greatest-mohawked-surfer-zombie-comedy-ever-made is best summarized by writer/director Badat: “Menlo Schwartzer - the geekiest mad scientist of all - wants to rid the world of surfers by transforming them into garbage-ingesting zombie punks! But no way dude can he stop their most awesome party!” SURF II (no, there was not a SURF 1) packs more early ‘80s drive-in mania into one movie than even a brain in the final stages of rabies can handle. Drooling undead new wave boneheads, valley girls, electronically transgendered geekazoids in underwater fortresses, the guy who played everyone’s favorite corpse in WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S, spazztastic video game combat and an appearance from actor Fred Asparagus as “Fat Boy # 1”! Speaking of the stellar Z-caliber cast, this picture sports a career-best lead performance from Supreme Alpha Nerd Eddie Deezen, as well as surprise roles from Ruth Buzzi, Carol Wayne and BLAZING SADDLES’ Cleavon Little. Combine with the pogo-inducing soundtrack by Oingo Boingo and The Circle Jerks and you have the most entertaining IQ-remover The Video Age ever shat out! Totally retardular!!! (Zack)

CARNIVAL MAGIC
Dir. Al Adamson, 1981, 35mm, 85 min, "G" - NOT ON VHS, DVD or ANYTHING ELSE!Alright, it’s time to get serious. Very serious. Because this is possibly the rarest movie on the entire planet. As far as we can determine, only one print exists of this thing and we’ve got it. And we’re going to share it with you. If you’re a fan of the cinematic badlands, you’ve seen some pretty strange things. But unless you’ve guzzled embalming fluid on the moon with Bigfoot you’ve never seen anything quite as awe-inspiringly jacked-up as this “inspirational” kids’ movie from the director of SATAN’S SADISTS and BLACK SAMURAI. Why anyone thought this was appropriate for children we’ll never understand. Granted, it might be educational for kids to see the lion tamer gratuitously slapping his girlfriend around or a teenage girl apparently giving an ape hand-relief (we didn’t believe it at first either), we don’t know if we’d be prepared to field Junior’s many questions about the unsavory goings-on in the cheapest, most depraved carnival this side of Tod Browning’s FREAKS. (Lars)

New Beverly Cinema
7165 West Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
www.newbevcinema.com

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Saturday April 18
Yerba Buena Center For The Arts in San Francisco

MR. SCARFACE
Dir. Fernando Di Leo, 1976, 35mm, 85 min, ROne of the most entertaining Italian crime movies ever made, as should be expected from neglected auteur Fernando Di Leo. Di Leo made some of the toughest, funniest crime movies ever. He was the master of tasteless ultraviolent comedy. He also had a sense of story and characterization that even Howard Hawks would envy. Usually his films feature a tough hombre who gets caught up in a struggle between two mafia factions and gets over on the mobsters using superior intelligence and nerves of steel. Along the way, Di Leo creates brutal and hilarious poetry among the bloodshed. Here, Jack Palance plays a bad, bad man who runs a neighborhood crime syndicate in Rome. But when a series of small outrages escalates to an all-out war he proves no match for a couple of nervy slacker kids with a dune buggy and an over-the-hill consigliere (the great Vittorio Caprioli) who still remembers the old days and the old ways. While not a comedy as such, this film contains more laugh out loud scenes than all but the very best comedies. But it also delivers shocking, intense violence and a pungent ambience redolent of sleazy pool halls and greasy hair tonic. I can't recommend this movie highly enough. Pulp art at its very best. (Lars)

CHAINED HEAT
Dir. Paul Nicolas, 1983, 95 min, R - NOT ON DVD!The best women-in-prison movie in the history of the world. Spend an hour and a half locked in a squalid cage with a few dozen sweaty bad girls! Sound like fun? You bet it does! This is pure women-in-prison exploitation with all the catfights, steamy shower scenes and deviant sexuality you can handle. Maybe more! Linda Blair plays the new fish on the cellblock. With ubiquitous '80s Amazon Sybil Danning and CLEOPATRA JONES star Tamara Dobson as warring inmates. Kinky Stella Stevens cracks the whip as the captain of the guards and scuzzy John Vernon plays the warden (who has a hot tub in his office). Sharp-eyed viewers will also recognize the great Henry Silva. Others may disagree but I think this is a great first-date movie (but be sure to bring enough for her cabfare home just in case). Either she'll love it or she'll flee. What better way to separate the wheat from the chaff? After all, who wants to get stuck with a good girl? (Lars)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission St (at Mission & 3rd)
San Francisco, CA
www.ybca.org

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Sunday April 19
TUFF Quadruple(!) Feature
at the Midnites For Maniacs series at The Castro in San Francisco

VIGILANTE
Dir. William Lustig, 1983, 35mm, 90 min, R
In the post-DEATH WISH era of action exploitation, many a hard-working everyman was given the chance to set things straight using every firearm within reach. Of this rich array of middle-aged homicide fantasies, this raw, feral streetwar collision is the most teeth-grittingly severe. Directed by top-drawer NY scum specialist William Lustig (MANIAC COP) and starring Fred Williamson (BLACK CAESAR) and Robert Forster (ALLIGATOR, MEDIUM COOL), who puts in a genuinely incredible performance as a troubled blue-collar schmoe pushed to the brink of human endurance. When he finally lashes out, no lowlife is spared from his four-wheeled, double-barreled, white-knuckled wrath. This one’s for the toughest, leatheriest, ass-kickiest score-settlers out there, so don’t come cryin’ to me when the sweat and blood get in your eyes. If you can’t enjoy watching a 4-year-old kid take a point blank shotgun blast, that’s your hang-up. (Zack)

RAW FORCE
Dir. Edward D. Murphy, 1982, 35mm, 86 min, R - NOT ON DVD!
Once this show is over, you’ll be tearing your eyes out of your head and setting them ablaze. Because you have NEVER seen such a brain-blasting bonesmasher as the epochal omegawave that is, was and always will be RAW fucking FORCE!!! If you think you’ve been entertained in the past, here is a white-hot scholarship to FUN SCHOOL!! Let’s open this sucker up and see what’s inside, goddammit. Blue-skinned undead samurai? Check! Cannibalistic rump-chasing monks? Yes sir!! Drunken kung-fu yacht party? To the max!!! Wall-eyed flesh-trading seaplane pilot with a Hitler moustache? Man ohhh MAN!!! In absolute honesty, all this is just the tip of the trashberg! Blowtorches blaze, teeth fly, bullets zing, dialogue is botched and cages full of virgins are sent to their heartless demise! So packed with action, you’ll have to blink every 3 seconds to keep your eyes from catching on fire! The legendary Cameron Mitchell (THE TOOLBOX MURDERS) semi-stars in this Filipino/American co-production that would have brought the world to its knees if it wasn’t 200,000 YEARS AHEAD OF ITS TIME! If you see just one movie in your entire life, it better be here, now, tonight: RAW FORCE! If you’re blind, deaf and comatose, only one film will STILL kick your ass through the wall: RAW FORCE!! Look, I don’t care if you’re reading this at a funeral...scream it out loud right now: RAAWWW FORRRCE!!! (Zack)

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
Dir. John Carpenter, 1981, 35mm, 99 min, R
Snake Plissken is the ULTIMATE Sci-Fi Male. Why? Because he's played by an Ultimate Real Life Male named Kurt Russell, who was at the height of his effortlessly steely machismo when he teamed with ultimate filmmaking Badass John Carpenter for the first (and many say greatest) of several flawless collaborations. So if you love BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA and THE THING - and you sure as hell do - this is the unshaven, post-apocalyptic blowtorcher that started it all! The year is 1997 A.D. Cold-blooded criminal Snake has 24 hours to enter the lawless, bloodthirsty prison island known as "Manhattan" and rescue the nation’s president (HALLOWEEN's Donald Pleasance) from the clutches of a crazed gang leader played by the late, great Isaac Hayes! Along for the explosive destruction, mayhem and grit are Harry Dean Stanton, Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine. A beautiful '80s sci-fi masterpiece absolutely slampacked with testosterone-fueled violence and tough guy rage. Watching this movie on the big screen will make you a man, even if you're a woman! (Zack)

LADY TERMINATOR
Dir. Jalil Jackson, 1988, 35mm, 87 min, R
White people have been too stupid to notice, but the nations of the South Pacific have provided the world with some of its most neck-snappingly exciting movies. This isn’t a recent development…Filipino and Indonesian exploitation films have held a firm grip on these nations’ entertainment industry and output since the glory days of Eddie Romero, the bold auteur responsible for the Blood Island trilogy and fistfuls more of the finest South Seas exports. These movies have a unique, magical ability to forego logic and feasibility in a relentless drive to distill maximum entertainment, and in no film has this impressive approach triumphed more wholly than Lady Terminator. After a man steals a snake from a sex witch’s vagina, she threatens to exact revenge on his great great granddaughter. 100 years later, a scuba-diving female anthropologist is violated by the same naughty snake, causing her to unleash a wave of shirtless, lazer-eyed homicide in a kill-crazy goddamn rampage. And it’s not all white hot bulletry; Lady T’s favorite non-firearm method of execution involves a hearty chomp from her carnivorous vagina. In fact, genital terror is expanded to new dimensions throughout this film. Male crotches are riddled with bullets, mangled, eaten and worse. Would you believe this vicious she-demon even pauses to give a gunned-down corpse a kick in the dingle? What a totally cruel supernatural tramp!! (Zack)

The Castro Theatre
429 Castro St.
San Francisco, CA
www.castrotheatre.com

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Wednesday April 22
Grindhouse Film Festival at the Hollywood Theater in Portland, OR

Cinemapocalypse VS. Grindhouse Film Festival in TRAILER WAR!!!

We're setting our most violent, reprehensible and ungodly 35mm explosives for the absolute supreme Battle of Celluloid Insanity. Portland's beloved Grindhouse Film Festival kingpin Dan Halsted will be going head-to-head with the visiting exploitationeer duo of the Cinemapocalypse Tour to present a dehumanizingly fierce barrage of classic film trailers featuring the very excruciatingest horror, kung fu, scifi, prison, nudie, cannibal, manimal, exploitation, hicksploitation, blacksploitation and sploitationsploitation! These miniature bursts of mankind's most twisted and unhealthy brainwaves are destined to transform you into the next stage of human life after dyn-o-miting you through the back of the theater. Make no mistake...this show will pummel your fragile reality right in the nuts!

The Hollywood Theater
4122 N.E. Sandy Blvd
Portland, OR
www.grindhousefilmfest.com

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Thursday April 23
HICKSPLOITATION Double Feature
at the The Grindhouse Film Festival at the Clinton Street Theater, Portland

GATOR BAIT - NOT ON DVD!
Dir. Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, 1974, 35mm, 88 min, RPicture yourself on a state highway in the rural south in 1974. In the distance an apparition flickers on a drive-in screen. It’s a beautiful woman with long red hair and skin the color of mother’s milk. She lifts a 12-gauge to eye level and squeezes the trigger. It’s not a hallucination. It’s Claudia Jennings, a common sight on drive-in screens throughout the country in the 70’s and that rarest of things, a genuine female action star. The movie is GATOR BAIT, a huge hit that kept drive-in audiences coming back again and again. Like most movies that made it big on the chitlin’ circuit, GATOR BAIT really delivers. The story of a sexy swamp rat named Desiree who’s half woman and half savage, it features the scariest inbred hillbillies outside of the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and a revenge plot that builds to a thundering, foot-stomping climax. As an actress Claudia Jennings doesn’t have a great deal of range, but then neither does a sawed off shotgun. Under the right circumstances both can be devastating. Jennings, who was a Playboy Playmate of the year, had an outstanding career in low-budget exploitation films before dying in a car crash at age 29. There’s never been another one like her. GATOR BAIT is a true drive-in classic. Don’t miss it. (Lars)

PSYCHO FROM TEXAS
Dir. Jim Feazell, 1981, 35mm, 94 min, R - NOT ON DVD!
Already a cult favorite among the most discriminating hicksploitation connoisseurs, this cheap, sleazy slice of lone-star low-life is finally poised to infect the rest of the country. All Texans are familiar with this film but the very mention of its title is oddly taboo. It's a little like the mentally deficient cousin with the weird ears who lives in the basement and eats bugs. We just don't talk about it. Well, maybe now's the time to start because there's a lot to love about this movie. The titular psycho, Wheeler, is one of the most memorable characters in regional filmdom. John King III deserved an Oscar for his performance as the mommy obsessed killer with the weird laugh and the unorthodox fried chicken eating technique. But it may be Tommy Lamey as Wheeler's toothpick-worrying sidekick Slick who provides the most memorable moments in the film, notably a long foot chase that takes up probably a third of the run-time and provides laughs galore - as you'll see. PSYCHO FROM TEXAS features more scummy dialogue, K-mart fashions, mean rednecks, continuity lapses, incongruous BOING sound effects and country cuties than any film you can name. (Lars)

The Clinton Street Theater
2522 SE Clinton St
Portland, OR
www.clintonsttheater.com
www.grindhousefilmfest.com

* * * * * *

Friday April 24
PSYCHOPATHS UNLEASHED! Triple Feature
at the The Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle, WA

VICE SQUAD
Dir. Gary Sherman, 1982, 35mm, 97 min, RA highly recommended descent into the sulfurous pit of hell known as Hollywood. Direct-to-video action god Wings Hauser burst onto the scene with his intense, over-the-top performance as the psychotic killer pimp Ramrod. Seething and ranting, a homicidal twisted nerve, Hauser is incredible. This is his show all the way, he even sings the theme song, "Neon Slime!" Along the way, Hauser jumps the fence from villain into full-on monster territory, making VICE SQUAD not only one of the most exciting films you'll ever see, but one of the scariest as well. In this truly grim urban fairy tale, a hooker named Princess (Season Hubley) must make it through a long night in a very dark forest (the streets of L.A.) without being gobbled up by the big bad wolf (Hauser), who himself is being chased by the mighty hunter (the LAPD detective who earlier allowed him to escape.) Pure entertainment from the gifted director of RAW MEAT and DEAD AND BURIED. (Lars)

NIGHT WARNING a.k.a. BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER
Dir. William Asher, 1983, 35mm, 96 min, R - NOT ON DVD!
Listen up…this movie has the best opening scene in film history. Absolutely, without a doubt, no first 5 minutes of any other feature are more rip-rocious than what you'll see tonight on this screen. By the time the opening credits roll, you'll be peeling your fingernails out of the armrests. And here's the kicker: the best is yet to come! Susan Tyrrell stars in her greatest performance as a tragic, spastic auntie with a more-than-healthy appreciation for her orphaned teen nephew. When folks get too close to this happy family, heads start to roll. Enter Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson), a tough-as-rusty-nails police detective who utters the word "faggot" with practically every breath. Easily among the most perfect and underappreciated slashers of the golden ‘80s. If you don't go nuts for this one, get the hell out of my house. (Zack)

TOURIST TRAP
Dir. David Schmoeller, 1979, 35mm, 90 min, PG
Terror nerds are well aware that the American road holds myriad dangers. Many a frenzied sasquatch, invisible space vampire and/or cannibalistic madman has transformed our turnpikes into his personal open-air slaughterhouse, but in the great Halls of Highway Homicide, no film dares examine the darkest precipices of rural insanity like the crushingly inventive TOURIST TRAP. Rectangle-jawed screen ham Chuck “The Rifleman” Connors plays mysterious Mr. Slausen, a dubious yokel who leads a life of quiet isolation in the woods. When a couple carloads of recreation-hungry youths happen across his private property, Slausen introduces them to a bold new cavalcade of nightmares including -- but not limited to -- autonomous singing mannequins, gender-bent nutsoids and a telekinetic knife-throwing fiend. Goddamn! You may have watched a thousand car-broke-down-in-a-maniac’s-front-yard movies, but until you’ve seen TOURIST TRAP, you’re still wearing your horror Huggies. (Zack)

The Grand Illusion Cinema
1403 NE 50th St
Seattle, WA
www.grandillusioncinema.org

* * * * * *

Saturday April 25
at the The Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle, WA

THE SIX THOUSAND DOLLAR NIGGER a.k.a. SUPER SOUL BROTHER
Dir. Rene Martinez, 1979, 35mm, 80 min, R - NOT ON DVD!We can't believe the title either. But that's why they called him Wild Man Steve. We all love Rudy Ray Moore but he wasn't the only comedian working the chitlin' circuit back in the day. Get ready to laugh your ass off at Wild Man Steve. Wild Man Steve can say anything and make it funny. He has a slow, stoned delivery that makes even the stupidest dirty jokes gut-bustingly hilarious. In a way, Wild Man Steve is the ultimate cult comedian and this is an actual WILD MAN STEVE STAR VEHICLE! It's about a midget mad scientist (with a full-sized D-cup girlfriend) named Dr. Dippy who helps the mob develop a formula that makes users super-strong, bulletproof, and, after about two days, super-dead. Obviously it's hard to get sensible people to sign up for this treatment, so the mobsters grab the nearest wino, played to perfection by Wild Man Steve. Steve is hilarious, ad-libbing like crazy, stepping all over his costars' lines. He even gives a little speech in favor of legalizing pot that's a small masterpiece of reason and logic. If you are easily offended please stay away from this theater! (Lars)

THE DEADLY SPAWN
Dir. Douglas McKeown, 1983, 35mm, 81 min, R
McKeown’s low-budget backyard scifi terror epic is the defining accomplishment in the mighty ‘80s Homemade Horror genre. An alien meteorite unleashes a hideous, carnivorous beast that gorges insatiably on the unwitting denizens of a New Jersey town. The massive meatmonster grows exponentially while it casts off knife-faced leechlets to further the annihilation. No one is off limits; old ladies and adolescents and everyone in between are all fair game for this unstoppable eating machine. From unbelievable creature creations to some of the best dialogue ever captured, no shoestring production before or since has contained a fraction of the fearless filmmaking on display here. Shot for the cost of a new washer/dryer combo, THE DEADLY SPAWN is a bona fide, undeniable fuck-you to major studio exploitation crammed with an impossible amount of ambition, masterful latex effects and unbridled, flesh-ripping satisfaction. (Zack)

The Grand Illusion Cinema
1403 NE 50th St
Seattle, WA
www.grandillusioncinema.org

* * * * * *

...That's it for now! But do stay tuned for more developments as we ANNIHILATE THE UNIVERSE.

Love,
Lars and Zack

Friday Foster trailer

2009-02-15T16:28:00.000-08:00

Some nice person has uploaded the FRIDAY FOSTER trailer to YouTube. It's a weird trailer. I'm not sure if you can tell what the movie is about from watching it. It mainly seems to string together all the punch-it-up action scenes. Anyhow here it is:

Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Rosalba Neri

2009-02-15T15:58:00.001-08:00

If I ever get tired of seeing Rosalba Neri you will know that I am dead.

Weird Wednesday Titles and Writeups for March and April

2009-02-11T15:04:00.000-08:00

Warning, this calendar contains Larry Hagman. It was manufactured in a facility that produces peanuts, soybeans and shrimp.

Here's the schedule of upcoming Weird Wednesday movies at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz. All shows are free for people who don't talk during the movie. All films are presented on 35mm film prints. Sponsored by I Luv Video.

SINFUL DWARF
MARCH 4, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. VIDAL RASKI, 1973, 35MM, 92 MIN, R
The dwarf community went apeshit when this movie came out. And who can blame them. I feel like protesting this movie even now. It doesn’t exactly say that all dwarves are perverts who abduct women, lock them in an attic and sell their bodies to the highest bidder, but it strongly implies it. The Jack-Black-in-miniature lead actor does such a phenomenal job suggesting the universality of little people’s dark desires and deeply corrupted souls that one can’t help get these (entirely wrong) impressions about this hard-working and vital segment of the population. So be warned ahead of time, THE SINFUL DWARF preaches lies, it is wrong and it is filthy. But let’s face it, you can’t stay away. And to everyone who thinks this film can’t possibly live up to the expectations the vivid title promises: have fun being wrong, because it totally does. When we last showed this film, a grown man fainted from the general degradation of it all. But I’m pretty sure I can handle it this time. Can you? (Lars)

THE THING WITH TWO HEADS
MARCH 11, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. LEE FROST, 1972, 35MM, 93 MIN, PG
I don’t know how filmmakers Lee Frost and Wes Bishop kept a straight face long enough to actually pitch this movie but I’m sure glad they did. Academy award winner Ray Milland plays a bigoted white doctor, dying of cancer but obsessed with his technique of head transplantation which he demonstrates on a gorilla - leading to the world’s first 2 headed gorilla rampage! When the doctor’s condition worsens, his colleagues transplant his head on the first volunteer they can find. Unfortunately, it’s the body of a black man wrongly sentenced to the electric chair! Soon the 300 pound convict, played by Rosey Grier, escapes from prison with the head of Ray Milland sticking out of his collar, shouting watermelon jokes and seriously messing up his sex life. They lead the police on a harrowing motorcyle chase you won’t believe. In fact, disbelief is the only appropriate reaction to this film. That, and gales of hysterical laughter. One of the all-time drive-in classics. (Lars)

VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS
MARCH 25, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. SERGIO MARTINO, 1975, 35MM, 104 MIN, R
When a tough detective (played by human comic-book drawing Luc Merenda) reaches the end of his fuse, the explosion takes out half of the Italian underworld, and quite a few innocent bystanders. Director Sergio Martino and screenwriter Ernest Gastaldi appear to have taken it upon themselves to trump the Dirty Harry movies with even more extra-legal police mayhem and rights-trampling. And just as Merenda’s rampage violates all the tenets of human decency, Gastaldi’s scenario violates all the laws of probability. As in many of Gastaldi’s celebrated giallo scripts, the story turns on the most bizarre coincidences. Also, Merenda’s idea of investigational procedure is, brutality aside, surreal in the extreme. He essentially turns into a pool-hustling, pimping bad guy to stalk his quarry and in that guise commits much more crime than he could ever hope to prevent. He genuinely becomes Milan’s public health menace number one. It’s odd but it’s also a lot of fun. Plus, the De Angelis brothers provide one of their best “harsh ‘70s reality” scores. Pow! (Lars)

THE TRIP
APRIL 1, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. ROGER CORMAN, 1967, 35MM, 85 MIN, NR
The hippified late ‘60s were like an answered prayer for exploitation filmmakers. They could present sensationalistic multicolored tableaux of drugs, decadence and permissive sex and fob it off on the public as hard hitting expose. This environment bred some of the worst and most insulting movies ever, many of them strangely compelling now, like RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP and MARY JANE. But the best results came from the folks who actually lived the life and drank the kool-aid, so to speak. Producer-director Roger Corman and screenwriter Jack Nicholson (yes that Jack Nicholson) didn’t just stand on the sidelines and retool the same old stories about wayward daughters and drug peddlers, as the others did. They actually took acid and made a movie that more or less accurately represents the psychedelic journey. This unusual film, experimental, funny and genuinely frightening is one of the glories of low-budget filmmaking. Peter Fonda plays the guy on the trip. Bruce Dern is his guide. Dennis Hopper, who worked as a second unit director, appears as a stoned inquisitor with a cotton-candy merry-go-round. (Lars)

GATOR BAIT
APRIL 8, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. FERD & BEVERLY SEBASTIAN, 1974, 35MM, 88 MIN, R
Picture yourself on a state highway in the rural south in 1974. In the distance an apparition flickers on a drive-in screen. It’s a beautiful woman with long red hair and skin the color of mother’s milk. She lifts a 12-gauge to eye level and squeezes the trigger. It’s not a hallucination. It’s Claudia Jennings, a common sight on drive-in screens throughout the country in the 70’s and that rarest of things, a genuine female action star. The movie is GATOR BAIT, a huge hit that kept drive-in audiences coming back again and again. Like most movies that made it big on the chitlin’ circuit, GATOR BAIT really delivers. The story of a sexy swamp rat named Desiree who’s half woman and half savage, it features the scariest inbred hillbillies outside of the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and a revenge plot that builds to a thundering, foot-stomping climax. As an actress Claudia Jennings doesn’t have a great deal of range, but then neither does a sawed off shotgun. Under the right circumstances both can be devastating. Jennings, who was a Playboy Playmate of the year, had an outstanding career in low-budget exploitation films before dying in a car crash at age 29. There’s never been another one like her. GATOR BAIT is a true drive-in classic. Don’t miss it. (Lars)

SON OF BLOB
APRIL 15, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. LARRY HAGMAN, 1973, 35MM, 91 MIN, PG
In the years before “Dallas”, Larry Hagman was best known as the button-down astronaut who dreamed of Jeannie. But secretly he had a wild streak high and wide enough to land a 747 on. When he wasn’t toasting another sunrise with his next-door neighbor Keith Moon or dropping acid with David Crosby he was working hard to get this, his dream project, made. It’s a very strange, very loose sequel to the 1958 teen horror classic THE BLOB. The free-wheeling performances and absurdist humor are unlike any other movie we’ve ever seen. Hagman was obsessed with making this movie, often going without sleep for days on end, deeply worrying his friends and associates. Unfortunately the film was critically ignored upon release and Hagman retreated to the forest where he lived like an animal for several years before accepting the role of J.R. Ewing and returning to the forefront of American consciousness as the man you love to hate. More popular than ever, he was nonetheless a scorned and broken man whose one-of-a-kind film-making genius has never been fully appreciated. Until now. Join us for this very rare screening of Larry Hagman’s one and only film as a director, starring Robert Walker Jr., Burgess Meredith, Godfrey Cambridge, Marlene Clark, Gerrit Graham, and Shelly Berman. (Lars)

DOBERMAN GANG
APRIL 22, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. BYRON CHUDNOW, 1972, 35MM, 87 MIN, PG
You can learn a lot from movies. What I learned from THE DOBERMAN GANG is: when in doubt, train a bunch of vicious dogs to do it. That philosophy is shared by the crooks in this film. A pack of dobermans is put through an extensive training course and deployed to rob a bank. The dogs, who have cutesy names like Bonnie and Clyde, are pretty amazing. The humans aren’t quite up to their level. This film has a reassuring seventies kind of shittiness going for it. The music, for some reason is hammer-down hard funk, except for the final song which will take up residence in the dog-house of your mind for weeks after you see this movie. (Lars)

COOL IT CAROL
APRIL 29, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. PETER WALKER, 1970, 35MM, 101 MIN, R
A beautiful thing happened throughout the world in the late sixties and early seventies, the censorious bluenoses who policed popular culture, making the world safe for mediocrity, began to lose their grip on the throttle. Free expression flourished. Honesty, candor and good ideas flowed again. We know what the results were in America and continental Europe, a mass pollination of openness and freedom. We rightly consider this a great golden age now. In the realm of British film the loosening of restrictions largely resulted in a lot of sexually and formally juvenile movies like CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER and I’M NOT FEELING MYSELF TONIGHT. But amidst this stupidity, a man named Pete Walker had set up shop. He produced films that had a lot more of the maturity and assurance of the best American and continental product. COOL IT CAROL is a terrific movie about a young couple who come to London from a small town and are intoxicated by the bright lights and easy virtue of London. Soon the two have embarked on a voyage of sexual self discovery both together and apart. It’s a very funny movie but not in the usual British “crumpets and dolly-bird” manner. Check it out. Thanks to the Ant Timpson Film Archive for this rare print.(Lars)

Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Mimsy Farmer

2009-02-07T10:25:00.001-08:00

From RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP and MASTER AND MARGUERITE respectively.

New I Luv Video Pick Shelves

2009-01-22T17:00:00.000-08:00

MOJU: THE BLIND BEAST

Since the folks over at the great I Luv Video are kind enough to give me my own pick shelves I popped over last night to change them out.

Here are my new selections:

AIRPORT Location:

VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS
This is the one about the giant teenagers who take over a town. It's really pretty subversive and funny. The music by Jack Nitzsche is great. There's a lot of that beehive and bikini sex appeal that I like from these sixties youth movies. Producer/director Bert I. Gordon (B.I.G.) specialized in movies with outsized protaganists.

THE YESTERDAY MACHINE
Made in Dallas Hitler Time Travel movie. Super cheap and great. Very imaginative in a cornpone kind of way. Like a lot of ultra low budget films it leaves a dreamlike aftertaste in your brain.

THE BLIND BEAST
From the same avant-garde Japanese theater world that brought you movies like FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION, this is a very strange dreamlike fantasy about a blind sculptor and the woman he loves. Some of the most bizarre sets ever built. Director Yasuzo Masumura also made the the equally odd BLACK TEST CAR and the Tashlinesque GIANTS AND MONSTERS.

CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN
A pretty devastating look at police (and human) corruption in '70s Rome. Franco Nero and Martin Balsam take it all very seriously and the film has the nightmare realism of the best Italian polizieschi.

AT THE GUADALUPE STORE:

SHAOLIN INVINCIBLES
Judy Lee (FLYING MASTERS OF KUNG FU) stars in one of those kung fu movies that must make a lot of sense in the exotic east, but seem completely insane over here. She fights gorillas and weird wizards with long tongues that hang down to their knees. Run of the mill in some ways and capital K KRAZY in other ways.

THE ACID EATERS
The comparatively innocent adult film world of 1967 California responds to the LSD menace in the only way they know how: with boobs and tedious shirtless makeout scenes. Fortunately things get a little crazy in the Satan department and everybody has fun.

CASTLE OF FU MANCHU
I can't defend this Jess Franco Yellow Peril movie on any grounds at all. It's not especially good or original. But when you watch it you will feel immersed in a sort of tacky pulp nostalgia, you'll smell the vinegary newsprint as it powders away under your fingers. Franco's free-wheeling new wave style has a lot in common with the fast guys who made the old serials. And Christopher Lee is a great looking Fu Manchu. And Rosalba Neri is a great looking Rosalba Neri, as always.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
This was originally called ONE PLUS ONE. It's Jean Luc Godard's Rolling Stones project. It documents the band in the studio trying out the song Sympathy For The Devil in different ways. It starts as a bluesy ballad, becomes a samba, then once Keith plugs in a little 15 watt amp and wails the paint off the walls, it becomes the song we all know and love. With interpolations of Fanonian anticolonialist discourse delivered point blank at the screen by murderous garbagemen and Anne Wiazemsky (Mrs. Godard) painting punny graffiti.

Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Fernando Di Leo

2009-01-04T14:22:00.000-08:00

Here he is with friends on (I think) the MANHUNT set. DiLeo's sense of story (and humor) are missed more than ever. Watch his movies MR. SCARFACE, CALIBRE 9, MANHUNT and THE BOSS. Then and only then watch LOADED GUNS. Enjoy.

Layers of filth

2009-01-01T13:04:00.000-08:00

I wish there was more Bill Landis writing out there.

Here's a fantastic guide to the bygone food of Times Square by the late Landis and Michelle Clifford.

I have the late era Sleazoid Express and Metasex issues but if anybody has the original '80-'83 run of Sleazois I want it!

Pink Eiga DVDs out now!

2008-12-29T10:58:00.001-08:00

Those of you who watched the unforgettable Japanese Pink Film series at Fantastic Fest '08 will not want to miss out on the new slate of titles being rolled out by Pink Eiga. They will be officially released on January 14 but if you're smart you can go to www.pinkeiga.com and buy them now.

The first titles released are the delirious FF favorite S&M HUNTER and the highly regarded NEW TOKYO DECADENCE: THE SLAVE. Check out screencaps and trailers and all the goodies that Pink Eiga has in their overflowing vaults and you'll be looking forward to a great new era of insane sleaze.

Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Claudia Jennings

2008-12-26T14:57:00.001-08:00

When Maureen McCormick was here a couple of months ago I asked her about making MOONSHINE COUNTY EXPRESS. She said (in front of the audience) that her strongest memory of making that film was waking up in bed with Claudia Jennings and Gary Graver after a cocaine bender! The mind boggles.

Bill Landis is dead?

2008-12-24T11:55:00.000-08:00

Bill Landis photo by Michelle Clifford

Our friend Bill Landis, editor/publisher/damn near sole writer (with his wife Michelle Clifford) of Sleazoid Express Magazine and author of the essential book of the same name, has died. Bill was here 5 or 6 years ago when the book was first published and we chewed the fat about exploitation for a couple of memorable days. Not only did he know his stuff, he lived it. He even worked as a projectionist and night manager on the deuce.

While the rest of us pick up the latest Blue Underground and Code Red DVD releases and watch this sleaze in the comfort of our homes, Bill and his early collaborator Jimmy McDonough (whom he later had a huge falling-out with, unfortunately) sought these films out on 42nd St. in the last decaying pits of perversion where they unspooled for armed and hostile raincoaters and popeyes. In the pre-video era that was the only way to see them and Sleazoid Express was the Variety of 42nd St. You can feel the thrill of discovery on every page. Landis would review the film AND the experience, so if a glue-sniffing masturbator fell out of the balcony it was recorded for posterity.

Not surprisingly he was a weird guy, his tastes were so far out of the mainstream he may as well have been living in another country. I remember at Tim and Karrie League's he was blasting some Charles Manson jams and telling a long complicated story about BLOODSUCKING FREAKS maker Joel Reed, which Bill's New Yorkese stretched into a silly-putty dipthong I'll always remember: Jwaal Reeeed. He made his surroundings as hectic and confusing as his inner world, which was like a Times Square of the mind.

Bill's early death (he was 49) is especially sad because as we get farther and farther away from that glorious time the living memory of it is leaking out of the world, either through death or the slow attrition of brain cells. Bill was its greatest chronicler, so bursting with stories that his fingers could never have typed them all.

I'd like to think that our Weird Wednesday and Terror Tuesday series at the Alamo are as close as we can get to the kind of rude, untamed world of 42nd St. That's my hope anyway. So long, Bill.

Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Jess Franco

2008-12-21T13:08:00.001-08:00

Tio Jess shows how it's done.

Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Henry Silva

2008-12-16T14:37:00.000-08:00

The many faces of Henry Silva.

January February WW Titles and Writeups

2008-12-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

The greatest day of Thalmus Rasulala's life, courtesy of FRIDAY FOSTER.

OK, you can go ahead and plan your life around these. Sponsored by the great I Luv Video.

CHAINED HEAT With Star Sybil Danning Live!
JAN 7, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. PAUL NICOLAS, 1983, 35MM, 95 MIN, R
Spend your Wednesday night locked in a squalid cage with a few dozen sweaty bad girls. Sound like fun? You bet it does! This is pure women-in-prison exploitation with all the catfights, steamy shower scenes and deviant sexuality you can handle. Maybe more! Linda Blair plays the new fish on the cellblock. With Queen of the Amazons Sybil Danning and CLEOPATRA JONES star Tamara Dobson as warring inmates. Kinky Stella Stevens cracks the whip as the captain of the guards and scuzzy John Vernon plays the warden (who has a hot tub in his office). Sharp-eyed viewers will also recognize the great Henry Silva. Others may disagree but I think this is a great first-date movie (but be sure to bring enough for her cab fare home just in case). Either she'll love it or she'll flee. What better way to separate the wheat from the chaff? After all, who wants to get stuck with a good girl? (Lars)

FLYING MASTERS OF KUNG FU
JAN 14, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. ARTIS CHOW, 1979, 35MM, 88 MIN, R
In her first film QUEEN BOXER, diminutive fighter Judy Lee demonstrated great acrobatic ability and superhuman stamina as she devastated a teahouse full of dozens of bad guys like a teenage tornado. Between QUEEN BOXER and this film, made seven years later, Lee a) learned how to act and b) got hot. So while this is an extremely cheap Taiwanese martial arts film with very familiar locations and costumes, Lee lights up the screen as "the Heartless Lady" who will stop at nothing to find her father's killer, even though the real culprits have framed her for murder and dispatched an assortment of colorful super-killers to stop her. There's a one armed swordsman, a female dart specialist played by the great Angela Mao, and best of all a guy who throws gnarly exploding metal skulls with his mind! Lee rips them apart and looks great doing it, like a deadly Asian Pebbles Flintstone. (Lars)

THE DAY TIME ENDED
JAN 21, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. BUD CARDOS, 1979, 35MM, 79 MIN, PG
A psychedelic sci-fi freakout you can bring the whole family to. This strange and awesome alien encounter film takes a pretty basic premise about an alien landing in the desert, adds some Sun Ra style transmolecularization and about $5,000 worth of intense basement special effects. The final product is as close to total happiness as you can get without actually opening up your skull and messing with the wires and shit. The plot concerns a family get-together on a western ranch spoiled by the appearance of a glowing green pyramid in the horse corral. Soon all manner of aliens and UFOs are showing up to alarm the family and to - I don't know how else to put it - fuck with them. These aliens can communicate with them telepathically, alter destiny and make everything really shiny and pretty. Best of all, there's no real explanation. It just happens. I'll be enjoying this one with a tall frosty mug of LSD. Won't you join me? (Lars)

SINTHIA THE DEVIL'S DOLL
JAN 28, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. "SVEN CHRISTIAN", 1968, 35MM, 78 MIN, R
This unusual sex film, made pseudonymously by Ray Dennis Steckler, the man behind THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES and RAT PFINK A BOO BOO, reflects a lot of the artsy eclecticism that drove the last golden age of American film. Under the influence of Freud and Bergman, Steckler enacts a ludicrous, heavy handed psychodrama about that old standby, an attractive young woman with a father fixation. This same material, undoubtedly appealing to older men, has been done a million times, with predictable results. But Steckler's "let's put on a show" energy shines through the thin fabric of the plot. For every talky exposition scene there's an amazing dream/trip/hallucination/fantasy sequence to make you forget the silliness of the material. Multiple exposures, slow motion, psychedelic make-up and costumes and the talented Steckler's camera work combine to make these bizarre scenes some of the best you'll ever see. With Austin's own Gary Kent as daddy in the flashbacks and the gorgeous pinup model Diane Webber. (Lars)

BLACK SIX
FEB 4, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. MATT CIMBER, 1974, 35MM, 94 MIN, R
"See the 6 biggest, baddest and best waste 150 motorcycle dudes!" During the golden age of the drive-in there was one genre that could always be counted upon to turn a profit: Biker movies. "Scooter Trash" epics like THE WILD ANGELS, BORN LOSERS, SATAN'S SADISTS, and of course the major studio stepchild EASY RIDER paid for any number of mansions in Malibu and the Hollywood Hills. The films were inexpensive to produce and were highly appealing to the young, mobility-mad white audiences who frequented drive-ins. Meanwhile across town, movies like SUPERFLY, COFFY, BLACK CAESAR and the like were packing 'em in at the inner city theaters. It took an exploitation genius like Matt Cimber (WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA, HUNDRA) to bring the two audiences together in this story of an all-black Vietnam Vet biker gang who take on a rival gang of racist rednecks. The Black Six are all played by NFL stars, and while none are polished actors they are loose and likable and when it's time to throw an unwise user of the N-word through a wall, they execute the playbook flawlessly. (Lars)

SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS
FEB 11, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. THOMAS CASEY, 1971, 35MM, 95 MIN, R
Our explorations along the fringe of world cinema have led us to some strange places: Indonesia with its anti-colonial mythic avengers, the Philippines with its low-budget action and gaudy textiles, Nigeria with its camcorder excursions into ludicrous high drama; but closer to home there's a country with a film making culture as weird as any of those. That country is Florida. OK, maybe it's more of a state than a country per se, but trust us, they make some crazy ass movies. And with the possible exception of THE WIZARD OF GORE none is stranger than this one. Some guy named Abe Zwick stars as a brutal transvestite whose odd, codependent relationship with his (apparently heterosexual) roommate Stanley turns murderous whenever Stanley brings a girl home. There's a lot of blood and mayhem but the tone is oddly like a John Waters movie only with more palm trees. This one is really strange and really recommended. (Lars)

FRIDAY FOSTER
FEB 18, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. ARTHUR MARKS, 1975, 35MM, 90 MIN, R
Everyone knows the rough, tough ass-kicking Pam Grier of Jack Hill's great films COFFY and FOXY BROWN. But this classic from Arthur Marks (BONNIE'S KIDS, J.D.'s REVENGE) doesn't get mentioned very often. It's time to change that. Because this is one if the most unusual, fun soul cinema titles ever. It takes place in an alternate universe where virtually everyone is African American and the only whites are stooges or bad guys. Pam plays a photographer's assistant who witnesses an assassination attempt on Blake Tarr, the richest black man in America. When her best friend is killed under mysterious circumstances possibly connected to the shooting, Grier teams up with her harried and patient detective boyfriend Yaphet Kotto to get the story - and find the killer. Much less brutal and sweaty than the Jack Hill cycle, FRIDAY FOSTER presents Grier as a high spirited, quick witted knockout in the mold of a '30s screwball movie heroine like Myrna Loy or Barbara Stanwyck. For once Pam Grier is dressed, made up and lit like a glamorous star and not surprisingly she makes every other actress in Hollywood look like an anemic little wallflower. With an all-star supporting cast of black performers including Eartha Kitt, Godfrey Cambridge, Scatman Crothers and scene stealing Ted Lange as a pimp who really wants Grier in his stable. Music by Luchi De Jesus, who obviously just got one of those Peter Frampton voice boxes, because he uses it in every single song. (Lars)

GIRLS ON F STREET
FEB 25, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. SAUL RESNICK, 1966, 35MM, 69 MIN, R
Completely bizarre episodic expose about the numerous forms of sexual deviance that fester behind closed doors in a typical all-American skid row neighborhood. Shockingly frank and experimental in tone and execution. The visual vocabulary of the film includes carefully composed expressionistic scenes as well as the more typical "new wave by necessity" look of most '60s sex films: hand held camera, overlighting, the use of a narrator to hold the story together (and minimize expensive synchronized sound). As much as I love black and white '60s sex films, most of them are just slack, lazy excuses for nudity. This film is (literally) insane but every frame is fascinating. When the parade of perversion is over you'll need a shower. Or a flogging. Or both. (Lars)

There will also be a new feature at Weird Wednesdays and Terror Tuesdays where you can buy a reserved seat ahead of time for two dollars so you won't have to wait in line forever. If you choose not to buy the ticket that's cool too. Don't worry, we're not jumping the shark, it's just an optional service.

This week - Umberto Lenzi's DIRTY PICTURES

2008-12-07T13:44:00.000-08:00

Irene Papas vs. Pretty Colors

During the golden age of Italian exploitation cinema there were craftsman directors every bit as good as the humble (and not so humble) craftsmen of Hollywood's golden age like William Wellman, Clarence Brown, Woody Van Dyke and the like. They all worked in different genres as the market dictated and all could be counted on to provide films they could sign with pride. It's amazing to realize that at one time in Italy the following versatile guys were making movies: Sergio Sollima, Sergio Martino (and producer brother Luciano), Umberto Lenzi, Enzo Castellari, Mario Bava, Fernando Di Leo - and that's just scratching the surface. It was a time of great ferment. There was a lot of money and a lot of demand for new films.

In Lenzi's PARANOIA (ORGASMO) with Caroll Baker he played the first Altamontish dark chord of the end of the sixties. Italy always had an uneasy relationship with concepts like freedom and permissiveness. In PARANOIA two free young people tip a 35-ish self-destructive beauty over the edge. In DIRTY PICTURES the older woman traps the hippie couple in her web. It's a dark coda to the sixties as the two photogenic youths disappear and capsize into the voluptuous black storm that is Irene Papas. It's an ugly and fascinating film and if you care enough about these movies to read this blog you won't want to miss it.

Joe at Filmforno sure liked it but don't read it if you don't like spoilers.

Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Al Adamson

2008-12-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

Here's Al (3rd from right) with fellow vampires in HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS.

Polly Shang Kuan!

2008-11-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

PSK, join the movement.

This little video says everything you need to know about my favorite kung fu actress Polly Shang Kuan. Enjoy!

Lee Marvin, everybody

2008-11-18T12:04:00.001-08:00

Lee Marvin liked to fight the Second World War. He fought it all the time! He fought it killin’ everyone that was coming up the highway. But then when I got in the picture he started just starin’ at me. And he stared at me and he stared at me. I knew something was gonna happen to me bad right then. And then he would jump right at me, jump right over to the sideways at me and there I was, fighting the Second World War. I’d go sideways over the couch, he’d go sideways over the couch. I’d jump over behind the couch and here he’d come Ku-thud, Ku-thud, Ku-thud so I couldn’t quite get away from him.—June Carter Cash

This week the Weird Wednesday presentation will be Lee Marvin in John Boorman's POINT BLANK, one of the best Hollywood films ever made and a totally bizarre amalgam of RED DESERT, Don Siegel and Vincente Minnelli. It's a film that could have never been made without Lee Marvin. MGM wasn't in the art film business but because Lee Marvin was such a bankable star he secured cast approval and final cut, then deferred them to Boorman. Together Boorman and Marvin crafted a film like no other.

Here's John Boorman's appreciation of Lee Marvin:

Follow through to the further chapters if you're interested.

And here's some great stuff from Lee Marvin himself:

I Luv Video Pick Shelf for Nov 11.

2008-11-11T17:26:00.000-08:00

Come Drink With Me!

Pop by I Luv Video to see tons of great new stuff. I changed out my pick shelf today.

Here's what I gots now:

Airport Blvd. Location:

RIDER ON THE RAIN
Charles Bronson plays a great, challenging multifaceted role in this strange Rene Clement thriller. With Marlene Joubert, Gabrielle Tinti and of course Jill Ireland. Much more cerebral and less sweaty than you'd expect. Great noir euroambient vibe too.

RUN ANGEL RUN
William Smith, with an unfortunate, ludicrous fake 'stache stars as a biker who sells his story to LIFE magazine and ends up on the run from his former bros. Directed by the late, great Jack Starrett. Some really strange, experimental editing going on here. Smith is awesome.

THE THREE MUSKETEERS AND THE FOUR MUSKETEERS
Richard Lester directed both of these films, which were originally conceived as one big, long film. When they were released separately Raquel Welch, and maybe others, sued the producers. It's a huge epic in a way but it feels really loose and spontaneous too. It turns out Lester used up to seven cameras to film every take, so the action and performances have great, lifelike continuity. And it's really funny. Cast includes Raquel Welch, Faye Dunaway, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee and, as the musketeers: Michael York, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain and the always drunk and violent Oliver Reed. Great!

HEROES OF THE EAST
Shaw Brothers master Lau Kar Leung directs what is basically a 30's screwball farce mixed with a hardcore martial arts extravaganza. Gordon Liu marries a Japanese woman who turns out to be a karate master. They have a number of philosophical disputes about the nature of martial arts, then she storms back to Japan. He sends her a playful "challenge letter" which is intercepted by a shit-starting ninja master. Pretty soon the ninja brings a whole delegation of Japanese fighters to answer Liu's challenge. Then, in a long series of fights, the weapons and philosophy of China's martial arts prove to be no match for Japan. The End.

Guadalupe Store:

FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41
I don't know why everybody doesn't talk about this movie every day. It's a huge landmark classic. You can't be cool unless you've seen it. Ostensibly a women in prison film it becomes a howling vortex of psychedelic Noh expressionism. So weird. So great. So not rented out? What?

DEATH CURSE OF TARTU/STING OF DEATH
DEATH CURSE is OK but STING OF DEATH is what I'm about. Made in Florida dopiness about a mad scientist who somehow makes a jellyfish monster. At least I think that's what it's about. You watch it and tell me. With Neil Sedaka, horseman of the apocalypse.

COME DRINK WITH ME
Not a typical Shaw Bros. film, if there is such a thing. This was made by one of the greatest film dudes ever to make films, King Hu. Check out his A TOUCH OF ZEN too. This is beautifully soundstagebound, like a little Joseph Cornell box. Star Cheng Pei-Pei is just heartbreakingly adorable and cute and sexy and deadly. The action is like a dream. A perfect little jewel of a movie. Also known as BIG DRUNK HERO.

KING OF THE ZOMBIES
Dumb '40s B-movie. Completely forgettable in every way except for the performance of Mantan Moreland. Moreland excelled at playing the archetypal "easily scared man". Unfortunately a lot of people cringe at his performances because in addition to being "easily scared" he's "black". If he happened to be easily scared white man Mantan Moreland many more people would consider his humor funny. But no matter, Mantan Moreland was really really funny. And the proof is right here. Rent it. You'll laugh.

DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT and FREEZE BOMB

2008-11-06T13:53:00.000-08:00

This scene was cut out! Shiiiiiit!

Last week's showing of DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT went OK I guess. Unfortunately the print was mangled and my two favorite scenes were missing. If you didn't know what you weren't getting it was probably still fun but if you've seen the film you know that the blood bath scene and the love scene between Rosalba Neri and Mark Damon are pretty key parts. Also, a number of people were asking why Rosalba Neri was billed as Sara Bay. She did several films with that pseudonym towards the end of her prime, including LADY FRANKENSTEIN. I think she was trying to generate some US marquee appeal, which would be tough with such an ungainly name as Rosalba Neri I guess.

Even though the print was cut I think any time you can experience Rosalba Neri on film on the big screen is like a kind of religious experience and I enjoyed every second. It's apparently in the public domain and you can watch the whole thing here.

FREEZE BOMB is pretty appealing too. I've tried and tried to identify the appeal of Al Adamson movies and I can't quite put the pieces together. He's not a skilled director but he gets all the shots together to tell the story and works with good people like cinematographer Gary Graver and stunt coordinator Bud Cardos. The cast in FREEZE BOMB is pretty good too. Odd Job and Terry Moore are really bad (but entertaining) but Jim Kelly, George Lazenby, Aldo Ray and Patch Mackenzie as the lab assistant with the implanted microchip are all good. Also notable is the great stuntman Bob Wall as the Haitian henchman. But that snapping turtle is nightmare material. If I saw one of those in my neighborhood I'd move away.

DRESSED TO KILL... What is it?

2008-10-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

De Palma, shake well before understanding

Watching DRESSED TO KILL again this past week with a great audience got me thinking about what a really strange film it is. It's like a scrapbook of shock and detection.

In a sense all movies are about movie-making. Especially movies made by the movie-mad. So maybe the kill - when the movie goes into the red - is the representation of Hitchcock's mighty peak of visual invention and style. And the follow-up detection by Keith Gordon, playing a character who, like teenage De Palma, builds computers for his science fair and toys with cameras and voyeurism; is like De Palma's attempt to cope with and understand his own fascination with the magic. And his teaming with Nancy Allen (Mrs. De Palma in real life) is kind of like entering into a gender-balanced collaboration to explore these themes.

As De Palma says in this incredible interview, he is a visual stylist and that's the first and foremost motivator of his work. It's easy to understand why people would take the murder personally, since the filmmaker is thought to build a doll house that delights him. The furor is a furor against De Palma for refusing to be god or a moralist. Is the death punishment for transgressing against marriage and family, against seeking fullness and joy? It would be hard to find other expressions of that in De Palma's work so I doubt it. Can we take him at his word when he says that he prefers watching women on the screen and finds the sight of a woman in peril more emotionally engaging than the sight of a man in peril? Unless a filmmaker is as skillful at obfuscating these kinds of tensions by creating a harmonic framework of other tensions around them, he or she is walking a long wire. That high-wire act is yet another source of the intricately engineered tension of DRESSED TO KILL.

His bisecting of the frame, either with a true split screen, or with a subtly artificial split-diopter (allowing foreground and background to stay in sharp focus) replicates both the split in Caine's personality and in the filmmakers perspective, as does the very active shade between point of view and omniscient views of the action. Here De Palma shows his mastery of Hitchcock's greatest lesson - never let them go. In a suspense film, the screw shold be kept turning. And this is a screwed and chopped suspense film.

I was very happy to hear from Bryan Poyser of the Austin Film Society that AFS will have an Early De Palma Essential Cinema series in the spring. It will stretch from GREETINGS through CARRIE and I'm pretty pumped up about it. Also, if you haven't seen PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, it should be your Halloween night movie, no doubt about it.

Next week (this week?) we'll have the incredible Rosalba Neri (remember how she steals the show in 99 WOMEN?) in THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT. It is a triumphantly Euroambient film and Neri is like a goddess or a celestial phenomenon. See it!

Rosalba Neri

REDNECK down, DRESSED TO KILL coming up

2008-10-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

Telly Savalas prepares to accept his Oscar for REDNECK

This past Wednesday we had the great pleasure of watching one of our most volatile actors, Telly Savalas, explode in a shower of high-energy emotive sparks. He shows zero restraint. It's a nutso, psychotic performance. And Franco Nero's there too, though Savalas gives off so much power the other stars tend to get lost in the coma of light around him. I don't think I'll ever lose the auditory memory of Mark Lester yelling "mow SKEET ohhh!"

Quality stuff.

This week we'll be watching one of my favorite films by one of my favorite filmmakers: Brian De Palma's DRESSED TO KILL. I still remember the controversy it caused. I saw it at Earl Vanderheyden's house (his parents had Showtime and mine had HBO, it was really either/or back then) and thought it was the scariest, most intense thing I'd ever seen. I didn't see it again until 6 or 7 years ago and was struck by how funny it is and how much the story of Keith Gordon's investigation parallels the filmmaking process itself, and his obsession with getting to the heart of a Hitchcockian murder recalls De Palma's own celebrated status as the Hitch of the '70s and '80s - a constructor of shock machines, but also a reverse-engineer of shock. It's a really good film and you want to see this on the big screen if you're here. It's still controversial and doesn't get dragged out (heh heh) for a lot of theatrical screenings.

Di Doo Dah

2008-10-12T14:02:00.001-07:00

Jane Birkin - Di Doo Dah(1973)
Uploaded by couleurdefrance2007

Seriously though.

November December WW Titles and Writeups

2008-10-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

POINT BLANK, Lee Marvin vs. color.

FREEZE BOMB
NOV 5, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. AL ADAMSON, 1978, 35MM, 90 MIN, R
AKA DEATH DIMENSION. If you have a medical condition that makes it unwise for you to laugh your ass off for an hour and a half, then we urge you: PLEASE STAY HOME. Because FREEZE BOMB could be your grim reaper. This Al Adamson Bond ripoff may well be the worst action movie ever made not starring a chimp, a midget or Lorenzo Lamas. Jim "Black Belt Jones" Kelly and Myron Bruce Lee (Myron?) are the kung fu fighting heroes out to stop a supervillain named The Pig from developing the "freeze bomb" which turns victims into ridiculous looking snowmen. Along the way Kelly and Lee have to deal with various double-dealers and scumbags who are also after the secret formula. With George Lazenby, Aldo Ray, Terry Moore, and Harold "Oddjob" Sakata as The Pig. Oh yeah, there's a mean-ass snapping turtle too. If you miss this one you better have a doctor's note. For real. (Lars)

TARZANA THE WILD GIRL
NOV 12, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. GUIDO MALATESTA, 1969, 35MM, 87 MIN, R
How do you know when you're a total hardcore freakazoid case? One very good indicator might be: you're out late on a Wednesday night watching an Italian naked jungle girl movie in a theater full of sex maniacs. That might be a tip-off. And what an Italian jungle girl movie! In fact we'd like to propose that if you only watch one jungle girl movie this year, let it be TARZANA, THE WILD GIRL. Now, if there's another movie genre that has as little regard for logic, continuity, and plain common sense as the jungle girl movie I don't know what it is. But when the Italians get their hands on it...oh boy. Any little bit of coherence that Hollywood may have inadvertently left intact is flushed down the commode and the movie is free to deliver all those delicious jungle girl goods: gorgeous topless jungle girl -- CHECK; listless drunken chimp -- CHECK; grainy mismatched stock footage -- CHECK; wild "native" dancing -- CHECK; Weird Wednesday Nirvana -- CHECK! Starring Yugoslavian beauty Femi Benussi as Tarzana and a whole lot of other people you've never heard of. Hot damn! (Lars)

POINT BLANK
NOV 19, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. JOHN BOORMAN, 1967, 35MM, 92 MIN, NR
It's hard to believe this surrealist nut-hammer of a movie was made at all but we're so glad it was. Lee Marvin, probably the coolest man ever to put fist to face, stars as the last of the "hands-on" gangsters. When he's double-crossed and robbed of $93,000 by his wife and best friend on the orders of the big bosses, he goes on what may be the greatest (and certainly the most colorful) rampage of all time. He breaks down door after door and puts his business in the street - along with his clever catch-phrase, "I want my money back." The problem is, the new breed of criminals are all organization men who hide behind desks and tax shelters. Nobody can believe he's that bent out of shape over a measly 93 grand but he's a man who lives by a code and he won't stop until he gets what's his. Sounds good huh? Now factor in the fact that the movie is relentlessly experimental, full of fragmented narrative devices and a bizarre primary color scheme that's as insane as it is brilliant. It was billed as a pop art gangster movie and it's certainly a feast for the eyes but at heart it's a primal showcase for the walking (and walking and walking) spirit of vengeance played by the great Lee Marvin. With Angie Dickinson at her most beautiful - the scene where she tries to beat up Lee Marvin is unforgettable. Also stars slimy John Vernon, Caroll O'Connor and Keenan Wynn as Hamlet's father. Miss this one on the big screen and you have fucked up, Charlie. (Lars)

SUGAR COOKIES
NOV 26, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. THEODORE GERSHUNY, 1973, 35MM, 89 MIN, R
Atmospheric New York psychosexual thriller starring the great Mary Woronov and directed by her then-husband Ted Gershuny. Mary and Ted made several films together and all of them are nasty little things, full of mind-games, kink, and hateful, argumentative characters who live to screw over everyone in sight. This is the best of their collaborations. It takes place in the soft white underbelly of the New York porn industry. A scumbag porno producer accidentally (?) shoots his biggest star while she fellates his revolver and enlists his lesbian enforcer (Woronov) to help him cover up the crime and find a new star. She complies with vigor, and even has a long sex scene with the new starlet (a high point of the movie.) It's a tense, sick melodrama full of shifting allegiances, revenge, and triple-crosses. Also starring busy Lynn Lowry (SHIVERS, I DRINK YOUR BLOOD) and a bunch of the Warhol stock company. Oliver Stone was an associate producer but was unable to fuck up this movie. (Lars)

BONNIE'S KIDS
DEC 3, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. ARTHUR MARKS, 1973, 35MM, 105 MIN, R
The thinnest plotline imaginable (two foxy sisters hit the road after killing their lecherous stepfather) is pushed as far as it can go. And I mean AS FAR AS IT CAN GO. As tasteless as it is fun, and it's a fuckin' blast. If you thought THE CANDY SNATCHERS was horrifying and offensive, you might want to sit this one out. If, on the other hand, you thought THE CANDY SNATCHERS was a religious experience beamed down directly from the brain of almighty God for the benefit of humankind -- well, then you might want to wear a diaper for BONNIE'S KIDS, 'cause you're gonna SHIT! A slam-bang frontal assault of sleaze. This will be one of the greatest moviegoing experiences of your life. Mark my words. (Lars)

DIRTY PICTURES
DEC 10, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. UMBERTO LENZI, 1971, 35MM, 90 MIN, R
Leave it to Italian genre king Umberto Lenzi, whose decadent, pessimistic master stroke PARANOIA wowed Weird Wednesday audiences earlier this year, to find the worm in the big juicy apple of seventies free love and permissiveness. In PARANOIA a beautiful older woman was terrorized in her home by a young couple leading to madness, senseless violence and death. This time it's the older woman (the great Greek actress Irene Papas) who gets the upper hand as she sets a trap for two beautiful young Brits (Ray Lovelock and Ornella Muti), who have been funding a lawless rampage across Europe by making amateur porn and selling it as they go. Like all the best Lenzi films, DIRTY PICTURES is full-blooded in its both its sleaze and cinematic invention. (Lars)

WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
DEC 17, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. MATT CIMBER, 1976, 35MM, 88 MIN, R
A perfect illustration of the sort of freedom filmmakers could have in the arena of low-budget films. This ragingly weird movie about a waitress' psychological disintegration into castration mania could certainly have never been made in a Hollywood studio context and it's a gigantic anomaly even among drive-in films. Millie Perkins (THE SHOOTING, DIARY OF ANNE FRANK) plays the tormented woman whose repressed memories of childhood abuse begin to surface in some pretty undesirable ways, compelling her to pick up a razor and go after some of the men she sees on TV everyday. While it was marketed (when it was marketed at all) as a psychotic slasher film, it has as much REPULSION and PERSONA in it as PSYCHO. Written by Robert Thom (writer of WILD IN THE STREETS and Perkins' husband) and directed by the underrated Matt Cimber (THE BLACK SIX, HUNDRA). An unforgettable moviegoing experience. (Lars)

MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE
DEC 24, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. RICHARD PARRISH, 1964, 35MM, 60 MIN, G
Special seasonal reprise of the Christmas-killing hit! Here it is: the evil holiday movie we’ve all secretly been waiting for. It made its producers wealthy men and turned a generation of children into santaphobic sociopaths. We are still paying the cost. It’s a very strange film and we’re not sure why anyone would make it, but two words come to mind: Malicious Intent. Why else would the young hero be abducted by a witch and forced to uh, plant Satan’s magic seed in his backyard? The seed grows into a tree that gives him three wishes. Then the kid abducts Santa Claus, straps him to a chair and abuses him until he gets all the toys in the world. Plus there’s a long race between a lawnmower and a turtle and more tomfoolery presided over by the powers of Darkness, including the appearance of a giant who says inappropriate things. We cannot be held responsible for any lasting trauma. (Lars)

Speaking of Mary Woronov, here she is going on the attack against Warhol superstar International Velvet:

Joe Sarno - Man of Greatness

2008-10-04T14:54:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who showed up for the epochal Joe Sarno double feature of two films that were considered lost just a short while ago. Joe himself, slower in speech but still sharp in his 87th year shared some of his priceless insights about film-making, transferring his vision to the screen on a tight schedule and with a mixed bag of performers and the psychological underpinnings of his very pro-female sex films.

Here's some video of his appearance. Thanks to Anne for filming:

This week's Joe Sarno Double Feature is now FREE FREE FREE!

2008-09-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

Joe Sarno and collaborators

No doubt due to the giant financial hit and general exhaustion wrought by the back to back Fantastic Fest/ACL juggernaut, ticket sales for this Wednesday's 9:30 Joe Sarno screening of ABIGAIL LESLEY IS BACK have been slow. But since we want as many people as possible to see this movie and this great man we are making the whole double feature free. That's right. Get here at 9:30 and stay through both ABIGAIL LESLEY and ALL THE SINS OF SODOM with the great Joe Sarno in attendance, sharing his philosophy about filmmaking and the stories of the films themselves.

For my money Joe Sarno is the key figure of '60s and '70s sexploitation. Others may have advanced the medium and codified the cliches but Joe Sarno was the first filmmaker in the movement to make personal art out of sex films.

THIS IS A BIG, BIG DEAL. Don't miss it.

About ABIGAIL LESLEY.

About ALL THE SINS OF SODOM.

Oz, Pink, Sarno, Boston - We can't be beaten!

2008-09-27T13:22:00.001-07:00

You better believe S&M HUNTER rocked some asses.

Fantastic Fest is over. I worked over 90 hours last week and 70 or so the week prior, which left me with little time and even less presence of mind for blogging. But it has been a great time. 2 weeks ago we had DARK AGE, the Ozploitation movie about the giant crocodile and the Aborigines. Mark Hartley, who directed the doc NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD joined us for that one. If you didn't catch NQH at Fantastic Fest be sure to see it at the Alamo or, if the release doesn't shake out for us - on DVD. I worked both screenings of it at FF and had seen it prior so at this point the movie's theme song, "We Can't Be Beaten" by Rose Tattoo is tattooed into my brain. Watch the video here and share my affliction:

The other Oz titles were Russell Mulcahy's super-'80s stylefest RAZORBACK and two Brian Trenchard Smith classics with BTS himself in person, MAN FROM HONG KONG (brilliant!) and TURKEY SHOOT (flawed but crowd-pleasing). I watched MAN FROM HONG KONG 3 times and each time it got better for me. I really think it's one of the all-time action classics.

The Pink Retrospective also went well. The films were all quite distinct, with GUSHING PRAYER being the high point for me. S&M HUNTER was probably the crowd favorite though - and it rivalled MAN FROM HONG KONG for cultural insensitivity. At BLUE FILM WOMAN there were a few walkouts, maybe people who didn't realize there were going to be long sex scenes in the movie.

During any other month the appearance of one of my greatest heroes, Joe Sarno, would be all I could think or talk about. With Fantastic Fest and ACL going on everything has been curiously muted but let me amplify: JOE SARNO IS COMING TO TOWN! JOE SARNO! Don't miss either screening - ABIGAIL LESLEY IS BACK at 9:30 or ALL THE SINS OF SODOM at midnight. Everyone seated for ABIGAIL LESLEY will be able to remain seated for ALL THE SINS OF SODOM, so no line waiting.

Also, if anyone will be in Boston next week, come check out my act at the Brattle Theater. I've programmed a big-ass "grindhouse" series for them. I'll be there for some of the screenings so if by some weird chance this blog is read in Boston, come say hi.

Schedule for the Brattle series here. Scroll down to October 1.

Video Interview

2008-09-15T09:05:00.000-07:00

A couple of gents from Austin Is Rad came over to the offices the other day to talk about Weird Wednesday, Fantastic Fest etc. Here's that video interview. If only I'd brought a comb to work.

Pink Films, Ozsploitation, the Tingler and me

2008-09-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

I've alluded a bit in this space to Fantastic Fest. It's a gigantic international film fest that I and all my Alamo colleagues have been spending a huge amount of the last few months programming, planning and coordinating. The effort has been huge. I plan on taking a 46 hour nap at some point, but in the meantime I wanted to let all the readers of this blog know about some of the programming work I've been doing on this and recommending a few things highly to each and every one of you. Well, most of you anyway.

First and foremost there's a Japanese Pink Film retrospective. It's my highest recommendation of this fest and really one of those film events you'll beat yourself up about if you miss.

About Pink Films:

Almost everyone has the same tingling response to the bright, shiny world of Japanese pop entertainment. It tickles the roof of the mouth like ginger-ale. But for hardcore addicts, that's just the gateway stage. The terminal phase is the Japanese pink film. More than just sexploitation movies, they're like the entire culture's autoerotic asphyxiation reveries. Filled with crushing weirdness and experiments on the extreme edge of filmmaking, the pink films provide much greater insight into the nation's character than the mannered civilities of mainstream films, largely due to the fact that young film-makers are given the freedom to go as far out on the chain as they want to, provided they expose the requisite number of
naked bodies onscreen. And they must strike a pretty resonant chord since they're still going strong, as evidenced by some of our favorite Fantastic Fest titles of the past few years like UNCLES PARADISE and THE GLAMOROUS LIFE OF SACHIKO HANAI.

This year we'll be showing four pink films that as far as I can discern have never been shown in the U.S. before. Click on the links to read all about them:

BLUE FILM WOMAN, Monday September 22 9pm, South Lamar

GUSHING PRAYER, Tuesday September 23 9:30pm, South Lamar

A LONELY COW WEEPS AT D AWN Wednesday September 23 8:50pm, South Lamar

S&M HUNTER Wednesday September 23 10:15pm, South Lamar

Special thanks for the last two titles to the new, exciting company Pink Eiga, which is bringing tons of pink classics to the DVD marketplace very soon. Check their site out here. It's probably only safe for work if you work where I do.

All of these screenings will feature insights from Jasper Sharp of midnighteye.com, who is the acknowledged expert on the subject. He wrote the book on it as a matter of fact. And you'll be able to buy that book at the screenings. He and Marc Walkow of Outcast Cinema have worked very hard with me to make this series the event of the century - so be there. You can just straight-up buy tickets for these if you don't have a fest badge.

Ozsploitation: Nature's Revenge, The Road and Explosions

The other big retrospective I've been working on (with my invaluable colleague Zack Carlson) is the Ozsploitation retrospective. This year, Fantastic Fest is dedicated to making everyone we know into giant, committed fans of Ozploitation cinema. That is - the peculiar brand of exploitation films that bubbled to the surface in Australia in the '70s and '80s. Certainly the best known are the MAD MAX films but those didn't emerge in a vacuum. The industry was already pumping out films as rude, tough and resourceful as the primal Aussie himself, kicked out of the British Isles for being ungovernable, forced to carve out a livelihood in the most hostile terrain on earth. While Australia has its share of classic arthouse-worthy fare in the manner of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK and BREAKER MORANT, it was the cheap action, horror and titty films that really made the Fosters go down easy.

Films in this series are the big FREE outdoor screenings of MAD MAX (This Friday! Outside at Lamar) and THE ROAD WARRIOR (next Friday also at Lamar). Hopefully you know already that these movies are 900 km. per hour ragers and unmissable.

The other films in the series may be a little less familiar but they are totally crucial. If your grandmother tries to stand between you and these screenings, hit her in the face with an axe. You'll be glad you did and will never regret it.

DARK AGE (Click on show name for description, Ritz Wednesday Sept. 17, Midnight FREE and Lamar Sunday Sept 21, Lamar 8.50/6.50)

RAZORBACK (Click on show name for description, Ritz Thursday Sept. 18, Midnight FREE)

THE MAN FROM HONG KONG (Click on show name for description, Ritz Wednesday Sept. 24, Midnight FREE with director Brian Trenchard-Smith Live and Lamar Monday Sept 22 8.50/6.50)

TURKEY SHOOT aka ESCAPE 2000 (Click on show name for description, Ritz Thursday Sept. 25, Midnight FREE with director Brian Trenchard-Smith Live)

The other main thrust of my repertory programming duties at Fantastic Fest 2008 has been arranging a couple of TINGLER screenings in Percepto at the theater. The screenings feature the documentary SPINE TINGLER, all about the great showman William Castle.

The screenings take place on Wednesday Sept 24 at 4:30pm and Thursday the 25th at 5pm. The theater will be rigged with a highly experimental Percepto set-up in which a (hopefully) non-lethal electric shock is administered to select members of the audience at a crucial point in the film. If you have a pacemaker, don' t even show up because we'll laugh you out the door.

Even if you don't have a badge you can buy tickets for this incredible double feature by clicking here.

See you there, I mean here.

KIDNAPPED COED Tonight!

2008-09-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

Toooooo-NIGHT! KIDNAPPED COED is a pretty remarkable little shot-in-North Carolina movie that really brings the wood. Hero Jack Cannon is an amazing, conflicted existential hero. But you'll see.

KIDNAPPED COED!
Rated R; 76min; Director:Frederick Friedel (1976)

In the ‘70s, Times Square was a seedy open-air sex and drugs marketplace. And the real hot-spots were the 24-hour movie theaters where double features of kung fu, horror, and sex films unreeled 24 hours a day for audiences composed primarily of bitter, sociopathic males. Think Travis Bickle from TAXI DRIVER and you’re on the right track. It was an audience for which no extreme was too extreme. The audience of “popeyes” would sit through showing after showing of gory horror, amputee porn and worse, sniffing glue and smoking dirt weed. There was enough existential nausea in any given foot of Times Square to make Jean Paul Sartre toss his crepes in the nearest clogged and overflowing urinal. So KIDNAPPED COED must have hit Times Square like an artillery shell. You can imagine the smell of record cleaner in the theater; you can almost hear the sound of the butterfly knives clacking shut as the crowd watches in rapt admiration. Not since the films of Jean-Pierre Melville had there been an antihero quite like Jack Cannon, a self-loathing kidnapper whose victim is stolen away from him by the mob, leading to a bloody showdown. This is tough stuff, rough around the edges but gooily primal. If it had been made in France it probably would have been acclaimed a masterpiece of postwar alienation. Thank God it wasn’t made in France but in the number one country on Earth - USA America. (Lars)

I was hoping to have lots and lots of time to devote to blogging since the Fantastic Fest guide went to press but I was deluding myself. Of course there are tons of tiny little details to be taken care of. So if you've been kind enough to follow this blog please continue. I will make much writing soon.

As always, thanks to the great folks at I Luv Video for making Weird Wednesday possible week after week.

BEYOND ATLANTIS this week at Lamar!

2008-09-01T17:43:00.000-07:00

Please note, due to AGLIFF, Weird Wednesday will be shown at the big, spacious, roomy, large South Lamar Theater. Here's the trailer which I just uploaded.

I Luv Video Pick Shelf 8/30

2008-08-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

I changed out my pick shelf after too many weeks at both I Luv Video locations yesterday. By the way, I hope some of you have started checking out I Luv Video since it became the WW sponsor. Their website has also gone from being (very nearly) the worst site on the internet to a valuable resource: www.iluvvideo.com

My picks:

AIRPORT:

UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT
All the great black actors who weren't in FRIDAY FOSTER are in this. Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby are great as two working class buddies who get robbed in a stickup at an underground casino, then have to retrieve a winning lottery ticket from the gangsters who stuck the place up. These two Joe-Sixpacks are totally out of their league but they con their way into the world of the gangsters. Not a perfect movie - in particular the tone gets pretty goofy by the ending - but a lot of fun.

SCREAM BABY SCREAM
Some of you may remember CONVENTION GIRLS, and maybe also - though it wasn't as good - REVENGE IS MY DESTINY. The man who made those was Florida's Joseph Adler and this is probably his best movie. It's a psychedelic horror film made for a tiny budget but with a lot of cool shocks and such a fun sixties feel (and a really sexy heroine). It's the old "mad artist keeps a dungeon full of mutants that he paints and becomes well known as an abstract artist" plot but it rocks like a peninsula full of alligators.

RETURN OF THE TIGER
A satisfying kung-fu film made and set in the crazy Hong Kong seventies. I don't remember much about it other than I loved it - as much for its ambient qualities (great clothes, the soundtrack cleverly constructed of a bar or two of various American funk instrumentals) as for anything else. Paul L. Smith, who played chainsaw man in PIECES and Bluto in POPEYE is the main American bad guy and he's supposed to be a kung fu master, which is pretty hilarious.

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED
By far the best Hammer Frankenstein movie. CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN is pretty good and FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN has its moments but this is the scariest one. Peter Cushing is incredible as the doctor/monster. He's a really bad guy and his performance is surgically precise. Of course Terence Fisher's direction is great. Like Fritz Lang he tells the story visually first and lets the words fill in the spaces - but you could watch this without sound and get the whole story.

GUADALUPE:

INGA
Early Joe Sarno masterpiece starring Swedish sex kitten Marie Lilljedahl. Sarno has always had a lot to say, even though the market was pretty non-demanding. Look at the amount of human interest and storytelling he fits into this film. And as always, it is an erotic film, that is to say the subject matter is that crossing place of human beings that is sex. An brilliant and original filmmaker.

SPASMO
This giallo is some sort of experiment in reducing human actors and actresses into a series of lines and planes. The whole style of the film is mechanical and fascinatingly detached. After a while I was expecting the whole thing to be revealed as a dream but the movie never let me off the hook. It's weird as fuck and I don't understand what Umberto Lenzi was going for at all but I'll take it. With Robert Hoffman, Suzy Kendall (!) and weird-looking Ivan Rassimov.

WITCHFINDER GENERAL
Most of the AIP sixties horror movies were candy-colored concoctions of swirling mist, tacky looking castles and Vincent Price going nuts. They're great. I love them. After a few years of these AIP took the show on the road to England and surprisingly gave the 24 year old Don Siegel freak Michael Reeves a chance to direct. Reeves instantly alienated Vincent Price by criticizing his acting and making him tone down his performance. Reeves and Price hated each other throughout, but it's the best work either did. This movie is dark, muted and doom-suffused. It's not fun per se but it's undeniably major. If you haven't seen it. Now's the time.

CATMAN IN LETHAL TRACK
Just watch it. And learn how to curse like a pro.

Catherine And Co.

2008-08-30T13:20:00.000-07:00

This French sex comedy (in a classical mode) may have seemed like an odd choice for WW. It was, actually. It's a truly elegant, extremely European comedy of manners and mores. It seemed oddly highbrow, even though it was a sex movie all the way.

I enjoyed the hell out of it and the audience seemed to as well, despite the almost-total lack of bad taste. Credit screenwriter Catherine Breillaut with feminizing and humanizing what could have been a pretty silly film.

After the show, one longtime WW-goer said that the movie had ruined Jane Birkin for him because it showed too much of her. It's true that she has kind of an ungainly, clumsy body, her profile isn't classical and her teeth are huge and irregularly spaced. All the more proof that there's nothing more boring on the screen than perfection. In the '50s when the Hollywood film industry had finally assembled a stable of perfect Natalie Woods and Grace Kellys, whose faces had the sort of perfect symmetry that could be measured and standardized, Europe invaded with a whole assault force of thoroughly imperfect "sex goddesses." Silvana Mangano, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Anita Ekberg and of course Brigitte Bardot made American arthouses much more inviting for audiences of males starved for sensuality and "earthiness". Most of the above actresses could never have gotten a screen test in Hollywood, except as a casting-couch stratagem. The European beauties had something much more thrilling than aesthetic "perfection" (whatever that means) and I feel the same way about Jane Birkin. When she's onscreen it's hard to look at anything else and her style of dressing and undressing and slouching around elegant parties is so insolent it's gorgeous.

By the way, Weird Wednesday/Terror Thursday super-regular Chris Popkoff has written up C&C in his excellent blog, Who Put The Pop in Popkoff? Check it out. Here are some clip and save photos of Jane Birkin, and sometimes Serge Gainsbourg - who's also pretty kickass - and will get even more kickass once the hipsters get over him.

My hometown, uh grindhouse

2008-08-23T12:16:00.001-07:00

As much as I hate using the overexposed word grindhouse (which was overused even before the movie came out), I don't know how else to describe the Booker T in my hometown of Rocky Mount N.C. I never went there (I'd be shocked if any white person did, considering the old-south segregated mentality that persisted even into the '80s) and it was always mysterious to me as a child, I remember the movies on the marquee always had the word "Black" or "Dragon" in them. It closed down in '82 or so. The Booker T didn't list showtimes in the paper and they always ran double features.

I found this photo on Flickr while feeling nostalgic for the old hometown.

WONDER WOMEN

2008-08-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

Rare surveillance photo of Nancy Kwan hiding out in Mexico after WONDER WOMEN'S release

Yeah, WONDER WOMEN!

By the way, I hope to be back as a more regular correspondent and a more regular person. We finally got the Alamo Sept/Oct calendar and the Fantastic Fest guide done so my time will hopefully be a little freer and I can do things like post blogs, sleep with both eyes closed etc.

WONDER WOMEN is pretty awesome. I hope some people came to WW for the first time this week because I think that movie encapsulates a lot of the really great things about these kinds of films. It has a sort of '60s comic book craziness and improbability while never (well, rarely) becoming overtly comic.

I really love Ross Hagen as the gravel-voiced hero. He plays that kind of macho superman with just the right amount of humorous observation. The brain-sex scene is flat out hilarious, particularly played against Nancy Kwan's cold veneer. Kwan herself doesn't fare so well in low-budget movies generally, her acting effects are limited largely to being beautiful, and in the hands of a quickie camera-crew she isn't lit for glamour and she comes across as stiff. Still, the role calls for a woman who stands a little apart from her flock, so it works fine.

The army of female assassins is notable for two actresses, Maria de Aragon, who seduces and (almost destroys) Hagen, and beautiful blonde Roberta Collins as Aragon's antagonist. De Aragon was in director Robert V. O'Neill's BLOOD MANIA, which I like too but the part she's been able to capitalize on most was the role of Greedo in STAR WARS! Collins was a dependable fixture in all the best exploitation films - her taste in role selection was impeccable. She played prisoners in Jack Hill's BIG DOLL HOUSE and Jonathan Demme's CAGED HEAT. She was Claudia Jennings' sex-mad roommate in UNHOLY ROLLERS, Matilda the Hun in DEATH RACE 2000, and she lit up EATEN ALIVE, THE ROOMMATES and THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA in small roles. A pretty impressive variety of films.

One element about Filipino-shot exploitation I neglected to mention is one of my favorite: bug-eyed, perpetually stoned-looking character actor Vic Diaz, who plays the cab driver. Diaz was so funny and reliable that he ended up getting cast in 90% of all American/Fili productions. Every time I see him it's like seeing an old friend.

Thanks again to I Luv Video for being super awesome and sponsoring Weird Wednesday. Check out Robert V. O'Neill's first feature THE PSYCHO LOVER (produced by the Isley Brothers!!!!???) in the Something Weird section of the Airport location.

Sept/Oct WW titles and writeups

2008-08-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

With free typos. Gimme little holler if you like.

BEYOND ATLANTIS (SOUTH LAMAR)
SEPT 3, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. EDDIE ROMERO, 1973, 35MM, 91 MIN, PG 1973
One of the superprime made-in-the-Philippines movies. As East Eddie, a scuzzy pimp who contrives to steal a massive stash of sacred pearls from primitive islanders, Sid Haig has never been cooler or balder. This movie also scores major '70s exotica points with its wild analog synthesizer-flavored score, amazing underwater mating dances, jaw-dropping tropical locations, and of course the mind-altering textiles we've come to expect from Filipino movies. For some reason the goddess/princess of the island tribe is a stone fox Amazon Barbie-doll blonde while everyone else is brown-skinned with giant ping-pong ball eyes! Whoa! Why can't all movies be this fun? With John Ashley, Vic Diaz, and Patrick (son of John) Wayne, who can't act but has his dad's cool walk. (Lars)

KIDNAPPED COED
SEPT 10, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. FREDERICK FRIEDEL, 1976, 35MM, 76 MIN, R
In the ‘70s, Times Square was a seedy open-air sex and drugs marketplace. And the real hot-spots were the 24-hour movie theaters where double features of kung fu, horror, and sex films unreeled 24 hours a day for audiences composed primarily of bitter, sociopathic males. Think Travis Bickle from TAXI DRIVER and you’re on the right track. It was an audience for which no extreme was too extreme. The audience of “popeyes” would sit through showing after showing of gory horror, amputee porn and worse, sniffing glue and smoking dirt weed. There was enough existential nausea in any given foot of Times Square to make Jean Paul Sartre toss his crepes in the nearest clogged and overflowing urinal. So KIDNAPPED COED must have hit Times Square like an artillery shell. You can imagine the smell of record cleaner in the theater; you can almost hear the sound of the butterfly knives clacking shut as the crowd watches in rapt admiration. Not since the films of Jean-Pierre Melville had there been an antihero quite like Jack Cannon, a self-loathing kidnapper whose victim is stolen away from him by the mob, leading to a bloody showdown. This is tough stuff, rough around the edges but gooily primal. If it had been made in France it probably would have been acclaimed a masterpiece of postwar alienation. Thank God it wasn’t made in France but in the number one country on Earth - USA America. (Lars)

DARK AGE
SEPT 17, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. ARCH NICHOLSON, 1987, 35MM, 91 MIN, NR
Part Of the Fantastic Fest "Not Quite Hollywood" Ozsploitation Retrospective. Seriously, Australia seems like a cool place to live. Everybody seems pretty cool. There are beautiful beaches. Outlaw culture is honored and respected. There's one huge downside though, everything that walks, swims or crawls can kill you within 8 seconds. The ocean is full of Great White Sharks, the venomous snake population is tops in the world, there are all kinds of creatures that taxonomists have never been able to get close enough to to even slap a latin name on. Most disturbingly, there are giant crocodiles the size of eighteen-wheelers roaming the marshlands. Or so the makers of DARK AGE would have you believe. Fortunately, the film is so boomingly well directed, acted and shot you'll be willing to believe just about anything. Not only is the giant crocodile at the center of this film hundreds of years old, he is venerated by the Aboriginal Australians as a sacred spirit. Enter the great Aussie actor John Jarratt (WOLF CREEK) as a ranger assigned to kill the croc after it ingests some poachers. Instead of killing the beast, he makes plans to capture and relocate it - but the whole plan is jeopardized by the most incredibly scuzzy outback reptile hunters imaginable. Their one-armed leader lost an arm to the crocodile and takes it all pretty personally. With David Gulpilil and Burnam Burnam as the Aborigines who join up with the ranger and his lady against the bad guys. Fantastic, highly recommended. (Lars)

MAN FROM HONG KONG with Brian Trenchard-Smith Live
SEPT 24, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. BRIAN TRENCHARD-SMITH, 1975, 35MM, 111 MIN, R
Part Of the Fantastic Fest "Not Quite Hollywood" Ozsploitation Retrospective. From now on whenever anyone asks me what the most berserk orgy of action and violence ever placed on film is I'll be honor-bound to answer THE MAN FROM HONG KONG. If a car crashes and explodes in this film (and it will, don't worry) you'd better believe it will explode with 5,000 megatons of TNT power. When our special guest Brian Trenchard-Smith was filming this movie in Australia he got complaints from Soviet Cosmonauts in space who said it kept them awake at night. With 75 car chases, 17 throat-ripping death fights, 437 burning-man scenes and one dopey hang-glider this is truly a memorable exercise in pedal to the metal excitement. And director Brian Trenchard-Smith, who not only directed the film but plays a pornishly-bedecked henchman, will be here in person to explain how and why. Stars Jimmy Wang Yu as the "tough cop who learned every trick in the book and then threw the book away" and erstwhile James Bond seatwarmer George Lazenby as a dandyish crime boss with a bulletproof mustache. Stunts by the madman from dingo-land Grant Page, who appears desperate to end it all in a progressively greater and greater aggregation of death-defiance. (Lars)

ALL THE SINS OF SODOM with Joe Sarno Live
OCT 1, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. JOE SARNO, 1968, DV, 91 MIN, R
Presented by Retro-Seduction Cinema. Thought lost for many years, Joe Sarno's ALL THE SINS OF SODOM is back, and playing in front of an audience for the first time in over 30 years. Sarno's genius is that he builds realistic situations stealthily. The cheap sets may lull the viewer into thinking he's watching just another dodgy sex movie but as the narrative progresses, the situations become not only realistic but universal and mythological. Not only do you care about the characters. You are the characters. I know it sounds like I'm enthusing too much but seriously, be here. See it for yourself. (Lars)

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
OCT 8, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. GEORGE McCOWAN, 1979, 35MM, 98 MIN, PG
In case you haven't heard, STAR WARS was a big, huge monster hit on an unprecedented scale. For years afterward cheap space operas swept through the multiplexes, promising so much on the poster and delivering so, so little. I'd like to say that this film is the exception but it's not. Fortunately it's an entertaining, though confusingly jumbled, mix of sexy space ladies, a wisecracking robot (ugh), special effects that look like they were filtered through a burlap sack full of ass and the great Jack Palance, looking stronger than a locomotive full of steroids at age 60, as the evil robot lord Omus. If you drink enough generic cough syrup before the movie, you'll swear you're really in space. That's our guarantee to you. (Lars)

REDNECK
OCT 15, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. SILVIO NARIZZANO, 1975, 35MM, 89 MIN, R
Telly Savalas and Franco Nero play a pair of wisecracking screw-ups who botch a jewel robbery, kill some people and accidentally take a young boy hostage. Pretty soon they're tutoring the kid on the finer points of being a complete psychopath. Savalas, never noted for his actorly restraint, is like a runaway downhill ham-train as the ruthless killer Memphis while the nattily mustachio'd Nero is a bit more subdued as Mosquito, the (relatively) sympathetic one. Along the way there's a side-trip into what-the-fuck land with a bit of the old inappropriateness we've come to know and love so well. Hard-edged, violent, idiosyncratic... not your usual Italian crime movie. I'll be quaffing tumblers full of J&B Scotch at this one so stay out of my way and don't be grabbing on me! (Lars)

DRESSED TO KILL
OCT 22, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. BRIAN DE PALMA, 1980, 35MM, 105 MIN, R
“If this film succeeds, killing women may become the greatest turn-on of the Eighties!” - Women Against Pornography leaflet, 1980. When DRESSED TO KILL came out it created a firestorm of controversy. Womens' groups marched on theaters, gay rights groups protested, reviewers savaged it as an unnecessarily violent rip-off of all of Hitchcock's best ideas. They were all wrong. DRESSED TO KILL is one of the funniest, cleverest essays on the art of the suspense film, and a superior example of the form. It's the only American giallo thriller and it stands with the best work of Argento, Bava, Lenzi and Sergio Martino. The film was a huge hit and shot its vile seed deep into the brains of millions of people in theaters throughout America and later as a late night staple on pay cable. Angie Dickinson, Michael Caine, Nancy Allen and especially Keith Gordon (even though he looks like Harry Potter) are all fantastic but the spotlight is on writer/director Brian De Palma. He was very busy throughout the '70s and by the time he made DRESSED TO KILL his reflexes and instincts were tuned up tighter than a drum. Like a kinky behaviorist, he runs the viewer through a sleazy maze of sex and death while constantly exploiting the audience's sophisticated cinema-consciousness. Think you're smart? De Palma's smarter. He virtuosically demonstrates 37 positions of mind-fucking before letting you have your cigarette. It's a true classic, and an unmissable big screen event. (Lars)

DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT
OCT 29, MIDNIGHT, FREE, DIR. PAUL SOLVAY, 1973, 35MM, 80 MIN, R
Just in time for Halloween, an Italian sexy vampire lady movie starring the smoketacular Rosalba Neri. The dusky, olive-skinned Neri ran off with nearly every movie she appeared in, no matter how insignificant her part. She has a way of melting your eyeballs with just her tiniest nostril-flaring glance. She's basically sex personified. And this is one of her best roles. She plays a Countess Bathory type who bathes in the blood of virgins to stay beautiful. But when vampire hunting twin brothers show up, will some other stuff happen? Looks like you'll have to show up to find out because all we remember is the sight of Rosalba Neri rising naked from a silver bathtub covered in the blood of virgins. Oh, and there's an awesome Dracula ring. And a bald guy. (Lars)

Also of note:

ABIGAIL LESLEY IS BACK IN TOWN WITH JOE SARNO LIVE
OCT 1, 10PM, DIR. JOE SARNO, 1975, 35MM, 96 MIN, R
Presented by Retro-Seduction Cinema.
Wow. That's all we can say about Joe Sarno's mind-blowing erotic masterpiece ABIGAIL LESLEY IS BACK IN TOWN. It's the story of a quietly desperate suburb, the kind of staid, puritanical, thoroughly unhappy town full of attractive but aimless couples that provides so much kindling for the flames of lust in Sarno's films. This time the torch is lit by the titular town tramp Abigail Lesley, who was hounded out of town two years earlier after being caught with a married man. When she comes home again, all those unresolved erotic demons rise, stretch and begin their frolics anew. This movie is chock full of sex but Sarno is careful to provide an emotional framework so that when the pieces start to fit together (literally) the viewer is carried away into the bacchanale. Even though the film was shot cheaply and quickly, the Sarno magic is all over it. (Lars)

NINJA ANNIHILATION WAR tonight. Ritz. 7.

2008-08-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

Can't wait to hear everybody's thoughts about NINJA ANNIHILATION WAR which we ganked from the Thrifty Scotsman Flea Market in Oxnard last summer.

Lars & Zack Present
NINJA ANNIHILATION WAR - FREE!

Rated R; 90min; Director:Fung Brothers (1987)

Location: Alamo Downtown

God knows the '80s weren't perfect. It was the decade of rising budget deficits, illegal U.S. intervention in Central America, widespread failings of the infrastructure and social safety net and Duran Duran.

But it was also the Decade of the Ninja. While the black-garbed messengers of death have appeared in films for a long time, they were usually hiding behind ornamental potted palm trees or clinging to the ceiling...it took a sharp eye to spot them.

But thanks to martial art moviemaking mavericks like The Fung (pronounced 'fang') Brothers, they shimmied their way into the video stores and late night cable TV stations of America. These multi-thousand dollar spectacles usually starred whatever Caucasian actor happened to be in Hong Kong at the time (generally as an Interpol agent masquerading as a ninja). They were relentless cut-and-paste jobs that combined scenes from unrelated films into a dense fabric of digressions, flashbacks, minor-character subplots that go on at baffling length and - of course - demonstrations of pole-spinning, star-hurling prowess. They are head-scratching meta-constructions of the Global Mind circa 1985 and we love them.

So when we found an obscure 3/4" video master at an Oxnard California flea market labeled "NINJA ANNIHILATION WAR" we clearly had to have it. After exhaustive research, we've learned that it has never before been released on video or even theatrically. When the blood-red Ninja tide rolled back out to sea this was the one left flopping on the beach - and it's a goddamn masterpiece.

Now, through the miracles of modern technology, we've had it transferred to digital video and are going to share it with you. It's difficult to synopsize the off-the-wall, maniacal plot so we won't even try. But trust us - if you're a fan of the brand of cruel and unusual films we offer at our weekly Weird Wednesday and Terror Thursday screenings, you don't want to miss NAW!

Coming in October

2008-08-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna do it. I've been thinking about it for a long time and now I'm gonna show it.

Dying over here

2008-08-04T09:56:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the paucity of posts here. I haven't lost interest, just buried in a huge amount of theater and fantastic fest work so - keep checking in.

PUZZLE aka MAN WITHOUT A MEMORY TONIGHT

2008-07-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

Senta Berger. Vicious.

Come on out tonight for an interesting noir/giallo about a guy who has amnesia (or does he?) and is running from some crooks (or is he?) because he killed a guy (or did he?) and has some drugs stashed (or does he?). It starts at midnight (or does it?).

Weird Wednesday: PUZZLE
Midnight, Ritz, Rated R; 92min; Director:Duccio Tessari (1974)

This rough-edged yet stylish Italian giallo thriller stars Luc Merenda as an amnesiac, newly returned to Italy and his wife (the incendiary Senta Berger), trying to put the pieces back together. Wherever he goes death follows - he’s being blackmailed for reasons he doesn’t understand - and with every piece of the puzzle he finds out something new and disturbing about himself and his past. The particular appeal of the Italian giallo thriller is the counterpoint between the often strangely beautiful visuals and the dark violence and psychological tension underneath. The best giallo film-makers externalize the characters’ central conflicts in the atmospheric settings, sweeping the viewer into an often bizarre, nightmarish fantasy world that’s oddly appealing. Director Duccio Tessari balances an eye for angles and locations with a great feel for suspense timing. Written by genre Grandmaster Ernesto Gastaldi. Recommended. (Lars)

Thanks as always to I Luv Videoooooo!

How to recognize a genius

2008-07-27T12:06:00.001-07:00

He does shit like this:

Monte Hellman says thanks to all

2008-07-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

Warren Oates. Hey maybe there'll be another one someday.

Monte Hellman loved his time in Austin and asked me repeatedly, "where did you find that audience?" He said it was the best audience his films had ever played for and I'm inclined to think it's not flattery. You laughed at all the right parts, cheered at the right parts and asked the best questions. I don't have time to give the event the coverage it deserves but suffice to say THE SHOOTING which might seem a little turgid on the small screen was as compelling as intended on the big screen and TWO LANE BLACKTOP is a great American classic. Even SNDN 3: BETTER WATCH OUT! was better than remembered. I asked Monte what he thought of the audience reaction to his horror sequel and he smiled broadly and said "Great! Just great!"

Thanks again to Charles Lieurance and the fine folks at I Luv Video.

Monte Hellman on BETTER WATCH OUT!

2008-07-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

Last night Monte Hellman joined us for a triple feature: THE SHOOTING, TWO LANE BLACKTOP and SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT!.

It was truly a great moment in movie history. More to come. If you live in Austin come see Monte at the cocktail party being given in his honor at Spider House from 3-5. Then stop in over at I Luv Video and get your synapses shredded.

Monte Hellman Tonight!

2008-07-23T14:19:00.001-07:00

The 9:30 screening of TWO LANE BLACKTOP is pretty close to selling out tonight but there are still a couple of seats. A few more seats for THE SHOOTING at 7pm too.

Obviously, you can't miss these and unless you want to stand in line forever and not get into the Weird Wednesday screening of BETTER WATCH OUT, you should at least see TWO LANE BLACKTOP.

That's Rogueish

2008-07-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

Rogue wave.

My friends Zack and Blake and I started a new blog called THAT'S ROGUEISH. It will examine the phenomenon of rampant rogueishness through many amusing examples. Read it, contribute, whatever.

From the faraway planet of the Philippines

2008-07-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

I would watch the shit out of this.

Though I've never been there, I love the Philippines. Amazingly, the kind of cheapo Cirio Santiago/Eddie Romero/Gerry DeLeon movies we all love so much are big budget compared to the films that aren't intended for export. There's a great blog called Video 48 that reproduces ad-mats and goes deeply into the indigenous film culture of the '60s, '70s and '80s with asides about comics, true crime and culture. Check it out. It's kind of the Fili Reel Distraction.

I Luv Video Pick shelf for 7/19

2008-07-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

Brigitte Lahaie in NIGHT OF THE HUNTED

I changed out my pick shelf the other day at both I Luv Video locations. I Luv Video is the phenomenal video store chain that sponsors Weird Wednesday. Stop in and see them and tell them I sent you.

At the Airport location:

GETTING STRAIGHT

Richard Rush (THE STUNT MAN, FREEBIE AND THE BEAN, PSYCH OUT) is one of my top favorite filmmakers of all time. This was his first big studio movies after making the AIP motorcycle, race car and drug movies that honed his craft to a fine edge. It's a campus story made more or less contemporaneously with the great wave of campus unrest of the late '60s. Elliot Gould plays the hard-working dirt poor grad student trying to hustle his way through while being called a sellout by all his fellow students and a revolutionary by all his profs and administrator. In truth he's the truly sane one in the mix, even as he progressively appears to go crazier - most notably at his tour-de-force oral exam. I don't know much about academia (I could never stand classrooms) but this rings true for me. With one of the best action sequences I've ever seen in a film - the campus riot looks just like documentary footage and a raft of good performers. The only downside for me is Candice Bergen, whose supposedly a great beauty but whose acting leaves me flat (though this is the best I've ever seen her.) When Rush was here I asked him about that and while he said nothing but good things about Bergen he actually wanted a then unknown actress named Lesley Ann Warren who was incontestably beautiful and could act but he had to compromise on it. It's still a fantastic movie. Photographed by the great Laszlo Kovacs, whose amazing rack focus technique, meticulously worked out with Rush, can be seen in this clip as can Harrison Ford as a young 'un.

O.C. AND STIGGS

Speaking of compromises, this movie is nuts. Robert Altman directed this weird teen comedy about two total bastard nihilist kids who disrupt a suburban community with their vendetta against one particular family that they see as a blight on humanity, the Schwabs. This movie doesn't quite work, unfortunately, but it's fascinatingly strange. In addition to living a kind of dayglo dada provocateur lifestyle O.C. and Stiggs (the O.C. stands for "out of control") are obsessed with King Sunny Ade, who appears in the film. Those are the good parts. The bad parts are the broad mugging of people like Martin Mull and Jane Curtin. Still highly recommended.

ROGER CORMAN, HOLLYWOOD'S WILD ANGEL

This is one of my favorite documentaries about a filmmaker. The interviews are all from the mid to late '70s when the shit was really going down. Corman glows like a holy man as he talks about his formulas and philosophies. His collaborators and alumni like Joe Dante and Alan Arkush (shown editing trailers for New World!!!), Jonathan Demme - who runs down Corman's famous "lunch" that he has with all directors, where he has them bring a notebook and he explains everything about film directing from camera placement to foreground action to dealing with actors. I've heard about this lunch quite a lot and someone should document it with all the filmmakers who heard it while they remember it. I talked to Jim Wynorski about it and he said most of the same things Demme says. If you care about Corman's work at all you have to see this.

NIGHT OF THE HUNTED

Jean Rollin updates his gothic surrealism to a Cronenbergian '80s. It's a sexploitation movie, so the demands of the genre occasionally derail the plot (maybe plot's not the word). The whole thing moves and flows like a nightmare - but with tits. And what tits! The beautiful porn and horror star Brigitte Lahaie has never been more striking. Her eyes are very far apart and she looks like an alien seductress. Trailer.

And over at the Guadalupe store:

TNT JACKSON

I don't make any bones about it, a lot of the appeal of movies for me is the beauty of certain actresses. I think I am in the mainstream of movie-going culture at large when I say this but a lot of intellectual types act like it's not a factor. The joy of watching beautiful women on screen has led me into some great movies. I have also chased the likes of Helga Line or Rosemary Dexter or Rosalba Neri down some pretty crooked and dusty roads simply because I love watching them on screen. Occasionally I've dragged a few of you along and if you regretted taking the trip I'm sorry. TNT JACKSON isn't very good at all, but Jeanne Bell is for fucking goddamn sure a beautiful woman. And if you take this short to the Philippines you probably won't regret it. Everything she does is adorable, from trying to act tough to delivering terrible lines in a sweetly country accent that she tries to hide. See if you can spot her male stunt double! Disorienting trailer with tons of dropped frames here.

100 RIFLES

This understandably has a big picture of Raquel Welch on the cover but the real star of this Spaghetti Western in all but name is Jim Brown as an American sherriff on the hunt for a fugitive in the familiar movie Mexico of generalissimos and banditos. Director Tom Gries (Jon Gries' father) has a great feel for big, bombastic action. It's all bubblegum but it's fine on those terms. Burt Reynolds shows up as a halfbreed bandit with a me-first attitude and Raquel Welch is good as an avenging daughter, covered in dust but with perfect makeup. Watch for Soledad Miranda in the small role as the prostitute Burt slaps around. Fernando Lamas is very entertaining as the Mexican bad guy general. Trailer.

TOUCH OF EVIL (Unrestored Version)

In '98 a lot of well-meaning folks tried to put Orson Welles' classic pulp masterpiece back together according to his presumed intentions, as inferred from his correspondence. The problem is, Welles often asked for more than he knew he could get. He'd been through the Hollywood wringer before and was a genius and knew how to play the game. Maybe he really wanted all the changes, maybe not. We'll never know. And we never will - which irks me about the restoration being considered definitive and the admittedly adulterated and modified release cut being eased into obscurity and unavailability. Neither cut is perfect but at least the release cut looks sharp and clear and not all digital and grey and soft and shit like the restoration. Hey if you guys want to fix something - fix the score of LADY FROM SHANGHAI. That shit sucks and I've got memos from Welles on how to fix it. Either way, if you haven't seen this get ready for the best the art of film can give you. Everybody's great - Marlene Dietrich in particular kicks it into the stratosphere and it's as unsavory and dirty as a border town should be. Orson Welles' reputation is forever untarnishable. Like Shakespeare his work belongs to everyone and young people will always rediscover it and claim it as their own. Trailer.

A TOUCH OF ZEN

This is a different kind of touch but the touch of genius is here too, courtesy of King Hu (COME DRINK WITH ME, DRAGON GATE INN)). I was knocked completely out by this mystical swordplay epic. It looks like it must have cost $400 million dollars but I know it must have been made for much less than an American epic of the time. The plot starts fairly routinely but skillfully with a fascinating and unusual perspective character and the intrigue builds until the whole egg cracks into a vast cosmic metaphysical conflict with swords. It's totally serious, with no comic relief but you'll bust out laughing at what complete hammerhead bad-ass enforcers the Buddhist monks are. I'm talking all around this movie without really telling you much but trust me every once in awhile. See this. Here's a clip that doesn't give much away.

Heywood Gould on ROLLING THUNDER

2008-07-17T16:47:00.000-07:00

Everybody loves beautiful gringo girls!

As promised, here is my correspondence with ROLLING THUNDER co-scripter Heywood Gould.

From me:

Hello,

If my email is an intrusion please forgive me. I am a film programmer at the Alamo Drafthouse theaters in Austin TX. I will be presenting Rolling Thunder next week and I was curious about the collaboration on the script with Paul Schrader.

Specifically, who wrote the first draft, did you collaborate actively or were you brought in to rewrite an existing script. Or none of the above? Did director John Flynn write any of the script?

The reason I thought to ask you was that Quentin Tarantino mentioned a few years ago when he visited us that his favorite parts of the script were your contributions. Which really got me wondering about specific scenes in the context of your and Mr Schraders' work.

This is all old news and possibly small potatoes to you but I will write up the film and hopefully in some small way the information you provide can help film historians in the future.

Thanks for your time,

Lars Nilsen

From Heywood Gould:

Lars,
Let me answer your questions and then give some background. Paul Schrader wrote the first draft and I was brought in to rewrite. I never spoke to him about it and haven't met him to this day. John Flynn didn't do any writing, but like a good director he and producer Larry Gordon shaped the script. In the great tradition (now lost) they let the writer do his job and then made adjustments.

I'll give you the whole story as I remember it. I was working as a bartender in Soho, living in a residential hotel and generally having a blast. Bill Devane had read a draft of a script I wrote called Fort Apache the Bronx, plus my novel One Dead Debutante. I don't know what was happening behind the scenes, but I know they were already in prep when they decided they needed a rewrite and he suggested me. So they flew me to LA and I met Larry Gordon, the producer and the director, John Flynn. I read the script that night and as I remember it was a relentless bloodbath, which I guessed they didn't want. At the meeting the next day I said they could keep the structure of the story, but needed more scenes to explain Raines, more emotion in his family life, more realistic bad guys, and they definitely needed a plausible, sympathetic woman (who doesn't?) I did a little writing out of sequence because they wanted scenes for the auditions. I wrote the scene in the bar where Raines meets Linda Haines first and then the scene in the garage where he relives the torture for Cliff. (The line "you learn to love the rope" became the motto for the shoot when the temperatures went over 110.) Then the homecoming scene with Raines and his wife and stuff with his son. I pretty much wrote the picture (or thought I had)in LA and then went home. The next week they called and flew me down to San Antonio to do a production rewrite based on the locations they had chosen. I stayed for about a month and ended up writing new scenes for Raines and Linda and rewriting the fight scenes and the big brothel shootout at the end. The only scene they wanted intact was the one with John's family where they talk about the Japanese cars, although I remember I wrote the last exchange between John and his dad.

I wanted to show some unspoken love and communication between the two men because I objected to what I considered to be the original's heavyhanded snobbery about working people. A picture changes a lot when the reality of cast, location and schedule sinks in. John wanted scenes punched up and new scenes written. I wrote the target practice scene between Raines and Linda after he looked at dailies and decided the relationship was playing well and he wanted more.

That's the best way to make a picture, keeping it alive and open to the very end.
I keep saying I remember because I was drinking mescal and eating cabrito every night and there's a lot I don't remember.

This was the first feature I ever worked on and it was a great experience.
The crew was old Hollywood. I remember the First AD, Pepe, had been Henry Hathaway's first and was smoothly, amiably efficient. He brought his little dog on the set and it never barked during takes.

John was completely prepared. He had an encyclopedia of shots in his head.
"This is a Kurosowa 150..." Or "A Huston low angle..." He may be one of the most underrated directors ever and you should definitely give him a retrospective. At least show "The Outfit," which is a terrific picture.

We became close friends and I was shaken by his sudden death.There was a fight in the bar of the Holiday Inn one night because one of the local stunt men said he had been Roy Rogers riding double and the Hollywood stunt guys took this as unpardonable blasphemy and demanded a retraction. Before I knew it I was in the middle of a brawl. The next day the stunt guys came over to me and said: "hey, you New York writers can really handle yourselves." To this day that's the best compliment I've ever gotten in this business.

I could go on and on.

Hope I answered your question.

Best,

Heywood

Great ROLLING THUNDER admat

2008-07-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

Over at Reel Distraction, Micah publishes tons of vintage newspaper scans as well as some pretty helpful movie journals. I read it every day. You should too. And of course you should join us for ROLLING THUNDER tonight. I anticipate a huge crowd so get there early.

What should you do today? I'll tell you.

2008-07-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

You should buy tickets for the huge MONTE HELLMAN Triple Feature at the Ritz next Wednesday.

For those of you in the readership who are planning on attending any or all of the three Monte Hellman films next week (with Monte Hellman in attendance!) please don't delay in buying your tickets. If we can get the ticket pre-sold total over 85 we can schedule it in the large theater, instead of worrying about theater placement on the day of the show and potentially leaving a lot of people out in the cold.

Normally it wouldn't be a concern but DARK KNIGHT is both a) very long and b) very popular so we have to determine which theater it will go in and stay there all day, which we decide by pre-sales.

So, pre-buy those tickets now. The individual screenings of THE SHOOTING and TWO LANE BLACKTOP are $10 seperately or you can buy an omnibus ticket for both films for $16 (buy that ticket on the bottom of the SHOOTING page) - which also allows you to keep your seat for the Weird Wednesday presentation of Monte's BETTER WATCH OUT.

If Altman or Peckinpah were alive and showing a triple feature would you go? That's the kind of company you're riding with when you're riding with Monte. Buy those tix today.