FINGERILLA
dir. Micah Vassau, 2017
90 mins. United States.

THURSDAY, JULY 25 – 7:30 PM (with cast & crew in person for Q&A)
ONE NIGHT ONLY! (This event is $10)

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In a far away, fucked up land, there lives a broke country-fried blonde who isn’t so bright… Consuming raw chicken and collecting beer cans out of the river to make ends meet, she spends her ditzy days caring for her decrepit grandmother in their dilapidated abode. But after a sinister demon of static steals an egg that she believes to be her baby, she is flung unto a seriously perverse quest to be reunited with said egg.

Rummaging through her shabby woodland town by jet ski, inhaling all the drugs that cross her path, she encounters a myriad of total nutjobs. Some try to turn her on to God, some let her suck on their toes, while others pour 40s over her head, or seek to demolish her innocent soul.

No childhood imagination is safe from this disturbingly depraved fable of nooky, dope, and degeneracy. Savvily shot on VHS, edited by cerebrums of relentless corruption, and scored with pretty much any genre of music you can think of, FINGERILLA is a fairy tale trauma you’ll certainly want to spare your children of.

CONTENT WARNING: Seriously… leave your kids at home.

There’s only one way to prepare for the return of the maestro of low-fi culture clash and camp, and that is to throw ourselves at the altar of alterity and join what were once called degenerates. Jon Moritsugu will soon be releasing NUMBSKULL REVOLUTION with long-time collaborator Amy Davis, which promises to be a satire of art world antics in the desert. We can expect it to include themes of otherness in American dystopia, a messy avalanche of sound, and mutated forms of self-expression, all of which can be previewed in this summer series. Moritsugu’s early films take apart the postmodern moment with mutilated joy, expressing the senseless with style and dragging whatever constitutes punk culture straight to the trash bin.

All month we will also be selling special Jon Moritsugu merch. What kind of merch, you ask? We can’t explain online.

MY DEGENERATION
dir. Jon Moritsugu, 1990
70 mins. United States.

TUESDAY, JULY 2 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 7 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 16 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 19 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 24 – 10 PM

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Continuing the rich legacy of late-night Girl Group mondo pictures, MY DEGENERATION updates the hippie sleaze of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and the punk delirium of LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, THE FABULOUS STAINS with a dispatch from the late ‘80s art school wastoid pukescape. Just as ‘indie rock’ was about to cash its check with the meteoric ascent of Nirvana and company, the film follows teen band Bunny Love’s rise to the ambassadorship of the American Beef Institute. Replete with fuzzed-out regurgitations of the midnight movie semiosphere, it’s the cinematic equivalent of the sub-genre Robert Christgau once referred to as “pig-fuck.” Moritsugu’s future wife Amy Davis co-stars, plus a parade of top-notch tracks from Vomit Launch, The Fizzbombs, Halo of Flies, and Bongwater. So puerile, it caused American’s favorite film critic (and BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS scribe) Roger Ebert to walk out after 7 minutes. Two middle fingers all the way up!

*Preceded by the shorts MOMMY MOMMY WHERE’S MY BRAIN (1986) and L’IL DEBBIE SNACKWHORE OF NEW YORK CITY (1987).

MOD FUCK EXPLOSION
dir. Jon Moritsugu, 1994
67 mins. United States.

FRIDAY, JULY 5 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 11 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 26 – 7:30 PM **Q AND A WITH DESI DE VALLE (M16)!**

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The Nipponese bikers have leather jackets and London, a broken-family blonde, wants a leather jacket more than anything. Her sister Nasty has one, but she’s a post-Quaalude comic artist and won’t give it up. London’s brother is a dumb wannabe mod, clinging to a style that is just nativism with thick-framed glasses. Top Mod Madball sums up their situation with a joke:

“Why did Hitler kill himself?”

“To get to the other side!”

All London has to do is party with the bikers and tell Kazumi that he has a great bod, but instead she’s in love with death-obsessed M-16. Cleopatra, the supernatural succubus and queen of feces, tries to give London some T-R-U-T-H but she won’t hear it! Everything is leading in a fucked-up, not-knowing-how-to-fuck direction not to mention the ultimate showdown between the pale mods and a powerful biker gang.

Preceded by the shorts SLEAZY RIDER (1988) and CRACK (1999).

TERMINAL USA
dir. Jon Moritsugu, 1993
57 mins. United States.

THURSDAY, JULY 4 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 8 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 20 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 26 – 10 PM  **PHONE CALL WITH JON MORITSUGU AND AMY DAVIS!**
WEDNESDAY, JULY 31 – 7:30 PM (ORIGINAL ROUGH CUT!)
**Q AND A WITH CINEMATOGRAPHER TODD VEROW!**

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Family comes first in this disaster portrait of a comically depraved Japanese-American household on the verge of Armageddon. Wholesome suburban sitcom sensibilities are rigorously contorted through a deliciously deranged cocktail of vices and filthy secrets all wedged under one roof. Any hopes of quality time deteriorate into a feverish shitstorm, before dinner ever has a chance to be served.

While pill-popping mom and homicidal-minded dad are busy reprimanding their nihilist junkie son, Kazumi (Moritsugu), his pregnant, nymphomaniacal cheerleader sister desperately tries to keep a blackmailing sex tape under wraps, and the protractor-wielding prodigy twin brother, Marvin (also Moritsugu), harbors a secret lust for skinheads. As Kazumi casually bleeds out from a gash dealt by debt-collecting drug dealers, his fashion-damaged girlfriend, Eight-Ball (Amy Davis), is of no help, as she may have an extraterrestrial agenda of her own.

Laying to utter waste the dignified image of the “model minority” in doubtlessly the most gnarly soap-opera to ever be funded by PBS and aired on televisions across America, TERMINAL USA gives wings to the term “dysfunctional” and lets it soar.

*Preceded by the shorts BRAINDEAD (1987) and DER ELVIS (1988).

**Brand new VHS re-release by Random Man Editions for sale!

HIPPY PORN
dir. Jon Moritsugu, 1991
97 mins. United States.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 3 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 12 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 14 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 18 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JULY 22 – 10 PM

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“Let’s face it, all we’ll be doing for the next 75 minutes is smoking, drinking wine, and complaining about not having anything to do.”

Frenetic disaffection holds reign in HIPPY PORN, Moritsugu’s demented portrait of 90s scum-punk, anti-existentialist youth life. Populated by Warhol Factory rejects who find themselves caught in the wrong time, Moritsugu’s film goes beyond holding nothing sacred, and takes all cultural markers, be they religious, political, or fashionable as equal opportunity material for degenerated profanation.

Starring Moritsugu regular Victor of Aquitaine as L, accompanied by fellow faux-punks M and Mick, HIPPY PORN sees these young college wastoids milling about in deserted lots, cheap-o sets meant to double as underground clubs that remind one of Jack Smith, and their bedrooms. The long stretches of indifferent conversation are broken up and energized by aggressive flashing interludes of disorienting montage that belie the filmmaker’s punk roots.

Soundtracked by an impressive Matador lineup including Superchunk, The Frogs, and Unsane, it’s no surprise that HIPPY PORN ran at the Action Christine Cinema in Paris for over year, where it was certainly appreciated for its indelible brand of American antipathy crossed with a familiar sense of chain-smoking philosophizing.

Preceded by the shorts L’IL DEBBIE SNACKWHORE OF NEW YORK CITY (1987), BRAINDEAD (1987) and CRACK (1999).

MONDO MANHATTAN
Dir. the Chain Gang
1987-2007, USA

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 7:30 PM
CAST IN ATTENDANCE + Q&A! (This event is $10.)

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Known for being 20+ years in the making and screening but twice before in Manhattan, this rare screening of Chain Gang’s MONDO MANHATTAN is a dispatch from an all-but-gone New York, with cast in attendance. Its Brooklyn debut…

“The Publisher, awestruck, can barely get the words out: They said it couldn’t be done. They said it shouldn’t be done. And yet here we were, in the side room of an Avenue A bar to bear two hours witness to the fact that, indeed, it had finally been done: MONDO MANHATTAN… the movie, twenty years since most of the world first learned of the film-in-progress in the pages of Forced Exposure #13. This classic interview of Chain Gang singer Ricky Luanda, conducted by Jimmy Johnson & Byron Coley, made some sense of 1987’s amazing & mysterious MONDO MANHATTAN “soundtrack” lp on Lost Records, although it must be said, many questions remained. The Music Director– holed up in the iron-rich hills of northwest Jersey at the time– remembers clearly the cold, snowy day he walked from the Port Authority Bus Terminal down 8th Avenue to Midnight Records on 23rd Street to purchase the album. Those who didn’t know the city then can’t begin to imagine the fun that even such a simple trip as that entailed. Others will tell ya’ll about 14th St, Cooper Square, the Bowery, etc: today, with each strip more denatured than the next (or vice-versa), who gives a shit, really? It happened once & memories (“I remember the worry– would I have enough money left over for Show World tokens?” the Music Director recalls) & some artifacts remain. One of which, we can now declare, is MONDO MANHATTAN, the bastard spawn of Andre de Toth & Herschell Gordon Lewis adopted by Sam Peckinpah. Indeed, as much as we love BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA & TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, THE WILD BUNCH & COCKFIGHTER, if Warren Oates had to die so that Ricky Luanda’s Mr. Mondo could be born… it was probably worth it.

I can only ask, is this the best punk rock “documentary” since Raymond Pettibon’s SIR DRONE? Without question but it’s a lot more than that too. Stay tuned.” – Brian Berger, Who Walk In Brooklyn, 2007

SPLATTER UNIVERSITY (LIVE SCORE by Chris Burke)
dir. Richard W. Haines, 1984
78 min, USA

FRIDAY, MAY 24 – 7:30 PM and 10 PM
(This event is $10.)

Original score remixed and performed live by composer Chris Burke, aka glomag.

ONLINE TICKETS

• •

“You know it seems to me if you are going to kill someone you [should] at least know them real well.” — The morbid but sensible landlord Mrs. Bloom

Before making his mark with CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH, Richard Haines began work on his very first film in 1981, at age 24. The end result, after running out of time and money, is a straightforward, traditional horror movie that’s only an hour. Putting it aside for a year and then padding it out with some “Porky’s-type humor” (at the distributor’s request and to his dismay), Haines gets the original runtime up to a feature-length, distribution-friendly 78 minutes.

The end result is what feels like two films in one, a traditional horror and college party flick; the sudden switches back & forth in tone are both in conflict and complement each other sublimely. New instructor Julie Parker (an earnest and believable Forbes Riley) unravels a murder mystery while her students waste their youth away in a seemingly unrelated subplot–until they themselves are wasted.

Nearly 40 years later, Richard Haines’s directorial debut has finally been released on Blu-ray, courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome. And the literal rough edges of their newly-restored print is one of two reasons why Spectacle is proud to present what can be considered the ultimate version of SPLATTER UNIVERSITY; the look & feel of dirty & grainy of decades old 16 mm footage that’s been modernized to conform to HD only accentuates the off-kilter feeling.

The second reason is the remastered and revamped 80’s synth score by the film’s original composer, Chris Burke (THE TOXIC AVENGER, BLUE VENGEANCE, THE REFRIGERATOR). Someone over at somethingawful.com described it best as “Optimus Prime passing a kidney stone with his motor oil.” Hear it performed live at our very special screening, one that will also include a panel with Chris and other special guests.

• •

One can find more synth horror goodness from Chris Burke at glomag.bandcamp.com.

NATIONALITE: IMMIGRE
(NATIONALITY: IMMIGRANT)
Dir. Sidney Sokhona, 1975
France. 70 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 8 – 7:30 PM + 10PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY
ALL PROCEEDS BENEFIT THE NEW YORK IMMIGRANT FREEDOM FUND

ONLINE TICKETS    FACEBOOK EVENT

The New York Immigrant Freedom Fund is a program of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund in partnership with an advisory board of community-based organizations fighting to dismantle our punitive immigration and detention systems. The advisory board consists of African Communities Together, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Families for Freedom, Immigrant Defense Project, Make the Road New York, and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project; other coalition partners include CAIR-NY.

Made by a young Parisian immigrant in his early 20s named Sidney Sokhona as he recoiled from a rash of exploitations and abuses in France’s African migrant community, NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ dramatizes the real-life rent strike undertaken by Sokhona and his neighbors in the Rue Riquet settlement housing, a “docu-fiction” of its own community in collaboration that’s unlike anything you’ve before seen in “world cinema”. One could hardly be blamed for interpreting the film as an endless litany of dehumanizing bureaucratic obstacle courses – as Serge Daney pointed out in his review “On Paper”, the film juts uncomfortably against the militant Left’s emphasis on using rupture theory to delegitimize the legal process, a high-minded option unavailable to immigrants like those depicted here. Sokhona took to filming after the Aubervilliers scandal of January 1970 – when five African migrants died in an overcrowded shelter on the periphery of Paris due to asphyxiation – prompting then-Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas to declare an end of these settlements, sometimes nicknamed bidonvilles or caves, by 1973. The filmmaker wasn’t so optimistic – but then, what NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ does offer is a rare glimpse at community organizing coming into praxis on both sides of the camera, with many of Sokhona’s neighbors playing themselves. (Sokhona financed the film in piecemeal fashion once scene at a time while working as a telephone operator.) While the thrust of NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ is unabashedly polemical, the loose narrative structure allows Sokhona to pursue fascinating side-stories and political tangents, at times dipping from what appears to be pure verite into a purely Brechtian exercise wherein immigrants are handed jobs in the form of huge placards, which they must carry around their necks, denoting their net worth to society in material terms.

In Cahiers du Cinema, Sokhona would elaborate to Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart that “I was not sure that he who had loved NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ would like it – which does not mean that no one can love both. SAFRANA is, for me, the continuation of N:I. At the time it was done, compared to the reality of that time, there were a number of plans in the construction of the film itself on which we had to pass. For the first time, perhaps, people saw things they had never seen – so their membership was much simpler. I think people also ask: should a film about immigration be cinema? N.I. was in black and white, there was a certain desired poverty – it’s unthinkable to film an immigrant’s home in color…. People will go see a movie; of course they will see a subject, but it must be possible to express it in a very simple way. I think a political film – or engagé – can use other weapons, and touch a large number of people taking account of the movies.”

Assuming the position of both French and African filmmaker, Sokhona published a kind of manifesto in Cahiers du Cinema entitled “Notre Cinema” (Our Cinema), wherein he decried the cultural feedback loop enabled by state funding (especially in postcolonial cases), the incessant use of African landscapes as backdrops for tawdry Western melodramas, and the pigeonholing of black movies in festival programming – citing that the 1976 Cannes Film Festival included CAR WASH in its main slate, but consigned Ousmane Sembene’s CEDDO to competition in Directors’ Fortnight. If SAFRANA closes on an impossibly optimistic note for Sokhona (as the audience has, over the too-brief course of two movies, come to understand him), it reveals itself in hindsight as a byproduct of the French example, wherein the the organizing onscreen bears a utopian fruit that’s nevertheless untrustworthy. (Sokhona alleges that audiences were far more skeptical about the immigrants’ warm countryside reception in discussions following screenings in Paris.) What’s universalized in the humiliations of NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ remains – or as Sokhona put it to Cahiers, “Immigration has not only served to alienate us but also to teach us to be ashamed of what we were before. Any immigrant with a conscience realizes he has as much to claim on the workers’ side as the farmers’, today.”

~ screening with ~