SALLY & JESS
dir. John Wintergate, 1989
United States. 94 mins.
In English.

SATURDAY, APRIL 12 – 5pm – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

TICKETS

Spectacle is thrilled to collaborate with our friends from Filmmuseum Boise on a rare screening of SALLY & JESS, John Wintergate’s little-seen (and Idaho-shot) followup to the infamous BOARDINGHOUSE.

A “family film” in content and production, SALLY & JESS is John Wintergate’s unreleased follow-up to BOARDINGHOUSE, his noted 1982 SOV feature. Filmed in 1989 in McCall, Idaho, the film follows the titular brother and sister (played by Wintergate’s children, Shanti and Kodey) as they navigate the fallout of their parents’ (Wintergate and his wife, Kalassu) deaths, fleeing from foster care while a child murderer operates in the area.

Less a horror film than an adventure film with some peril (a specialty of the Mouse House once upon a time) the film is at its best when it’s focused on the Wintergate family spending time together and with friends. It uses the big skies and nearby swaths of forest to make the movie feel larger than its budget. The close knit nature of the small town, pop. 2000, where it was made manifests on screen as actual community resources assemble to aid in the fictional search for the runaways.

SALLY & JESS is a snapshot of a time before the 90s boom turned “indie film” into a cottage industry where you follow every book and manual, trying your best to pass for legitimate studio product, hoping to be rise within reach of the brass ring and cash in on the promise of fame and acclaim, when making an independent movie could simply be a novelty, made for the hell of it, something you show to your friends, and then years later reminisce, “remember when they made that movie in town? What a time that was.”

“Idaho sees a lot of filmmaking among the locals, but not a lot of filmgoing. Until recently, the only repertory screenings run would be the yearly reruns of the usual franchise titles. Filmmuseum Boise (and its earlier iterations) was started to fill the void in film programming. If the only way to view a film I would see in NYC is to run it myself, then I guess that’s what I gotta do. I am very pleased to flip things around in this case and bring an Idaho film to the city.” – Alex Hansen, founder + curator of Filmmuseum Boise

2024 marked two decades since the Cannes debut of WHISKY, a drolly melancholic comedy from Uruguayan writer-director duo Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella. WHISKY combined a kind of shit-eating Beckettian existentialism with rigorously controlled filmmaking; while the movie took home an Un Certain Regard prize and was widely heralded as an important work of new Latin American cinema, Rebella sadly took his own life in 2006, at the untimely age of 32.

This spring, Spectacle is proud to host anniversary screenings of WHISKY as well as the earlier Stoll/Rebella comedy 25 WATTS (2001), and to spotlight two features Stoll made after his friend’s death. These films testify to a brilliant and idiosyncratic collaboration (and thus a great loss for cinema), as well as Stoll’s continued importance as an artist equally enamored of formal experimentation, film history, and the eternal comedy of being human.

Special thanks to Cinema Tropical, Lucía Malandro, Jesse Trussell, and Pablo Stoll.

25 WATTS
dir. Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2001
Uruguay. 93 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, APRIL 8 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 19 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 22 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 25 – 7:30 PM

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Un barrio. Tres pibes. Veinticuatro horas.

Stoll and Rebella’s breakout debut details the lives (or lack thereof) of a trio of teenage friends kicking rocks over a hungover and dissatisfied 24 hours in Montevideo.

Shot in arresting, high-contrast black and white film, 25 WATTS drew inevitable comparisons with CLERKS and LA HAINE. While it is often austere, Stoll and Rebella take conspicuous pleasure in brief digressions in style, like when the camera adopts the perspective of a spinning vinyl record or an 11th-hour flashback disrupts the sleepy narrative pace. Almost a quarter century later, 25 WATTS feels like a playful, even punkish antidote to the taxidermied mise-en-scene that came to dominate twee arthouse cinema in the 2000s.

While 25 WATTS was the most recognized film in Uruguayan history at the time of its festival run, the filmmakers were uncomfortable at the idea of representing a national cinema. Nevertheless, this is a precise portrait of a culture that doesn’t know quite what to do with its young men, resulting in a turn-of-the-millennium slacker comedy par excellence (and anticipating the even more bone-dry WHISKY).

“A very charming and funny derivation of the Jarmusch manner from Uruguay… The basic focus is on three hungover slackers one busy Saturday in Montevideo. I served on the jury for the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film that awarded its acting prize to the three likable leads (Daniel Hendler, Jorge Temponi, Alfonso Tort), and the film won many well-deserved festival prizes elsewhere (including a couple in Rotterdam.)”— Jonathan Rosenbaum

WHISKY
dir. Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2004
Uruguay. 94 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, APRIL 10 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 17 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 22 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 28 – 10 PM

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Stoll and Rebella did not return to the disaffected teenage milieu of 25 WATTS for their second feature, but instead pivoted into a tale of existential crisis past the point of midlife. 60-year-old Jacobo (Andrés Pazos) operates a sock factory in Montevideo. When his more successful older brother Herman (Jorge Belani) surprises him with a visit after years of estrangement, Jacobo can’t face the idea of him walking in on a life that is blatantly unsatisfying and a factory on the verge of shutting down. So Jacobo asks his employee Marta (Mirella Pascual) to pose as his wife for the weekend. A love triangle ensues.

Seen by many as the duo’s masterpiece, WHISKY is a beyond-deadpan family comedy of matters. It’s a barbed rumination on middle-class success that revels in negative emotional space. This even extends to the title, a reference to how Uruguayans say “Whisky!” the same way Americans say “Cheese!” when getting their pictures taken.

“Repeated near-Bressonian sequences track Jacobo as he opens the plant: shots of hands flipping switches and machines whirring to life establish a cinematic rhythm that propels the film through its first half… [WHISKY]’s neat bifurcation suggests a pair of filmmakers gradually becoming fascinated with larger questions of narrative structure.” — Jeff Reichert, Reverse Shot

“The story of two souls seemingly stuck in neutral (with a third in relentless drive), the film is a model of both fiscal and narrative economy, and the kind of work—gleaned from the mysteries of consciousness, telling quotidian details and a sense of aesthetic proportion—that is too often missing from American independent cinema.” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

HIROSHIMA
dir. Pablo Stoll, 2009
Uruguay. 80 mins.
Silent with English intertitles.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 7 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 12 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 18 – 10 PM

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Like 25 WATTS, Stoll’s first solo credit as director takes place over the course of one 24-hour period. But it would be too easy to call HIROSHIMA a synthesis of that film’s slacker vibes and WHISKY’s mimetic tragicomedy, anchored by the filmmaker casting his real-life family—chiefly his brother Juan Andres Stoll as the protagonist, also named Juan. This Juan struggles to communicate with the people around him; Stoll subtracts human (and animal!) voices from the film’s equation, making HIROSHIMA a “silent musical.” The only audio is the music piped in through Juan’s discman as he makes his way from morning (working a joyless bakery gig) to night, where performing with his punk band The Genuflexes may offer an outlet.

While HIROSIHIMA does not explicitly reference Rebella’s death, its funereal atmosphere and trance state will resonate with anyone dumbstruck by grief. But Stoll’s film is also a game (and often hilarious) homage to pre-verbal cinema, using intertitles for spoken dialogue. This approach reveals a cinephilic love of experimentation wholly consistent with the earlier films, despite the almost neorealist trappings of the long takes and forlorn vistas, all building toward a payoff gag that must be seen to be believed.

“Actually nothing happens in this movie. But I was never bored throughout the screening. Makes me wonder…” — JvH48, IMDb

“…A wacky version of a certain kind of hybrid movie from cinema’s transition era from silence to sound, films in which sound was used expressively (even perversely) by the likes of Rene Clair and Alfred Hitchcock… We all see, a hundred times a week, examples of mainstream editing seamlessly, invisibly reinforcing the illusion of dialogue between characters, each of whom occupies his or her own close-up. By contrast, Stoll reminds us how dialogue was typically cut during the silent age, indistinguishable from visual force… HIROSHIMA is nothing less than trippy classicism.” — Tom Keough, The Seattle Times

THREE
dir. Pablo Stoll, 2012
Uruguay. 115 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 9 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM

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Another acerbic portrait of human folly and repression, THREE was expanded from a treatment Stoll and Rebella worked on together, another comic grotesquerie of family dysfunction. Humberto de Vargas stars as Rudolfo, a floundering 40-something dentist who attempts to reconnect with his alienated ex-wife Graciela (Sara Bessio) and teenage daughter Ana (Anaclara Ferreyra Palfy), who forms the film’s emotional center of gravity. Rudolfo is dissatisfied with his new marriage, Graciela is focused on her dying mother, and the void of attention from her parents leaves Ana to seek it in the wrong places.

THREE feels very much like a melancholic (and realistic) take on the quirky family dramedies that dominated the 2010s and 2020s, mostly drawn in brief, episodic scenes that gesture toward a bigger scope than is warranted by the material. The combined tension and lightness of touch that made WHISKY feel like watching bugs squirm under a microscope is here, but Stoll’s acute melancholy is impossible to miss, and the filmmaker again uses music (this time, punk and indie tracks from Uruguayan bands) to chart queasy emotional landscapes.

“This film screams ‘Uruguayan’ in so many ways, at least the stereotypes conveyed in previous films by the duo Rebella/Stoll and subsequent movies that followed their style in the Uruguayan Wave that began in the 2000’s. Being released in 2012, technologically speaking it looks like it was shot some ten years earlier: plenty of tube tv’s, white CRT monitors, VHS players, etc… A great soundtrack by local bands, usually very underappreciated in the spanish-speaking world, let alone outside of it. Loved the stylish 1990’s football jerseys from Defensor and other smaller sides from their local league and abroad.” — jaibeseret, Letterboxd

RESIDENCY
dir. Winnie Cheung, 2023
75 min. United States.
In English.

screening with

MY BODY IS A CAR
dir. Lucy Rosa Blanca Gaehring, 2023
3 min. United States.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27 – 5 PM followed by Q+A with filmmakers Winnie Cheung and Lucy Rosa Blanca Gaehring

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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Spectacle is thrilled to host a one-night-only pre-Halloween screening of New York City filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Winnie Cheung’s RESIDENCY, paired with Lucy Rosa Blanca Gaehring’s short film MY BODY IS A CAR (2023).

RESIDENCY was filmed during an interdisciplinary artist residency hosted by The Locker Room, a Brooklyn based underground art space. Director/writer/cinematographer/editor Winnie Cheung taps into the ethos of DIY cinema, leveraging the gallery as the set and her cohort of artists as performers.

RESIDENCY boldly redefines the legacy of Kenneth Anger, the Cinema of Transgression and No Wave Cinema. The film is a love letter that taps into the frenzied emotional psychogeography of New York City where the narrative structure is deliberately fragmented, creating an immersive experience that mirrors the unattainable nature of memory. In Cheung’s own words: “What if Warhol made a horror film about life at The Factory?”

“RESIDENCY and MY BODY IS A CAR both distill New York City’s relentless, claustrophobic energy into personal vessels for inner peace and renewal.” – Winnie Cheung

“(RESIDENCY) resurrects the collective spirit that once defined New York City’s artistic ecosystem, yet the zombified venture spirals into derangement as the film shifts into the mode of funhouse horror.” – Artforum

“RESIDENCY is part of the North American new wave of indie micro-budget genre features.” – Variety

“A concise and concentrated evil diamond of a feature debut.” – Filmmaker Rebecca Falvey

WINNIE CHEUNG is a Hong Kong born, New York based filmmaker at the cross section of non-fiction, horror and arthouse cinema. She mixes fictionalized tales with half-truths for unsettling cinematic experiences. In 2019, Winnie’s morbid animated short Albatross Soup premiered at Sundance Hong Kong, won Vimeo Animation of the Year and Short of the Week’s “Short of the Year”. The following year, she co-produced and edited Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, Kier-La Janisse’s epic feature length documentary on the history of folk horror which went on to win SXSW’s Midnighters Audience Award and Best Documentary at Fantasia International Film Festival. Residencyy is Winnie’s first feature film which she co-wrote, directed, shot and co-edited.

LUCY ROSA BLANCA GAEHRING is a trans-femme latin(e) interdisciplinary artist from Miami, based in New York, working primarily in performance with a practice that includes dance, poetry, and sound/video. As a trans Uruguayan-Mexican living in the United States, she questions the binaries of the colonial and patriarchal Western framework that we live under. She often channels feminist stories of melodramatic heartbreak into site-specific performance. It is important to her to continue blurring the line between art-making and community building. She is currently studying at the School of Visual Arts’ BFA ‘Visual & Critical Studies’ program.

HÉCATE
dir. Daniel Schmid, 1982.
France/Switzerland, 105m.
In French with English subtitles

screening with

THE WOMAN WITH A HUNDRED FACES
(LA FEMME AUX CENT VISAGES)
dir. Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1966.
France, 10m.
In French with English subtitles.

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Despite sharing intimate personal and professional relationships with both Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter, the work of Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid remains significantly underappreciated compared to that of his New German Cinema friends. Indeed, as actress-screenwriter Bulle Ogier wrote in her book J’ai oublié, “Some of [my friend Daniel Schmid’s] films are disappearing, and not only because my memory keeps fading.”

Yet during his life, Schmid’s films were celebrated at international festivals and were allegedly the subject of the first full Japanese retrospective of a non-Japanese filmmaker, curated by the critic Shigehiko Hasumi. Those who champion Schmid’s work are taken by the way his films oscillate between classical, operatic Italian references from the south and German expressionist and avant-garde influences from the north, frequently exploring how details, surfaces, and surroundings disclose the uneasy spirit below—how the heart is known through the mask.

HÉCATE explores these ideas through an allusion to the ancient Greek three-headed goddess of boundaries, travellers, the underworld, and witchcraft. The film begins with Julien, a consular attaché who is escaping the tensions of the European interwar period by absconding to the “international city” of Tangier, where he begins an affair with Clothilde, a mysterious woman played by Lauren Hutton. They consummate a physical relationship, but intimacy remains elusive and a burgeoning limerence demands increasingly extreme gestures to sustain itself. The creeping shadows erasing Julien’s sense of self are brilliantly captured by Renato Berta’s camera. The colonial horrors concealed by fantasies of the bon vivant class are ultimately disclosed.

While many readers interpret the source novella, Hecate and her Dogs by Paul Morand, as an autobiographical examination of the author’s guilt about his own wartime collaborationist sympathies, Schmid carries no such history and instead uses the myth to hint at a condition perhaps more ontological: the perversity haunting the human desire to possess.

Preceding the feature is one of Jean-Daniel Pollet’s most enigmatic works, THE WOMAN WITH A HUNDRED FACES, which was built around Antoine Duhamel’s music for Godard’s Pierrot le fou. Its script, written by Jean Thibaudeau, evokes the constitutive distance at the heart of desire.

New Circle of Cinema is a microcinema project that has hosted pop-up screenings across Toronto since 2021. Inspired by Henri Langlois’ Circle of Cinema film club, which held in his mother’s cramped living room clandestine screenings of salvaged films discarded by the studios, New Circle of Cinema is similarly committed to screening undistributed and out-of-print films in intimate, unconventional spaces. As Langlois said, “A film that isn’t screened is dead.”

As the second installation of our occasional series DECADES OF DEBRIS (formerly known as BENJI’S WORLD), Spectacle is thrilled to collaborate with our longtime partners at Screen Slate to host a one-day marathon of fist-and-face-blending action works helmed by the still-mysterious mononymous Indonesian director known as ARIZAL.

The original “HOT BLOODED: THE ARIZAL MARATHON” took place in August 2012, in conjunction with Spectacle’s first-and-last-ever SUMMER OF SHRAPNEL – an entire month of action cinema from around the world programmed in a doomed bid at offsetting the dog days of late summer. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the filmmaker’s untimely passing in May 2014, HOT BLOODED is back, with a few new VHS transfers.

With over 50 features and eight television series (“sinetron”) to his credit between 1974 and 2006, Arizal is is rightly described by his English Wikipedia page as “one of Indonesian most productive film director and script writer;” and yet these six films dated between 1981 and 1989 are the only ones classified as “Action” films on the IMDb (which lists one under two different titles for an incorrect total of seven movies). If Arizal is an obscure figure outside North America, it’s not difficult to imagine why—each of these features individually puts the entire western action film canon to shame. Suppression is an obvious motive.

Arizal is, if nothing else, the Monet of cars spewing fire from their trunks barrelling nose-first, upside-down into other exploding vehicles while Anglo heroes arc through the flames like star-spangled ropes of jism spewing bullets from a musclebike. The kind of artist who suicide-launches a flaming oil tanker into the helicopter of logic and reason, Arizal is on a sobering quest to unabashedly deliver every dashed promise all other action filmmakers have made. He is a steel-toothed, Rube Goldbergian idea factory of prurient bloodlust, pyromania and righteous acrobatic vengeance. If 10-year-old boys’ lewdest fantasies didn’t already exist, Arizal would have invented them.

EACH OF THESE FILMS stars a uniquely charismatic Anglo leading male, none of whom anyone would have ever heard of if AMERICAN HUNTER’s Christopher Mitchum had not run unsuccessfully for California’s 24 congressional district house seat back in 2012. And yet with the exception of THE STABILIZER, and just months ago SPECIAL SILENCERS, none of these films are available for retail in North America, and scantly available via private file sharing networks; when we last hosted this retrospective they could only be seen through carefully circulated choice bootleg distribution of decades-old Dutch, Greek and Japanese VHS releases.

Thanks to Screen Slate, Spectacle has obtained the highest quality sources available, and we take great pride in having procured all works with their original English dubbing.

TO BURN THE SUN
(MEMBAKAR MATAHARI)
dir. Arizal, 1981
90 mins. Indonesia.
In dubbed English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 1 PM
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The first of over a dozen collaborations between Dutch-Indonesian martial arts star Barry Prima (THE WARRIOR) and the lovely Eva Arnaz (THE WARRIOR), TO BURN THE SUN is the most hand-to-hand-combat intensive film in the Arizal canon. Arnaz is the film’s true protagonist—a young woman whose village was raided by bandits that stole her innocence and slaughtered her family. She was forced into a life of prostitution in capital city Jarkata, which is where Prima spies her escorting a customer in a night club. The two had been lovers once, and with this chance meeting they make arrangements to elope and return home. Naturally, this unsettles her pimp, whose thugs land Prima in the hospital (but not without an epic fight). Arnaz flees to her village, where her grandfather schools her in the deadly art of karate. With a newfound confidence and deadly resolve, she sets her sights on vengeance.

TO BURN THE SUN is without a doubt the most obscure item in Arizal’s catalog, and one that plays most directly to classic exploitation tropes. Arnaz’s performance suggests Meiko Kaji (LADY SNOWBLOOD, the FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION series), and she and Prima share a unique chemistry developed even further in SPECIAL SILENCERS and budded offscreen into a full-fledged marriage. The soundtrack is aided by some decidedly rockin’ Asian-tinged electrofunk rock.

DOUBLE CROSSER
(MEMBAKAR LINGKARAN API)
(aka CROCODILE CAGE)
dir. Arizal, 1989
84 mins. Indonesia.
In dubbed English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 2:45 PM
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“The richer you get, the crazier your ideas become…”

Arizal, star Peter O’Brian and scriptwriter Deddy Armand reteam several years after THE STABILIZER for their final and most intricately-plotted film. O’Brian stars as Jack, an ex-P.I. widower and amateur boxer who has hit upon hard times after being discharged from his latest job. He keeps close companionship with his brother-in-law, Leo, who helps Jack look after his blind daughter. But when a nefarious French villain—whose dubbing would pass for a fine Maurice Chevalier parody—insists they fight each other in an illegal boxing match, he’ll stop at nothing to make it happen. First he tries kidnapping Jack’s daughter, but when that doesn’t work, he hits upon a new scheme to wedge them apart… Might the stunning young woman whom Jack rescues from an apparently impromptu attempted gang rape (after an epic car chase) have something to do with it?

In any case, it’s eventually up to Jack to steal a small airplane and fly it into the side of a mountain after making a last-second dive onto a speeding pickup truck, which he then hijacks, to save his daughter from a second kidnapping before she’s released from a diabolical device which will drop her into a cage of bloodthirsty crocodiles. Other highlights include a saccharinely sweet date montage suddenly interrupted by a random attack on the ferris wheel and countless close-ups of O’Brian’s chiseled visage, delicately framed by his fluffy mullet, as it makes subtle twitches to indicate the rage bubbling beneath his cool surface.

THE STABILIZER
dir. Arizal, 1984
94 mins. Indonesia.
In dubbed English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 4:30 PM
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“Listen, Debbie, we’re dealing with Big Leaguers here: the world’s best criminals, who are completely capable of upsetting the balance between Good and Evil. As impossible as it seems, what we need is a man with the guts and the ability to restore the balance…”

Justly considered Arizal’s masterpiece, THE STABILIZER is, by the filmmaker’s standards, a sprawling, prismatic exhibition of picaresque high-octane adventure and squad-driven justice. In his signature role, feather-mulleted Peter O’Brian—variously described as an FBI agent and American cop—leads a colorful task force of special agents in the crusade against diabolical drug smuggler Greg Rainmaker. He’s after a rumored device known as the “Narcotics Detector” for the purpose of planting drugs on his competition. Just how the device will further this purpose, or the lapse of logic in the plan owing to his targets likely, as drug smugglers, already having drugs on their person, is not clarified; nor does this justify it being incommensurately pitched as a decisive battle between the forces of Good and Evil.

In any case, O’Brian’s Peter Goldson has a decidedly personal stake in the mission, as Rainmaker had previously ravaged Goldson’s fiancée and stomped her to death with his spike-soled derby shoes. Ditto the beautiful and deadly Christina Provost, whose father invented the Narcotics Detector and is being held captive by Rainmaker. Their team is mirrored by an equally distinct lineup of opposing henchmen including a man who eats live baby alligators—animals were definitely harmed during the making of this film—and an Asian Mr. T. The lengthy drug barn raid sequence, which begins with Goldson bursting through the wall Kool-Aid Man style on the back of a motorcycle, doing donuts in a pile of cocaine, and throttling off a balcony plunging his front tire directly into a random bad guy’s head, is a cinematic tour de force—and it only anticipates the later, greater drug warehouse raid sequence. Featuring the would-be hit punch-dance ballad “The Stabilizer.”

SPECIAL SILENCERS
(SERBUAN HALILINTAR)
dir. Arizal, 1982
86 mins. In dubbed English.
Indonesia.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 6:45 PM
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When a greedy, power-hungry magician decides to assassinate the beloved village mayor to seize his political seat and glean his riches, he’s not content to simply dispatch a knife-wielding killer; rather, he slips the mayor one of his “Special Silencers,” a small tablet which causes an orgiastic gaggle of tree branches to burst forth from its victim’s stomach with a torrent of blood and entrails streaming from their surcles. The same treatment goes to the mayor’s brother, an out-of-town police officer en route to ensure his family’s safety, but his daughter Eva Arnaz escapes—and just happens to cross paths with Dutch-Indonesian exploitation stalwart and champion martial artist Barry Prima. He may be a simple, kind-hearted drifter—or perhaps a police spy. The pair fight off legions of assassins and silencers are dispersed like razor-bladed candy while the heroes work to uncover the identity of their puckish antagonist.

Remember the never-ending torrent of blood in the possessed hand scene of EVIL DEAD 2? In SPECIAL SILENCERS, a simple papercut is occasion enough for Arizal to turn on the waterworks, and it’s not merely the insane, Cronenbergian special effects—which seemingly anticipate The Thing and happen to have appeared within weeks of Alien—that occasion geysers of gore, but even more so the rough-and-tumble physical fights and alarmingly dangerous-looking stunts. Which is to say, this isn’t so much an “action-horror” hybrid as a brute-force action extravaganza in which gnarled tree branches periodically explode out of people’s stomachs in spectacularly violent ways.

FINAL SCORE
(aka STRIKE COMMANDO)
(aka ELEGY OF A MASSACRE)
(aka AN ARMY OF ONE)
Dir. Arizal, 1986
88 mins. Indonesia.
In dubbed English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 8:30 PM
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“We can do this the easy way, or I can carve what I want out of you piece-by-piece…”

Christopher Mitchum is Richard Brown, a decorated Vietnam Vet who’s settled into an idyllic family life in Southeast Asia while forging his trade in the computer business. Unfortunately, ultra baddie Donovan Hawk—played by meaty Godfrey Ho regular Mike Abbott—has his own ideas about turning Indonesia into “Silicon Valley 2” and making a lucrative grab in the tech market while using it as a front for his illegal operations. When Brown rebuffs his buyout offer, Hawk dispatches his thugs to slaughter Brown’s wife and child on the boy’s 8th birthday. Now fraught with ‘Nam flashbacks, Brown straps up to settle the FINAL SCORE. He makes an unlikely ally in the form of a beautiful ninja who has insinuated herself as Hawk’s secretary in order to wreak her own revenge over a sister who was forced into prostitution, hooked on drugs and left to die on Hawk’s watch.

This setup is what qualifies as a “pot-boiling slow-burn” in the world of Arizal, and for the majority it’s one of his grimmest films—a stealthy guerilla DEATH WISH in the jungle. But once it kicks into high gear, it’s a never-ending string of some of Arizal’s most insane set pieces, including an epic, logic-and-continuity-defying car chase and a 20-minute climactic moto-massacre with Mitchum throttling a missile-launching dirt bike while blowing up multiple entire houses, not to mention jeeps and people. The final gun-mounted motorcycle vs. gun-mounted helicopter shootout is rad as shit.

AMERICAN HUNTER
(aka LETHAL HUNTER)
dir. Arizal, 1988
92 mins. In dubbed English. Indonesia.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 10 PM
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“With the information in this study, the wrong people could start a panic on Wall Street that would bring the Western World to its knees…”

Christopher Mitchum returns for what might be the purest expression of Arizal’s shoot-’em-up aesthetic as Jake Carver, an “agent” whose self-described occupation is to “fight bad guys.” In AMERICAN HUNTER, Carver battles a multifariously evil organization over a piece of microfilm to unspecified ends. Highlights include a jeep driving off the side of one skyscraper into the window of another, a three-way motorcycle/pick-up truck/train chase, a baby being run over by a car crashing through the side of a supermarket yet miraculously surviving, an eight minute helicopter chase, an awkwardly clothed shower sex scene, one house explosion, one castle explosion, dozens of car explosions, male bondage and electrocution, and a fist fight inside a dungeon full of what appears to be cardboard boxes overflowing with shredded paper. Bill “Super Foot” Wallace stars as the bad guy whose nefariousness is conveyed through his variously keeping pet falcons and monkeys on his shoulder, and Peter O’Brian drops in for an unlikely hench villain turn as a businessman who gets the shit kicked out of him then has his legs run over then crashes through a brick wall on the hood of a car. Approximately ten of the 92 action-packed minutes have been described.