This past February saw the passing of legendary Florida Man Ricou Browning, best known for embodying the “Gill Man” in the underwater passages of Jack Arnold’s classic CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON as well as its two sequels. We here at 124 S. 3rd Street wanted to pay homage to Browning’s less-known forays behind the camera as director and screenwriter, respectively.

This is not a career survey; Browning’s most famous creative work is probably the beloved dolphin franchise FLIPPER, which began as a theatrical film and was later adapted to television (before the infamous 1995 reboot with Elijah Wood and Isaac Hayes.) But these two films – the hate-filled grindhouse epic MR. NO LEGS and the bizarro-brain mutant crab thriller ISLAND CLAWS – both speak to Browning’s status as a pillar of Florida filmmaking, sure to offer delight and repulsion in equal measure on the last of these hot summer nights.

MR. NO LEGS
(aka GUN FIGHTER) (aka KILLERS DIE HARD)
dir. Ricou Browning, 1978
Tampa. 90 min.
In English.

MONDAY, AUGUST 7 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 17 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 – 5 PM

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“Don’t Double Cross Him or He’ll Cut You Down To Size!”

Spectacle first showed MR. NO LEGS in the summer of 2013, to great acclaim. Here’s how that original synopsis went:

Set in the ugliest Tampa imaginable, MR. NO LEGS follows two self-righteous police detectives (one with the obligatory porn-stache) tracking dope dealers and corrupt fellow cops, while trying to stay out of the clutches of an unstoppable mob enforcer. Enter Mr. No Legs: a martial arts master with many a violent trick hidden up his sleeves—and wheelchair, including shotguns, switchblades and ninja stars!

Meanwhile, racists start a rumble in a bar involving midgets and drag queens, whores get into broken bottle fights, and everyone double-crosses everyone else. Mayhem galore! Featuring a shameless cast of B- and C-listers, including Richard Jaeckel, Lloyd Bochner, John Agar, Rance (Ron’s dad!) Howard, and real-life double amputee Ted Vollrath as the snarling titular hero, MR. NO LEGS is a convoluted, ultraviolent, mean-spirited B-movie actioner that’ll leave you crawling on the ground.

“Nasty and hateful, MR. NO LEGS is of comparable regional interest to Browning’s family-friendlier fare because its drug runners operate out of the Ybor City suburb of Tampa, smuggling heroin via the state’s signature ‘Cuban’ cigars, culminating in a brain-flattening freeway car chase (a la Dukes of Hazzard) that lasts almost fifteen minutes.”
—Daryl J. Williams, The Baffler

ISLAND CLAWS
(aka NIGHT OF THE CLAW) (aka GIANT CLAWS)
dir. Hernan Cardenas, 1980
Florida Straits. 82 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 15 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 – 3 PM

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“A terrifying creation of the Nuclear Age!”

TV actor Robert Lansing (who also starred in Spectacle favorite 4-D MAN) and Barry Nelson (an American actor who nonetheless played James Bond in the original CASINO ROYALE, and who appeared in THE SHINING the same year he made ISLAND CLAWS) lead as marine biologists whose God-playing experiments result in crabs that grow to become eight feet long, terrorizing the town. These crabs are arguably the main draw of the film, and it makes sense: they were supervised by the great special effects artist Glen Robinson, of JAWS and the 1976 KING KONG remake.

Commingling the gee-whiz spirit of Atomic Era monster pictures with a noirish ambience via its Florida Keys locations, ISLAND CLAWS was Browning’s final go-round with his longtime creative partner and brother-in-law, screenwriter Jack Cowden. There’s an added dash of social consciousness as well, as one subplot concerns mistreatment of Hatian refugees and the film offers a panoramic portrait of a rural community besieged by toxic waste and rampant alcoholism.

Still not convinced? Check out this synopsis from one of the film’s many bootleg VHS releases…

Man is faced with his own destruction through 20th century technology. Nowhere is this more evident than in the lush tropical setting of ISLAND CLAWS. An experiment in Marine Biology goes terribly wrong in a sleepy little town near a nuclear power plant. Bizarre happenings create an aura of fear in the isolated village. Something, somewhere, is creating terror.

Suddenly it shows itself.

The vicious meat-eating crab, one hundred times its normal size, appears to destroy everyone and everything in the town.

The bone chilling climax is reached when the town has to slay the beast or be slain by it.

LE ORME
(aka FOOTPRINTS)
(aka FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON)
(aka PRIMAL IMPULSE)
dir. Luigi Bazzoni, 1975
96 mins. Italy.
In dubbed English with a few minutes of Italian.

SUNDAY, JULY 23 – DUSK at ARVERNE CINEMA
ONE NIGHT ONLY! (LE ORME will return to Spectacle in August 2023.)

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Spectacle is thrilled to partner with Rockaway Film Festival for a special outdoor presentation of Luigi Bazzoni’s surreal psychological thriller LE ORME (1975). Newly scanned in 4K from the original camera negatives by Severin Films, LE ORME will be preceded by cosmic short films by avant-garde filmmaker Jeanne Liotta who will join us in attendance.

In Luigi Bazzoni’s uniquely hallucinatory LE ORME, memories of a science fiction film seen in childhood return to haunt Alice (Florinda Bolkan, of LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN). The fragments of the film lodged in her memory concern an astronaut left behind on the moon; as Alice becomes more and more preoccupied with this vision, her life begins to spin out of control.

Shown at Spectacle in its first “Spectober” programme, LE ORME (originally reedited and rereleased in the States and Europe as PRIMAL IMPULSE) is an unsung masterpiece of 70s genre cinema, marrying the sustained ambient dread of gialli with god-tier cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (just after lensing Elizabeth Taylor in the similarly mental IDENTITK and before Bertolucci’s epic folly NOVOCENTO.) Klaus Kinski features in an extended cameo as the head of Mission Control.

“This hallucinatory Italian film resists easy classification, attempting to subjectively portray the fractured, paranoid psyche of a woman suddenly haunted by memories of a bizarre science fiction film seen in childhood. Florinda Balkan drifts through cinematographer Vittorio Storaro‘s strange, beautiful tableaux much like Monica Vitti in RED DESERT. Often mischaracterized as a giallo—I suppose simply because it’s Italian and stars Balkan—this is more of a haunting puzzle film grinding inexorably toward abject hysterics.” – Screen Slate

“Psychedelically haunting… An existentialist adventure that combines the narrative mystery of SOLARIS with the vivid visions of Argento.” – Electric Sheep Magazine

“Seek it out and unravel its mystery…One of the most unique and overlooked Italian films of the ‘70s.” – Moon In The Gutter

JEANNE LIOTTA makes films, video, moving image installations, projector performances and other media operating at a lively intersection of art, science,& natural philosophy. Her signature 16mm film of the night skies, OBSERVANDO EL CIELO (2007), has won many prizes including the prestigious Tiger Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and was voted among the top ten films of the decade by The Film Society of Lincoln Center. Her films and videos have been screened around the world, including The Whitney Biennial, The New York Film Festival, SFMOMA, The Cinematheque Francais, Museo Nitsch in Naples Italy, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Menil Collection Houston, The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver . Her works are included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Vienna Film Museum, The European Media Arts Collection, Harvard and Duke Universities. Liotta is a Professor of Moving Image Arts at CU Boulder and is also on the faculty at The Bard MFA program in the Hudson Valley. She is represented by Microscope Gallery, NYC where she has had two solo exhibitions, “Break the Sky”(2018) and “The World is a Picture of The World” (2021). Her films and video works are distributed by Lightcone in Paris, France.

Renoir the painter once told his son the director about the Paris Commune: “They were insane, but they had that little flame that never goes out.” Ken McMullen’s 1871 stages those extraordinary two months not as madness but as theater, a pageant that suspended capitalist existence. Med Hondo plays Karl Marx, whispering omens to the disgraced emperor; an actress sings “The Internationale” while government troops assemble in their seats. “They’re just a bunch of stupid fucking actors,” Timothy Spall’s amoral fop protests. “They get overexcited when they dress up.” History gets made at the prop department.

The Freelance Solidarity Project was founded in 2018 by digital media workers. Now a division of the National Writers Union, it campaigns alongside editorial staff and street vendors alike to raise wages for all. Following the first screening of 1871, writer Chris Randle, a member of FSP’s steering committee, will discuss Hollywood labor strikes with Writers Guild of America member Sara David.

KILLING
(斬)
dir. Tsukamoto Shin’ya, 2018
80 mins. Japan.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

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FRIDAY JULY 7 – 10 PM 
SATURDAY JULY 22 – MIDNIGHT 
MONDAY JULY 24 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY JULY 26 – 10 PM

Spectacle invites you to cool off this summer with a special New York City engagement of KILLING, the most recent masterpiece by Japanese filmmaker Tsukamoto Shin’ya.

Set in the 19th century, KILLING concerns a wandering swordsman named Sawamura (played by the filmmaker) who recruits a young farmer named Tsuzuki (Sôsuke Ikematsu) for an anticipated trip to Edo, with intention to help topple the crumbling Tokugawa shogunate. Sawamura’s would-be disciple is eager to learn the ways of the ronin to the point of neglecting less-exciting chores on the farm, but finds himself paralyzed when a pack of roving outlaws impose themselves on his village. What follows is a dense meditation on the preventability (or inevitability) of violence in the moment of decision, described by Tsukamoto as a “scream” of a film in response to the state of the world.

Far less pulpy than Tsukamoto’s genre riffs A SNAKE IN JUNE or BULLET BALLET, KILLING juxtaposes the natural beauty of the Japanese countryside with the hideousness of human nature. Fans of Michael Mann’s action painting with lightweight digital cameras in MIAMI VICE and PUBLIC ENEMIES will find much to learn in the brief, unforgettable battle sequences choreographed by Tsukamoto – pointed rebuttals to the kind of gratuitous massacres of consequence-free death and violence that make up so much genre cinema today.

While KILLING enjoyed success on the festival circuit in 2018, the film never received a traditional theatrical run in the United States, playing only a handful of times in New York City (first at Japan Society, last fall at BAM as part of a full Tsukamoto retrospective.)

“KILLING’s few fight sequences have the same gnashing energy as Tsukamoto’s city-punk classics TETSUO: THE IRON MAN and TOKYO FIST, but deployed to more judicious ends: blood is drawn as a last resort, there’s no glory in felling your opponent, and Sawamura and Tsuzuki’s blades are so fine they appear almost translucent, ethereal, out of focus. Tsukamoto’s signature camera language gives tactile proportion to the older samurai’s swiftness with the blade, while his would-be student’s trembling inability to fight becomes a core—you could even say fatal—insufficiency, recalling the psychosexual mania of DUEL IN THE SUN or THE LEFT-HANDED GUN.” – Daryl Jade Williams, Cinema Scope

“It wouldn’t be a Tsukamoto film without entangled brutality and sexuality, frustrations taken out in furtive masturbation, physical assault as lust, and other attacks on the flesh. Handheld camerawork avoids the stuffiness plaguing most period pieces, pulling viewers out of history and into the story’s present-tense. The film gets literally darker with each slice of the sword, its emphasis of futility a long way from TETSUO’s full-blown nihilism. The film ends on a perfect note of horror asking, with a kill completed, what exactly died?” – Danielle Burgos, Screen Slate

Following the wildly successful runs of Korean creature features, SPACE MONSTER WANGMAGWI and PULGASARI, earlier this year, Spectacle Theater now sets course due South, across the East China Sea, to discover what cinematic monstrosities the island of Taiwan has in store.

Though much less prolific than the neighboring film industry in Hong Kong, Taiwanese cinema exploded onto the global scene in the early 1980s with the emergence of the New Taiwanese Cinema movement. This crop of ambitious and talented young filmmakers— including Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chen Kunhou, and Chang Yi— sought to use cinema as a means of speaking honestly and openly about the issues affecting post-industrial Taiwanese society, crafting realistic and socially-relevant stories that resonated deeply with modern audiences.

But as Taoist philosophy suggests, just as every light has its dark and as every up has its down, for every TAIPEI STORY or CITY OF SADNESS, there must be a movie about a centuries-old zombie-fighting herbal deity or a semi-feral superpowered female ninja. And since our love of East Asian prestige cinema is only outmatched by our love of homegrown fantasy-horror schlock, Spectacle Theater is thrilled to present IT CAME FROM TAIWAN!, featuring two completely deranged, creature-heavy cuts from the stranger side of Taiwanese cinema.

WOLF DEVIL WOMAN
(雪山狼女)
Dir. Pearl Chang Ling, 1982
Taiwan. 85 min. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

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WEDNESDAY, JULY 5 – 10PM
THURSDAY JULY 13 – 10:00PM 
SUNDAY JULY 16 – 5PM

After her parents are slaughtered by the villainous Red Devil, a young girl is rescued from certain death and raised by the legendary White Wolf of a Thousand Years deep in the snowy wilderness. Twenty years later, now more monster than man, she must learn to harness her ninja-like animal instincts to take down the Red Devil and reclaim her humanity in the process.

The inimitable Pearl Chang pulled quadruple duty as director, writer, producer, and star of this loose adaptation of Baifa Monu Zhuan (白髮魔女傳) aka Romance of the White-Haired Maiden. Chang pulled no punches for her debut feature, mashing together hopping vampires, gorilla ninjas, wire fu stunt work, and voodoo magic effects in this psychedelic masterpiece of lupine lunacy.

Content warning: This film contains brief depictions of animal cruelty.

GINSENG KING aka THREE-HEAD MONSTER
(三頭魔王)
Dir. Wang Chu-chin, 1988
Taiwan. 86 min. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

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FRIDAY, JULY 7 – 5PM
MONDAY JULY 10 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, JULY 14 – 10PM
TUESDAY, JULY 25 – 7:30PM

Cynthia Khan (IN THE LINE OF DUTY series) stars in this tale of a young boy who encounters a thousand-year-old anthropomorphic ginseng root known as the Ginseng King. The herbal deity is highly sought after for its legendary healing abilities— rumored to be powerful enough to even raise the dead— putting the boy at odds with the hordes of demons, wizards, hopping vampires, and zombies of the Nazi persuasion, all seeking to capture the knobby necromancer for their own gain.

The film is a truly one-of-a kind work: A family-friendly, fairytale-adjacent kaiju flick that features some of the most batshit character design ever put to film. The Ginseng King’s look is worth the price of admission alone, with its bulging eyes and mane of roots that falls somewhere between the thing hanging out behind the Winkie’s dumpster and a partially melted wax statue of Marty Feldman. Needs to be seen to be believed