Heavy metal and horror movies have always been a match made in hell. From the moment Black Sabbath christened themselves after a Mario Bava film, to the graphic iconography of GWAR and Cannibal Corpse in the 90s, up through whatever the hell Glenn Danzig is directing these days, the two genres have historically operated with a similar penchant for the violent, the primal, and the macabre.

It was inevitable then, that the two would repeatedly cross paths throughout the 80s and 90s with the exploding popularity of both slasher fare and radio-friendly hair and glam metal. You could line up any 80s slasher next to a document of the era’s metal scenes like HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT or DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 2, and what you’re bound to find are overlapping imagery and themes dealing with teen angst, anti-conformity, music as an antidote to suburban ennui, and of course, the occult.

This Rockuary, Spectacle presents this series celebrating the unholy union of metal and the macabre, featuring four low budget headbanging horror gems that give whole new meaning to the term “grindhouse”.

DEATH METAL ZOMBIES
dir. Todd Jason Cook, 1995
United States. 82 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – MIDNIGHT

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“They like their music loud and their victims fresh!”

Sometimes a movie is generous enough to tell you everything you need to know about it with just its title. Skater-slash-SOV horror maestro, Todd Jason Cook (aka Todd Falcon), does just that with DEATH METAL ZOMBIES: A movie featuring lots of death metal, and also lots of zombies.

The film follows a young metalhead named Brad who comes into owning a one-of-a-kind tape by legendary metal band, Living Corpse (foreshadowing!). Unbeknownst to him, the tape contains a special track titled “Zombiefied” (more foreshadowing!) which turns its listeners, including Brad and his headbanger friends, into flesh-eating zombies. As the zombies begin to multiply and attack, it’s up to Brad’s girlfriend, Angel, to find the tape and stop them before it’s too late.

ROCKTOBER BLOOD
dir. Beverly Sebastian, 1984
United States. 100 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – MIDNIGHT

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“He’s back from the dead with a message from hell!”

Heavy metal frontman, Billy “Eye”, is put to death after going berserk during a recording session, killing two studio engineers and attempting to murder his girlfriend, Lynn. Years later, Lynn, now the frontwoman for Billy’s former band, is about to embark on her debut tour, but finds herself stalked and terrorized by a masked man claiming to be Billy, come back from the dead for revenge.

An SOV trash-terpiece made at the height of the 80s slasher and heavy metal booms, ROCKTOBER BLOOD strikes the perfect balance between the two, serving up ludicrous kills (including an all-timer of a finale) alongside some solid headbangers courtesy of hair metal band, Sorcery.

AFTER PARTY MASSACRE
dir. Kristoff Bates & Kyle Severn, 2011
United States. 74 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 7:30 PM

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After being attacked at a death metal show, Scarlett snaps and goes on a bloodthirsty killing spree indiscriminately targeting the Cleveland metal scene. Pretty soon everyone in her way— friends, fans, bands, and foes alike— finds out what happens when you push an already damaged mind too far.

Released in the 2010s but oozing with 80s regional SOV charm, AFTER PARTY MASSACRE is by far the most capital-M Metal of the films featured in this series. Set in and around the late, legendary Cleveland underground venue, Peabody’s, the film places the music front-and-center, featuring a sprawling soundtrack with over 25 death/grind/industrial/noise bands and live performances by Soulless and co-director/writer Kyle Severn’s own Incantation.

But make no mistake that the film more than delivers on the gore goods, featuring plenty of gnarly kills and inspired practical effects work that are sure to make even the most seasoned Blood Brunch-ers squirm.

LONE WOLF
dir. John Callas, 1988
United States. 97 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 7:30 PM

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The quiet town of Fairview, Colorado is rocked by a rash of gruesome killings that the locals blame on packs of wild dogs. Meanwhile, recent Chicago transplant and heavy metal frontman, Eddie and his fellow students learn that they must take matters into their own hands to end the madness, when the token nerd among them discovers an eerie moon-related coincidence between the killings.

Written by the late experimental horror maven, Michael Krueger (NIGHT VISION, MINDKILLER), LONE WOLF is an underseen and underrated gem among the 80s bumper crop of werewolf movies. A grisly DTV creature feature featuring some of the oldest looking “teenagers” ever put to film, and enough hair— human and lycanthrope— to flesh out at least a dozen other werewolf features.

Come for the kills but stay for the killer original soundtrack featuring all your favorite subtly-titled hair metal classics, including “Let It Rock”, “Rock You All Night”, and “Raised on Rock n’ Roll”.

This September, Spectacle Theater is honored to present this once-in-a-lifetime retrospective of the work of renowned independent filmmaker, Stephanie Rothman. Though often labeled as an exploitation filmmaker, Rothman’s work stands as some of the most politically and socially astute works documenting the period of transition between 1960s and 70s America.

Rothman got her start in the early 1960s working as an assistant to Roger Corman, tasked with performing a variety of odd jobs on his productions that ranged from casting and location scouting to re-writing and editing scenes. This experience would eventually land Rothman in the director’s chair on a couple of mid-60s Corman releases: Conducting reshoots on BLOOD BATH (for which she shares directorial credit with Jack Hill), and making her solo directorial debut with the beach party film, IT’S A BIKINI WORLD.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s, though, that Rothman would break out with her work on THE STUDENT NURSES (1970) and THE VELVET VAMPIRE (1972) for Corman’s newly-established production and distribution company, New World Pictures. With few opportunities available to woman directors at the time, Rothman was relegated to making exploitation films with a high volume of sexual content. Despite this, and with the creative freedom afforded to her at New World, Rothman was able to suffuse these works with her own ideological positions and ethics, incorporating plots— and by extension, her own commentary— that openly tackled issues of abortion, drug use, immigration, policing, and sexual empowerment; issues directly relevant to contemporary audiences but that largely absent from major studio productions.

Rothman and her husband, fellow Corman alum, Charles S. Swartz, would eventually leave New World to establish Dimension Pictures alongside Lawrence Woolner, where she continued her streak of progressively-minded productions with GROUP MARRIAGE (1973), TERMINAL ISLAND (1973), and THE WORKING GIRLS (1974). Each of these works expanded the scope of her films’ social politics further, now incorporating topics of queerness, sex work, polyamory, domestic abuse, incarceration, and capital punishment.

Rothman struggled to find work with major studios after leaving Dimension Pictures in 1975, discovering, rather ironically, that she had been stigmatized by her earlier exploitation-adjacent work, despite the obvious filmmaking talent behind them. Regrettably, Rothman wound up leaving the industry less than a decade later, though the legacy of her filmmaking career, its cultural relevance and its importance in the history of women’s filmmaking labor, endures to this day.

Join us on Sunday, 9/17 for a remote Q&A with Stephanie Rothman following a special screening of her final film, THE WORKING GIRLS.

THE STUDENT NURSES
dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1970
United States. 82 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – MIDNIGHT

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Chronicles the romantic and comedic adventures of four young women living together in California and studying to become nurses. Each forges their own wild path through their final year of nursing school: Sharon falls in love with a dying patient, Lynn becomes involved with a Chicano revolutionary, Phred falls into trouble with a young doctor, and Priscilla has an affair with a drug addict. All the while, graduation and the beginning of life in the Real World lie just around the corner.

Rothman’s second solo directorial effort was a landmark release for New World Pictures. The film was only the company’s second release, but would go on to become a box office hit, grossing upwards of a million dollars on a $120,000 budget, and establish New World’s extensive “nurses” cycle of releases (PRIVATE DUTY NURSES, NIGHT CALL NURSES).

For her part, Rothman turned what was originally envisioned by Corman and Larry Woolner as a tawdry sexploitation cash-in into a work of incisive social commentary. With Corman out of the country for most of its production, Rothman was given free reign over the tone, style, and content of the film, so long as it maintained the studio-mandated quotas of nudity and violence.

THE VELVET VAMPIRE
dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1971
United States. 80 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 10 PM

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Lee and his wife, Susan, accept the invitation of the mysterious vixen, Diane LeFanu, to join her at her secluded desert estate. Tensions begin to arise when the couple, unaware at first that Diane is really a centuries-old vampire, realize that they’ve both become the object of the temptress’ seductions.

Following the success of THE STUDENT NURSES, Rothman and Swartz reteamed with Larry Woolner on this unorthodox modern-day vampire tale. Rather than approach it as a straightforward horror story, Rothman used the film as an opportunity to subvert common vampire tropes by making the vampire figure a woman, equally deadly and desirous, and painting Susan’s character as a protagonist rather than a victim.

Visually, the film is Rothman’s most surreal, drawing inspiration from works of Cocteau and Franju as much as it did the adjacent European erotic vampire scene (DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, VAMPYROS LESBOS). Rothman’s vampire is less a horror icon than a totem of limitless pleasure, one who eschews a coffin for a lush king-size bed, large enough for three.

TERMINAL ISLAND
dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1973
United States. 88 min.
In English.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 7:30 PM

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In the wake of a Supreme Court decision that deemed the death penalty unconstitutional, California passes an initiative that designates San Bruno Island as a dumping ground for dangerous convicts, free to do whatever they want except leave. When a new group of women convicts is taken to the island prison they must fight to protect themselves against the iron-fisted rule of the tyrannical Bobby and take control of the island for themselves.

Ironically, the film that seems like it would be most outside of Rothman’s wheelhouse— a provocative action-thriller with touches of women-in-prison and blaxploitation fare— wound up arguably being her most explicitly feminist film: It’s plot centering around a group of women’s literal fight for agency within a sado-patriarchal dystopia.

THE WORKING GIRLS
dir. Stephanie Rothman, 1974
United States. 81 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 5 PM with filmmaker Q&A (This event is $10.)

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

Honey arrives in Los Angeles in search of a new life, and soon moves in with Denise and Jill. Honey is broke, but resourceful, eventually convincing an eccentric millionaire to hire her as his companion and confidant. Meanwhile, Denise falls in love with a shady musician while nightclub waitress, Jill, winds up in over her head when pressured by her boss to take on other responsibilities. All three women become endangered by the activities of the men in their lives, before realizing that they have to take matters into their own hands.

Rothman’s final film, and the only one for which she is the sole credited writer (or as she puts it, “means I take all the blame for it.”), may just be her masterpiece. By the end of her tenure in the film industry, the political subtext that had colored her earlier works had become the outright text, with sex work, equity in the workplace, and abuse becoming the focal points to each of her characters’ conflicts. What the film may lack in production values compared to her New World productions, it more than makes up for in the sophistication of Rothman’s compositions. While still undoubtedly a sex comedy, Rothman finds subtle ways of visually expressing the film’s themes. Case-in-point: With Jill being a nightclub waitress-cum-manager, of course the film includes gratuitous sequences of women stripping on stage (including a pre-“Elvira” Cassandra Peterson), but before Rothman makes a point of including POV inserts of the hideous men in the club’s audience, their presence lingering over what, in another director’s hands, would have been a lustful rather than dangerously leery affair.

Special thanks to Vinegar Syndrome and to Dr. Alicia Kozma of Indiana University, author of The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking, without whom this program would not be possible.

CATS 2
dir. Jake Jones, Curran Foster, Coltan Foster, Colleen Fitzgerald, & Danny Natter, 2023
United States. 65 min.
In English.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 – 7:30 PM with filmmaker Q&A (This event is $10)

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“We know that a cat is a cat… but is it ever anything other than that?”

In December 2019, 5 best friends went together to see CATS at the movies in Seattle, WA. They were astounded by the bewildering film they had encountered. Keep in mind, several of these friends had starred in a small town theater production of Cats (and this theater was run by a cult) when they were growing up.

When the quarantine of 2020 hit these friends vowed to put their creative minds together to create CATS 2. The film is an experimental romp through the world of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s CATS, or as we like to call it, “CATS 1”. Through the mystery of light and form, CATS 2 chronicles the metaphysical transformation of Macavity, as told by former community theater child stars. CATS 2 is simultaneously a meta-commentary on the truths of fear and desire and a vessel of pure love carefully crafted to be the singular representation of our collective soul. It also has puppets and stuff.

You will laugh til you cry at times, be delighted, and a little scared. The CATS 2 crew invite you to enjoy this little pandemic infused masterpiece.

Seeing CATS (1) is not required.

THE PLAINS
dir. David Easteal, 2022
Australia. 180 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 – 5 PM with filmmaker Q&A (This event is $10)

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

FRIDAY, AUGUST 4 – 6:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 31 – 7:30 PM

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

“In Easteal’s first feature, the Australian director adopts a durational model of filmmaking that arguably hit its peak around the turn of the 2010s, but he parlays the conceptual framework into a casually engrossing work free of slow cinema’s more trying aspects (e.g., long passages of silence; quasi-symbolic characters on seemingly endless quests toward enlightenment). Running 180 minutes and set almost entirely inside a car, The Plains depicts the daily commute of a middle-aged businessman from the parking lot of a Melbourne law office to his home in the city’s outer suburbs. Every day, at just after 5 p.m., Andrew (Andrew Rakowski) gets into his Hyundai, calls his wife, and checks in with his ailing mother, before listening to talk radio for the remainder of the hour-long drive. Occasionally, he offers a lift to a coworker, David (played by Easteal), who’s going through a breakup and is generally dissatisfied with his personal and professional life. Over the course of the film— told recursively, beginning at the same time and location each day—Andrew and David reveal themselves in casual, offhand conversations (apparently scripted but delivered so naturally as to evoke the feel of a documentary) that accumulate into an acute portrait of modern life—one in which otherwise unarticulated beliefs, regrets, and anxieties bring to light a shared humanity too often lost in the commotion of the world.”
—Jordan Cronk, Film Comment

Join us on Saturday, August 12th for a special screening and Q&A with director and star, David Easteal.

2551.01 – THE KID
dir. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, 2021
Austria. 65 min.
No spoken dialogue.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 14 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 22 – 10 PM

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One-hundred years lie between Chaplin’s first feature-length film and Pfaffenbichler’s very loose interpretation of it. The Kid, filmed in 1920, is a story from the realm of the “lumpenproletariat”, a tragi-comic moral tale of an abandoned child and police brutality. 2551.01 is all of that, too—and is, after all, at a distance of 100 years and all kinds of breaks in cinematic history and countless wars from Chaplin’s bittersweet patchwork comedy. The director calls his toxic genre blend a “dystopic slapstick film.” Pfaffenbichler has already shaped two of his short films from Chaplin material, and the “daemonic screen” is his passion. He devoted a film to the silent film quick-change artist Lon Chaney, and he called his 2013 Boris Karloff tribute A Masque of Madness. Now, in 2551.01, a lot more than one mask of madness can be seen. The false clown, sod, and nightmare visages, which the amateur ensemble wears, define this low-budget grotesque, which is set in the passageways of a sewer system, bunkers, and dark cellars, without windows, without daylight, without escape. Chaplin’s tramp turns into a man in a monkey mask, who takes in an abandoned child and hesitantly looks for a place for his charge in the violent and zombie world he inhabits.

A series of genuinely obscene images makes the pulse quicken: nauseating meals are served at a decadent candlelight dinner in the wreckage, disturbing rituals are carried out in a nursery school of horrors, and on the hero’s path through the underground hell, we witness Abu-Ghraib-like torture. Along with the complex textures of silent films, Pfaffenbichler also uses elements of splatter and exploitation films and sitcoms—and an extremely eclectic soundtrack of music. In this way, this episodic drama leads us to the peripheries of punk and shock comedy, to territories that are practically non-existent in Austrian cinema. For that reason, with all luck, the Orgy of the Damned, which is announced at the end as Episode 2 of this wicked tale, will soon become a reality. (Stefan Grissemann)

2551.02 – THE ORGY OF THE DAMNED
dir. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, 2023
Austria. 82 min.
No spoken dialogue.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23 – 10 PM

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The mad saga about the man in a monkey mask wandering through the torture garden of deviant delights continues. The second part of an intended trilogy, Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s 2551.02 – Orgy of the Damned picks up exactly where 2551.01 left the stunned viewer craving continuation, and as with all great sequels you needn’t have seen the previous film to be thrilled by this one. Especially if you like slapstick violence, sick sex and pitch-black humour. The opening image of a faceless sitting nude whose penis surprisingly retracts into a vagina announces that you’re entering a fantastic world where conventional constraints have no meaning: There are no taboos in the grotesque underground realm of Pfaffenbichler’s 2551 movies, which cross all borders, especially those of good taste.

Reviving the original punk spirit of true independent filmmaking, Pfaffenbichler and his ingenious collaborators have concocted another marvel of no-budget ingenuity, in which all characters wear crazy masks and society has regressed into subterranean caverns filled with resplendently obscene details. No words are needed to express the pain felt by the unnamed protagonist as he traverses this wacky wasteland, hunted by a police corps headed by a plague doctor and repeatedly crossing paths with a seductive mystery woman, while he is looking for an abandoned child (their relationship a loose perversion of Chaplin’s silent classic The Kid), which is literally trapped in a school of hard knocks. Awesome music and enthusiastically exaggerated performances propel the hapless (anti-)hero forward, as he drunkenly stumbles on, only to be knocked out repeatedly, especially by the lady of his dreams.

The lovingly staged set pieces include an “ultimate fighting contest” with wrestlers from hell (staged as a slap dance to electro beats), a brawl in a barroom that serves cut-off fingers as snacks, and a tour de force of the universal meat market to which no act of sexual transgression is alien. When a dreamy interlude (scored to Henry Purcell’s “Cold Song”) finally allows a vision of sexual healing you can bet that it ends with a money shot of the limp ejaculation of maggots. This Orgy of the Damned finally delivers on the age-old promise that you will witness things no man has ever seen before. Even your own vomit may stare back at you. Probably because it also can’t wait for 2551.03. (Christoph Huber)

Special thanks to Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer, Jonida Laçi, and sixpackfilm.