This Summer™, Spectacle is pleased to show a trio of earlier works by the great, madcap Spanish auteur (anti-auteur?) Álex de la Iglesia, better known of recent for his Elijah Wood-starring The Oxford Murders and his surrealist drama of the Spanish Civil War, The Last Circus. de la Iglesia’s howlingly funny body of work is marked as much by its wanton bloodshed and suffering as it is by a dexterity with words and aphorisms – hat-tips to the audience that there are no holy cows in this world.

Trigger warning: films include murder, rape, kidnapping, human sacrifice, drug use, live experimentation and acts of terrorism. 

ACCIÓN MUTANTE (MUTANT ACTION)
Dir. Álex de la Iglesia, 1993
Spain, 90 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

THURSDAY, JULY 2 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 10 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 25 – 7:30 PM

For those of us for whom DEMOLITION MAN wasn’t Boschian enough, there’s ACCIÓN MUTANTE! The film takes place in a dystopian near-future where a band of inept mutant troglodytes have made it their mission to target only the world’s most attractive – the other 1% – by blowing up sperm banks, attacking gyms and spas, etc. Led by the Frankensteinian Ramón (Antonio Resines), the  kidnap Patricia (Frédérique Feder), a glowing socialite bride-to-be, and haul her to the off-planet mining colony where Ramón has arranged to collect ransom money from her post-Francoist generalissimo father – but of course, things get more complicated en route. Awash in blood and metal, de la Iglesia’s nihlistic debut (produced by Pedro Almodovar!) is both a rib-brusingly hilarious satire of 90s society and a production of surprising detail and muscularity, likened often to the early collaborations between Jeunet and Caro.

EL DÍA DE LA BESTIA (THE DAY OF THE BEAST)
Dir. Álex de la Iglesia, 1995
Spain, 103 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

MONDAY, JULY 6 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 10 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 28 – 7:30 PM

After discovering the Antichrist will be born Christmas Eve, mousy but determined Basque theologian Ángel sets off for Madrid to be evil as possible in hopes of gaining Satan’s trust and stopping the Apocalypse before the holidays. He’s new to sin, but gets help from a friendly local metalhead in kidnapping TV psychic and paranormal investigator Cavan to help them out. Comic book goofiness barely disguises underlying social commentary – one priest stealing dead men’s wallets can’t compete with an overzealous, trigger-happy police force or xenophobic hate groups running amok.

---

PERDITA DURANGO
Dir. Álex de la Iglesia, 1997
Mexico/USA/Spain, 121 min.

THURSDAY, JULY 2 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 15 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 28 – 10:00 PM

Starring Rosie Perez and Javier Bardem’s worst on-screen haircut, PERDITA DURANGO is a violent whirl of sex, drugs, and ritual murder weaving across the U.S./Mexico border. Still mourning her sister’s death, Perdita joins Santeria priest/drug runner Romeo on his latest run – delivering frozen human fetuses to a beauty company in Vegas for processing into fancy face cream. To spice things up, they kidnap two clueless American teens to screw and sacrifice along the way. de la Iglesias’ portrayal of America as land of the Square blurs with Perdita and Romeo’s Latin world of brutal vitality, creating a cartoonish existence where investigator Dumas (played by James Gandolfini) perpetually getting slammed by cars is slapstick, violence and sex are indistinguishably intermeshed, and the only common ground is Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.

By the early 1970s, fallout from construction of Cross Bronx Expressway, misguided rent control policies leading to insurance fraud and arson, and economic stagnation drew international attention to the South Bronx as one of the most shocking instances of urban decay in United States history. As buildings blazed and lots turned to rubble, families struggled in tenement housing while police contended with an epidemic of gangs, drugs and prostitution; in the meantime, a revolution was happening with street art and the birth of hip hop.

BRONXPLOITATION takes a look at the northern borough as represented on film and video as an area of social, economic, cultural and commercial exploitation, but also one of enduring spirit and creative renewal. Through documentary and fiction alike, the series visits hip hop’s origins in dance parties amid apocalyptic rubble, rides alongside police patrolling the country’s most dangerous streets, sits inside gang hangouts, and examines the public perception of the Bronx crimewave, whether through a housing tenement under attack by vicious thugs or an Italian exploitation movie set in a sensationalized future Bronx.

---

80 BLOCKS FROM TIFFANY’S (BEST OF SPECTACLE)
Dir. Gary Weis, 1979
USA, 67 min.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17 – 10PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18 – 5PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 24 – 7:30PM

Special thanks to Gary Weis

A legendary cult documentary equally infamous for its subject matter as well as its scarcity, director Gary Weis traveled uptown in 1979 to provide an unflinching, hilarious, and sometimes shocking depiction of the South Bronx neighborhood and, in particular, two African American and Puerto Rican gangs known as the “Savage Skulls” and the “Savage Nomads.”

Facing severe sociopolitical decay throughout the 70s, the South Bronx is portrayed as a crime-infested, all out no-man’s-land war zone where the battle lines are drawn between warring factions of youth street gangs.

Commonly referred to as the real life version of THE WARRIORS, the film is a brilliant snapshot of a bygone era and a stark reminder of the damage that had been wreaked on parts of New York throughout the 70s; the abandoned districts, burnt-out buildings and human waste serving as the end point for a decade of mismanagement and unaddressed social problems. Spectacle is proud to present this landmark work in a brand new remastered version.

---

1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS

Dir. Enzo G. Castellari, 1982
Italy, 93 min.

FRIDAY, JULY 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 9 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 31 – 7:30 PM

Medieval in its brutality and psychedelic in its execution, 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS is among the crowning achievements of exploitation master Enzo G. Castellari (THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, KEOMA, THE BIG RACKET). And at that, it’s one of the most compellingly over-the-top, guttural pictures to capitalize on the 1970’s South Bronx crime wave. Handily cribbing from both ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and THE WARRIORS, it presents a dystopian future scenario in which the Bronx is quarantined as a mob-ruled No Man’s Land lorded over by colorful gangs marked by their flamboyant dress and manneristic quirks. Into this anarchic world a young heiress flees her evil capitalist father, who employs a mercenary army to slaughter its way through the gangs who variously harbor and fight over her.

This is perhaps the most lavish, colorful and explosive production of both Castellari’s career and the Italian post-apocalypse subgenre it inspired. Its highlights include epic slow-motion shootouts, sword-vs-hockey stick brawls, creepy mimes with nunchucks and a legion of mounted police officers strapped with flame throwers roasting out the gangs against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. The cast includes blaxploitation stalwart Fred Williamson alongside Vic Morrow in his penultimate role.

---

THE POLICE TAPES
Dir. Alan & Susan Raymond, 1977
USA, 88 min.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 1 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 7 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 13 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 26 – 7:30 PM

Special thanks to Alan & Susan Raymond

An alarming and distressing look into the tumultuous work of the 44th Precinct police officers in the South Bronx (a one square mile area that, in 1976, had the highest crime rate in New York City), THE POLICE TAPES peels back the skin to reveal a city at war with the civil servants assigned to serve and protect them.

Utilizing some of the earliest Portapak video equipment available, filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond capture raw scenes of domestic violence, crime, and murder as well as the officers who gallantly try to maintain a sense of order in a neighborhood coming unraveled. What emerges is an uncensored portrait of a community fighting the consequences of urban poverty and the law enforcers’ difficult task of remaining righteous in a soul-crushing job.

A vital landmark in cinema vérité, THE POLICE TAPES influenced everything from HILL STREET BLUES to COPS and kickstarted the future Oscar-winning careers of Alan and Susan Raymond. To this day, the film maintains its striking power.

---

TENEMENT
aka GAME OF SURVIVAL aka SLAUGHTER IN THE SOUTH BRONX
Dir. Roberta Findlay, 1985
USA, 94 min.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 8 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 16 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 27 – 7:30 PM

Special thanks to Roberta Findlay

Channeling NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD by way of DEATH WISH, this unabashedly sleazy thriller features a group of honest Bronx tenants fed up with the junkie punks squatting in their basement, who pass the time indiscriminately using rats as target practice and food alike. The residents call the police to remove the trespassers, but when the gang is released from booking that night, the vengeful siege begins. TENEMENT is a pat, fast-paced and action-packed thriller, but one of an uncommonly debased sensibility.

Director Roberta Findlay is best known for her sexploitation and hardcore films including ALTAR OF LUST and THE CLAMDIGGER’S DAUGHTER. Concurrently she and husband Michael created 1976’s SNUFF, inspiring outrage and widespread protest for its allegedly featuring actual murders later revealed to be a marketing ploy. Following Michael’s death, Roberta continued directing hardcore until becoming persona non grata among the industry for SHAUNA: EVERY MAN’S FANTASY, a hardcore documentary about drug addicted pornographic actress Shauna Grant’s shotgun suicide cashing in the following year.

But if anything pushes Findlay’s movies beyond the usual level of discomfort, it might be how shockingly well-made and entertaining they are despite an absolute disregard for taste and morality that makes LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE appear Puritanical in compare. Very clearly shot on location amid the rubble and decay of the decimated burrough, TENEMENT is a sleazy exploitation movie, to be sure, but one which by mere virtue of its existence is a bold, agitational indictment of a city squeezed through the bowels of Hell.

CRITICAL PARANOIA: DARK NIGHT RISING
A collection of conspiracy videos edited & curated by Ernest J. Ramon, 2015
USA, 87 min.

MONDAY, JUNE 1 – 10PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 7 – 7:30PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 16 – 10PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 30 – 10PM

You’re not allowed to believe in coincidences anymore. A Fast encroaching military police state, mind controlled assassins, domestic terrorism, secret societies, ritual sacrifices, clandestine psy-op programs, evil old billionaires clamoring for world domination! Tired old plots of a comic book franchise or prophetic and deliberate enigmas wrapped in bubblegum and subterfuge? Who or what really killed Heath Ledger? Has the Dark Knight vehicle become nothing more than a harbinger for horrors such as the Sandy Hook and Aurora Shootings, and the events of September 11th? What is the true meaning hidden behind the Dark Night Rising? Over the rainbow and through the looking glass, how deep does the rabbit hole go? All the way to a bat cave perhaps.

THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT
Dir. Ramon Zürcher, 2013
Germany, 72 min
In German with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, JUNE 13 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 28 – 5:00 PM

Ecstatic yet precise, Ramon Zürcher’s debut feature deconstructs the domestic drama of a day in a Berlin apartment to riveting effect. Family tensions share dramatic weight with falling orange peels, a spinning bottle, a broken washing machine, a hair in a glass of milk; all the small, private moments in a day are disclosed like secrets. In meticulously simple framing and painterly light, the film finds the beautiful and the alien in everyday life.

ALL MY BEST DAYS HAVE BEEN NIGHTS: YUGOSLAVIAN CINEMA OF REVOLUTION

In the early days of the dissolution of the Yugoslavian state, right after the splintering now known as balkanization, in spite of the impending political chaos, the vibrant Yugoslavian counter-cultural movement was in the midst of a moment of particular power.

After the death of Josip Broz Tito, beloved state leader in power since 1945, and the disintegration of the dream of Brotherhood and Unity and the beginning of the territorial war and ethnic conflict in Bosnia between nationalists in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, increasingly alienated youth of the nation-turned-cipher were drawn towards the anti-authoritarianism and nihilism of punk.

This series of films reflects a period in the Balkans where filmmakers in Yugoslavia’s Hollywood and the counter-culture shared spaces and sought to criticize the destabilizing regime and a society unraveling around them.

---

OUTSIDER
aka AUTSAJDER
Dir. Andrej Kosak, 1997
Slovenia, 105 min.
in Slovenian/Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, JUNE 6 – 10PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 11 – 10PM
MONDAY, JUNE 15 – 7:30PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 23 – 7:30PM

While OUTSIDER was released in a Slovenia six years after it was the first state to secede from the Yugoslavian bloc on 25th of June, 1991, and following the onslaught of war in Bosnia, there was a trend of escapist cinema already in the former Yugoslavia. However, while OUTSIDER focused itself critically against the Titoist regime of communist Yugoslavia, it was also a nostalgic look backwards to a time of peace and prosperity while war raged not far beyond its doorstep.

The film, set in Ljubljana in 1979, follows Sead, a Bosnian transplant to Slovenia following his father a career officer with the Yugoslav National Army, finds himself a misfit transplant and unwanted Bosnian in a rigid Slovenian high school of socialist pageants and violent cliques. He quickly becomes involved with a group of young punks and quickly adopt the moniker “Sid”, as he rises to become the leader of the motley-crew-cum-rock-band. He quickly finds however that his new life and friendships come with harsh consequences as they all become social outcasts, targeted by the police, military and rejected by other proper communist Yugoslavians for their shameless individualism and their disorder. When Kadunc, the band’s drummer, is picked up by the military for vandalizing a building with statements disparaging head of state Josip Broz Tito, he is imprisoned. Soon after Kadunc’s release the disgrace of his actions marks the lives of Sead and the rest of his bandmates and quickly tears all their lives apart.

Far from blind Yugo-nostalgia, Kosak’s OUTSIDER looks back towards individual persecution in the Yugoslavian system and indicts an unwillingness to move beyond a culture of conformity and obedience as the reason for the failure of Yugoslavia’s utopian dream.

---

THE FALL OF ROCK AND ROLL
aka KAKO JE PROPAO ROKENROL
Dir. Goran Gajic, 1989.
Bosnia, 106 min.
In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, JUNE 13 – 10PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 18 – 10PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 21 – 7:30PM
MONDAY, JUNE 29 – 7:30PM

Goran Gajic’s surreal counter-culture comedy THE FALL OF ROCK AND ROLL was made in 1989 right before the start of the Bosnian war and at the beginning of the end of the golden age of Yugoslavian subculture and the heyday of Balkan punk. Gajic’s film was a virtual who’s who of Yugoslavian punk rockers and counter-cultural icons from this period, like Anica Dobra, Sonja Savic, Srdjan Todorovic and the lead singer of ex-yu punk band Disciplina Kicme in a cameo as slacker-superhero and mascot the Green Tooth, among others. All of these young Balkan men and women were part of the same cohort among the bright stars that made up the collaborative Belgrade art and rock scene which had also produced other films like CRNI MARIJA/BLACK MARIAH and DAVITELJ PROTIV DAVITELJ/ STRANGLER VS. STRANGLER.

THE FALL OF ROCK AND ROLL is a composed as a picaresque comedy in three parts, all written by different screenwriters and directors and with musicians from three Yugoslavian rock powerhouses, Elektricni Orgazm, Idoli and Disciplina Kicme. The three scenarios begin this ramble through the streets and back-alleys of Belgrade with a wager between Koma, a failed punk rocker (Srdjan Todorovic) and his producer father, a folk-singer staging a contest to see who can perform a more popular song leading Koma to become a masked folk singer calling himself Ninja. The film quickly careens into the second scenario, chronicling a romantic episode between a young punk (Anica Dobra) who is wooed by Darko, a man claiming to be Dracula. In the third Eve and Djuro, a troubled pair of frustrated bohemians, an aspiring rock musician and a struggling designer, who are on the verge of conceiving a child but are driven astray by a mysterious love letter.

THE FALL OF ROCK AND ROLL in spite of its absurdist elements is also a reflection collaborative project of Belgrade’s urban rock subculture preserved in amber. Its lighthearted approach and devil-may-care attitude are still valued highly by the now grown youth of Yugoslavia who remember this moment as a time of joy and experimentation before the austere war years soon to follow.

---

BLACK BOMBER
aka CRNI BOMBARDER
Dir by Darko Bajic, 1992.
Serbia, 116 min.
In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, JUNE 4 – 10PM
MONDAY, JUNE 8 – 10PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 20 – 10PM
MONDAY, JUNE 29 – 10PM

CRNI BOMBARDER/THE BLACK BOMBER upon its release it a disintegrated Yugoslavia in the midst of the ravages of war became an allegory for resistance among the youth of Belgrade’s artistic and counter-culture set who had faced violent repression by Slobodan Milosevic’s political regime. In many ways it foreshadowed the resistance to come in the forms of OTPOR! and the guerilla theater of the Serbian protest movements of the late 90’s.

The film, set in a dystopian cityscape, is meant to represent a Milosevic-era Belgrade strewn with barricades, martial law and other trappings of wartime. Blackie, an amnesiac radio DJ is finds himself censored by the government, he begins to push the boundaries of acceptable programming. He soon finds himself being chased by nationalist gunmen and the secret police and in the midst of an increasingly self-destructive attempt to speak truth to power. In the process, he sparks a romance with Luna, played by Ana Dobric, a ferocious punk singer who is waging an internal battle between creatively resisting the regime at home with like-minded rebels like Blackie or artistically thriving in self-imposed exile. After he is forced out of his home-base in the national radio station Blackie finally takes to the streets in an unmarked van, the Black Bomber to broadcast a pirate radio program in the midst of widespread repression and civil unrest of the capital, unintentionally sparking a youth uprising and becoming the voice of youth resistance in the form of his radio persona “The Walking Ghost”.

Not far enough away from reality to be science fiction and not far enough from Hollywood forms to escape tropes of romance this film nonetheless captures the miasma of a generation of ex-Yugoslavs caught between political conflicts in a nation divided, yet still struggling to remain young and alive.