ALL JACKED UP AND FULL OF WORMS
Alex Phillips, 2022
72 mins, USA.
English

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27 – 10 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 31 – 7:30 PM

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Two strangers bond over eating addictive, hallucinogenic worms leading them on a psychotic bender full of murder and perversity through the back alleys of Chicago.

ALL JACKED UP AND FULL OF WORMS is a wildly dark, perversely funny, and shockingly sincere head trip through the seedy underbelly and industrial outskirts of Chicago.

Shot in sporadic chunks throughout the pandemic, WORMS is a rare labor of love that refuses to be pinned down or easily categorized – though if comparisons must be made, we’d say it falls somewhere between John Waters, John Cassavettes, and an actual cess-pool.

Ahead of its streaming debut in November and fresh off packed screenings at Fantasia + Fantastic Fests, Spectacle is proud to present this singularly perverse and delirious midnight flick that really does deserve to be seen with a squirming audience. Not for the faint of heart!

COCKAZOID
dir. Nick Verdi, 2021
USA, 85 min
In English

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 5PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 10PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15 – 7:30PM WITH Q&A *this event is $10
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19 – 10PM

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Andrew, a delusional loner who wants to kill all white men in Massachusetts, returns to his hometown in the wake of family tragedy and goes on a murderous rampage.

“…a gripping, hard-hitting psychothriller with the grimy, realistic edge of John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” – CinemaSpection

“It plays like a horrific dream during which you’re just following this one person the entire time and you don’t want to keep learning these terrible things about them, but you can’t wake up. Lead actor Jimmy Laine, who plays that brooding and delusional loner named Andrew, was the glue that made the concept stick. His performance is heightened and effective, bringing you along with him on this spiral. It’s hard to take your eyes off him. If you’re looking for an underseen (and bizarre) gem from 2021, this is it.” – Lex Briscuto, Dread Central

“No redeeming qualities to this one IMO. A large portion of the movie is the lead making anguished faces while nothing happens. Felt like it had nowhere to go and nothing to say along the way.” – Adam Vass, Letterboxd user

THE OREGONIAN
Dir. Calvin Lee Reeder, 2011
USA, 81 min
In English

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, OCTOBER 24 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 10PM

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After a car accident on a lonely stretch of road, a woman finds herself stranded and badly wounded with no memory of her name. A series of strange encounters leads her through the woods and sand, searching desperately for the answers she needs to finally be at peace.

Calvin Lee Reeder’s first feature film The Oregonian could be described as “Purgatorial Noise Horror”. A juxtaposition of breathtaking Pacific folk wilderness against derelict lo-fi nightmares. An aggravating piece of surreality with a gooey black sense of humor. Ojai Manson/Hipster sensory assault, edited to all hell, soaked in sickening reds and otherworldly greens. You may never want to eat an omelette again.

Who’s Watching: The Early Films of the Pacific Street Collective

On Saturday, October 29th, Spectacle and Cine-Móvil will host a tribute to the Pacific Street Collective and their early works of counter-surveillance. This program celebrates the 50th anniversary of RED SQUAD (1972), which will be followed up by the equally audacious SURVEILLANCE: WHO’S WATCHING? (1971).

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29TH – 7:30 PM

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Red Squad
dir. Pacific Street Collective, 1972
45 mins, USA.
In English

“An extraordinary work of investigative journalism.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Made by then-NYU students under the tutelage of Martin Scorsese, RED SQUAD sees the Pacific Street Collective disrupt and annoy extrajudicial police and FBI surveillance units who continually intruded on anti-Vietnam War demonstrations throughout the ‘70s. Their brave efforts to disclose these wanton acts of targeted surveillance by a prejudiced police force was acclaimed by critics, including Amos Vogel who dubbed it “an extraordinary political film.”

Surveillance: Who’s Watching?
dir. Pacific Street Collective, 1971
60 mins, USA.
In English.

SURVEILLANCE: WHO’S WATCHING? can be seen as a direct precursor to RED SQUAD, as young members of the newly formed Pacific Street Collective position themselves as bait during a peaceful demonstration to out members of Chicago PD’s radical squad on television. Despite catching PD knuckleheads Maurice Daly and Truman Stromberg in the act of surveillance, all three members of the Collective were arrested and told to leave Chicago under threat of violence, a testament to their courage as politically-motivated documentarians at an early point in their careers.

Special thanks to Steve Fischler, Joel Sucher and Cine-Móvil.

Cine Móvil is a pop-up cinema collective spreading revolutionary culture across the five boroughs. Founded in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, the collective endeavors to bring together audiences to view and discuss radical cinema. Cine Móvil recognizes the role that culture plays in movements, and aims to uplift the revolutionary consciousness of people, connecting the films they screen with the real material conditions which people and organizations face in the present. Cinema is for the people!

This SPECTOBER, we will invoke spectres on the screen. Probing the economic, social and political hauntings that possess the doomed state of our present condition, this program addresses the echoes of buried philosophies that reverberate beyond their graves.

Ken McMullen’s GHOST DANCE (1983) dives into a Derridean whirlpool as it reconciles the immortal nature of ghosts against the finitude of life, while Alan Klima’s GHOSTS AND NUMBERS locates a shared virtuality among phantoms and cybernetics. Legendary Spanish director Pere Portabella’s VAMPIR-CUADECUC (1971), a film forged on the fly as Jesús Franco filmed his own Count Dracula starring Christopher Lee, tessellates shards of making-of footage into an oblique allegory on dissent during dictatorial times. This subversion of Franco’s canonical narrative doubles as a disruptive act against Francisco Franco, collaging a mess of scenes that dispel the theatrical formulation of a grand political narrative. J.P. Sniadecki and artists Xu Ruotao and Huang Xiang’s YUMEN (2013) takes over this legacy, piecing together an anti-portrait of China’s economic prosperity through its exploration of a once-oil rich town now in ruins.

Special thanks to Elif Karlidag and Ken McMullen at Art Cinema, Documentary Educational Resources, Alan Klima, J.P. Sniadecki, Xu Ruotao, Huang Xiang and Cinema Guild.

GHOST DANCE
dir. Ken McMullen, 1983
100 mins, United Kingdom.
In English.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1 – 7:30pm
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5 – 10pm
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21 – 7:30pm w Q/A from Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Cinema Without Reflection
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 7:30pm

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Jumping between Paris and London as it traces the lives of two young women (Pascal Ogier and Leonie Mellinger) as they muse about ghosts and memories, Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance falls somewhere between Celine and Julie Go Boating and San Soleil in its investigation into Jacques Derrida’s phantasmagoric philosophy. Though intellectually rigorous, the film maintains a humorous tone, balancing heady ideas alongside entrancing visuals and witty dialogue.

VAMPIR-CUADECUC
dir. Pere Portabella, 1971
66 mins, Spain.
In English.

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MONDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 10pm
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 7:30pm
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 10pm
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 7:30pm w Q/A from Sara Nadal-Melsio, author of Politically Red

Shot on the sly while Jesús Franco shot his own Count Dracula, Vampir-Cuadecuc remixes making-of footage alongside an investigation into the figure of the vampire. Boasting a roaring score and high-contrast black and white, the fantasmic materialism of Portabella’s early experiment deconstructs the dominant cinematic and political narratives of the Franco regime.

GHOSTS AND NUMBERS 
dir. Alan Klima, 2009
66 mins, Thailand.
In Thai with English subtitles.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1 – 5pm w Q/A w director Alan Klima
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 5pm
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 7:30pm
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 10pm

Anthropologist Alan Klima’s directorial debut is set in the aftermath of the Asian monetary crisis and the collapse of the Thai baht. Narrated by a ghostly figure who wanders the colossal buildings left unfinished by the crash, Ghosts and Numbers embarks on a surreal trip through Bangkok as it tries to reckon with the wreckage of a financial fiasco.

YUMEN 
dirs. J.P. Sniadecki, Xu Ruotao & Huang Xiang, 2013
65 mins, China.
In Chinese with English subtitles.

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MONDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 7:30pm
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 10pm
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 7:30pm w Q/A w director J.P. Sniadecki
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 10pm

Commended as “a painful and nostalgic homage to a fading world and the medium which registered it,” after winning the Special Jury Award at FICUNAM, J.P. Sniadecki (of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab) and Chinese artists Xu Ruotao and Huang Xiang’s celluloid collage conjures a ghost story that aptly reflects the terrain it registers. Tracing the lives of lost souls hovering about a once-rich oil town now in ruins, Yumen (玉门) creates a spellbinding story registering the effects of late-stage capitalism.