This March, Spectacle is proud to welcome the esteemed DJ/VJ duo Smash TV (Brendan Shields & Ben Craw) back behind the velvet curtain for a mini-retro (emphasis on retro) every Thursday night. Since 2012 Smash TV, has been gracing the Spectacle screen with “long for entertainment for short attention spans” showcasing a love of cinema spanning multiple genres and decades.

THURSDAY, MARCH 7th – 7:30 PM – SKINEMAX (2011)
THURSDAY, MARCH 14th – 7:30 PM – MEMOREX (2012)
THURSDAY, MARCH 21st – 7:30 PM – GUNSLINGER (2014)
THURSDAY, MARCH 28th – 7:30 PM – MEGAPLEX (2016)

SKINEMAX
edited by Smash TV, 2011
55 min, USA

THURSDAY, MARCH 7th – 7:30 PM

Skinemax is Koyaanisqatsi for a generation raised on late night television and B-movie VHS tapes. It’s long form entertainment for short attention spans. An hour long VJ odyssey, it will move your body and warp your mind.

A nostalgic look back at a half remembered childhood growing up in the 80s and early 90s, Skinemax takes a close look at the culture of that era. The images that motivated, delighted, and terrified us on the silver screen, set to propulsive modern music that pines for a simpler time.

Containing lightning quick edits from 44 different films, Skinemax has been described as “hypnotizing” and “a veritable nostalgia nuke.” Recently featured on six of the top 25 blogs in the world, it aims to draw attention to the rapidly developing art of the mashup or supercut. It also holds the distinction of being one of the longest duration videos to ever go viral.

MEMOREX
Edited by Brendan Shields, 2012
50 minutes

THURSDAY, MARCH 14th – 7:30 PM

SMASH TV’s latest opus, MEMOREX is the most nostalgic thing you’ve ever seen if you were a kid in the 80s. Culled from over forty hours of 80’s commercials pulled from warped VHS tapes. Endless beach parties, Saturday morning cartoons, sexy babes, sleek cars, toys you forgot existed, station idents, early computer animation, all your favorite sugary cereal mascots, and so much more. An ode to the hyper consumerism and sleek veneer of a simpler time.

The audio, mixed by your friends at Smash TV, provides a perfect accompaniment to the warped and weirdly nostalgic footage, like finding your favorite cassette from childhood after it’s been baking in the sun for 25 years. VHS Head, Hype Williams, LA Vampires, and Boards Of Canada are just a few of the artists you can expect to hear.

It’s the nostalgiapocalypse for anyone born between 1975 and 1985. Your favorite everything you totally forgot existed.

screens with:

GUNSLINGER
edited by Smash TV, 2014
62 min, USA

Gunslinger is the ultimate tribute to the Old West. The BACK TO THE FUTURE III of our trilogy, if you will, Smash TV has bid a fond farewell to the neon excess of the 80s and set the controls of the DeLorean back to 1885. A simpler – and infinitely more dangerous – time.

Painstakingly assembled from more than 50 Western movies, ranging from Sergio Leone’s early Spaghetti Westerns all the way up to 90s re-imaginings such as DESPERADO and WILD WILD WEST, GUNSLINGER serves as a humble attempt to pay homage to one of the longest running and most influential genres of the silver screen.

Taking a magnifying glass to one of the most prolific genres in film history, GUNSLINGER aims to preserve the ideals and struggles of a unique time and place in history which becomes more and more foreign to our daily lives with each passing year. Deliberately paced to match the look and feel of a Western, it recontextualizes classic tropes of the genre to deliver a unique and fast paced narrative.

A mysterious stranger arrives in town, authority is challenged, vengeance is sought, tensions run high at the saloon, a frantic horse chase ensues, and everything goes to hell in an epic gunfight you’ll have to see to believe.

The audio borrows from a number of different genres; from time-honored soundtracks by Ennio Morricone and John Barry, to modern hip hop and electronic reworkings of genre standards.

Gunslinger condenses 30 years of Western movies into one unforgettable hour. The good. The bad. The ugly. An ode to the Man with No Name.

MEGAPLEX: BEYOND & TURBO
edited by Smash TV, 2016
80 min, USA

THURSDAY, MARCH 21st – 7:30 PM

MEGAPLEX is the most insane double feature the world has ever seen. With a running time of 80 minutes and thousands of cuts from more than 80 movies, Smash TV has spent the past year and a half cramming the most entertainment possible into every second. It’s dense enough to pressurize these diamonds in the rough into gleaming treasures.

MEGAPLEX is the long awaited followup to the critically acclaimed SKINEMAX, much more fully realized, utilizing myriad editing and layering tricks picked up over the past five years. Deeper, darker, and definitely more bizarre.

Borrowing from the Grindhouse tradition and from Tarantino’s more recent tribute, MEGAPLEX is a double feature comprised of BEYOND (Sheilds) and TURBO (Craw) that both members of Smash TV worked on independently to create a massive cinematic sandwich.

Dirs. David Hall and Thomas D. Rotenberg, 2019 Canada, 95 min.
In English

TUESDAY, MARCH 19 – 7:30PM & 10PM
DIRECTOR Q&A AND SPECIAL SKYPE CALLS  
10PM followed by afterparty at Un**n P**l ($5 for Spectacle Theater ticket holders)

SATURDAY, MARCH 23 – 7:30PM & 10PM
DIRECTOR Q&A AND SPECIAL SKYPE CALLS  

WORLD PREMIERE!
LIVE PRANK CALLS BY LONGMONT POTION CASTLE! FILMMAKERS IN ATTENDANCE!
For over 30 years, the artist known only as Longmont Potion Castle has been beguiling and bedeviling random victims across the country with the most avant-garde prank calls ever recorded. Throughout it all he has remained completely anonymous, released over 16 original albums, and become a cult favorite, notably amongst musicians. LPC describes the albums as his “phone work,” or “absurdist art” rather than the clumsy label “prank phone calls.” The recordings combine prank calls with sound collages, often filtering his voice through a Digitech RDS 8000 delay unit to produce odd sound effects, thus making whoever he has called even more confused.
This March, Spectacle is proud to host the world premiere of the very first Longmont Potion Castle documentary, “Where In The Hell Is The Lavender House? The Longmont Potion Castle Story.” Directed by David Hall & Thomas D. Rotenberg, the film includes interviews with Rainn Wilson, Andrew Bujalski, Pissed Jeans, Municipal Waste, NBS Electronics, Twist and Shout, Pig Destroyer, Weyes Blood, Cattle Decapitation, Pinback, and a variety of hard-core fans, the film peeks behind the curtain of America’s Underground Prank Call King.

Both screenings at this historic event will feature the filmmakers in attendance, and Longmont Potion Castle himself will be calling in to conduct live prank calls from the theater. You don’t want to miss this.
And don’t forget the AFTER PARTY! After the 10PM screening, head to Union Pool with your ticket stub for a discounted ticket to the after party. ($5 for ticket holder, $10 for non-ticket holders.)

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 7:30 PM

GET REEL is a movie-clip based comedy show, where comedians voice over movie clips live. This month’s theme is REEL LOVE.

Hosted by:
Max Wittert & Joe Castle Baker

$5 @ Spectacle Theater
124 S. 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11249
(Williamsburg)

In partnership with Gravel Road Distribution, Spectacle is thrilled to exhibit a handful of deep cuts from the heyday of South African blaxploitation cinema, excavated and restored by Cape Town-based Retro Afrika Bioscope. Many of these were developed under a government subsidy spearheaded by one Tonie van der Merwe, the white owner of a construction company who realized there was an opportunity to produce and screen inexpensively made genre films in impoverished Black townships. (In a 2015 Guardian interview, van der Merwe said, “We used all of my equipment as props. My diggers. My airplane. My cars.”)

The ensuing “B-Schemes” are complicated: they star entirely Black casts, yet the movies are apolitical genre thrillers, melodramas, adaptations of South African novels – Van Der Merwe himself is estimated to have worked on nearly 400 of them, a quarter of what was produced until the end of the white-supremacist regime in 1990. Here’s how Bevis Parsons, director of CHARLIE STEEL (coming February), described the “B-Scheme” pipeline:

“Distribution was informal to say the least in that a film copy was supplied to an independent (Black) distributor who drove into the countryside far from large cities with a small pick-up truck with a projector, a generator and a portable screen. Posters were usually put up at the rural school and films were generally shown for one night only before moving on to the next venue. I know this sounds primitive but at the time there was little or no infrastructure to do otherwise. Ticket stubs were returned to us to claim subsidies on each movie and these returns were carefully audited by the department of Trade and Industry, which oversaw the B-scheme subsidy.”

Retro Afrika Bioscope is dedicated to saving, restoring and distributing these films worldwide, including making each of them available streaming on their website. The favored masterpiece is 1986’s Zulu-language desert western UMBANGO – THE FEUD – coming to Spectacle in February.

JOE BULLET
dir. Louis de Witt, 1973
79 mins.
In Afrikaner English.

WEDNESDAY JANUARY 2 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY JANUARY 10 – 10 PM
MONDAY JANUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY JANUARY 17 – 10 PM
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 16 – MIDNITE

The first South African film with an all-Black cast, JOE BULLET was shown twice before it was banned by government censors – producer Van der Merwe would later say that “in those days, it was taboo for a black man to have a firearm.” Anchored by the steely yet mega-charismatic performance of Ken Gampu, JOE BULLET is an apartheid-era answer to SHAFT and SUPERFLY, a must-see for any connoisseur of international action cinema. Gampu plays Joe as a karate master with a cocky sneer, an indefatigable wardrobe and an uncanny grip on logistics; his supervision of the safety of the neighborhood soccer team (The Eagles) runs him afoul of mobsters who want to bump off the top players, thus preventing the team from winning the championship. A number of run-ins ensue, dazzling miniature set pieces blending wooden acting with hushed asskicking (martial arts and otherwise), and fascinating snatches on-location naturalism. Among Gampu’s claims to fame was convincing the racist Afrikaner government to allow a stage performance of OF MICE AND MEN; he would later star in films including ZULU DAWN, Cornel Wilde’s THE NAKED PREY and THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY.

BULLET ON THE RUN
dir. Tony van der Merwe, 1982
90 mins.
In Afrikaner English.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 20 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 24 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 28 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30 – 10 PM
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 23 – MIDNITE

This time, Bullet stakes his reputation on the line by infiltrating one of South Africa’s toughest prisons to unfold the mystery of a police corruption ring lorded over by a mob boss known only as “Snake”, with whom Bullet has deep – and bitter – roots. What initially starts as a funky shoot-em-up goes full courtroom drama, crime procedural and finally becomes an archetypal prison film, as Bullet must band together with other ripped-off inmates to fight Snake’s minions. BULLET ON THE RUN expands the world of the first film, including more elaborate stunts, and setting Joe up with a bashful folk singer named Patience (Thandi Mbongwe). As in JOE BULLET, the blood is neon-fluorescent while every moment of violence (including car chases, a dam crossing, one character getting sand thrown in their eyes, another falling backwards and hitting their head on a rock) lands with jarring brutality.

ONE NIGHT ONLY
JANUARY 3RD
7:30PM

This screening is dedicated to the Philosophical Research Society.

A film school drop out after his first semester, Sell began traveling the country with nothing but a bag of clothes, a few dollars, a laptop and his beloved Hi8 camera. Covering 42 of the 50 states in a whirlwind Kerouac-esque style, Sell obsessively and extensively documented his travels and the people he met along the way before he even turned 22.

From sleeping in parks, graveyards and the many floors of his friends apartments, Sell would shoot and edit simultaneously on his broken laptop wherever he could and present the works wherever they would have him. Previously being distributed on DVD by small labels, these early short documentaries never gained much public attention but were recognized for their gritty style. Fans of SHRIEK SHOW 6’s DON’T LET THE DEVIL IN take note – presented here are some of Sell’s earliest and rarest works.

* THE HOLE (2010) // 10 min.
Co-Directed by Billy Feldman
A look at a mysterious neighborhood on the Brooklyn/Queens border known for being a mafia body dumping ground, thirty feet below sea level and the home of the Black Cowboy Federation.

* WHITE CLOVER (2007) // 9 min.
A day in the life of New Orleans resident ‘Squirrel’ which includes driving through the city with a loaded gun and dealing with elements of drugs months after Hurricane Katrina.

* MY DYING DAY (2007) // 10 min.
An award-winning short documentary based around an the Rev. Bradly Sell’s struggle with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

* AN AFTERNOON WITH WALT CURTIS (2013) // 12 min.
A portrait of poet Walt Curtis – the inspiration behind Gus Van Sant’s first film MALA NOCHE.

* LIVING LIKE A KING (2013) // 10 min.
A portrait of the “Lower East Side Minister of Information” John King.