MERCANO EL MARCIANO
(MERCANO, THE MARTIAN)
dir. Juan Antin, 2002
73 mins. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 10 PM

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Do you like Martians? Tex Avery-paced animation? Political satire? Rude humor? Subtitles? Then have we got a movie for you!

From Argentina, and a combination of traditional and computer animation, the Spanish-language MERCANO EL MARCIANO is the epitome of a cult movie: not too many people have seen this, but those that do, love it. When animation comes out of a region where it is not an “industry”—like the US, Japan or France—it tends to use the medium for more than just brainwashing children and increasing sales of soon-to-be-forgotten toys.

In this film, after a space probe from Earth squashes his “dog,” angry alien Mercano flies his saucer to Earth to register a complaint—only to find that the Earth is so fucked up and evil that even a Martian armed with a death ray can’t catch a break.

The film is a twist on the “fish out of water” and “Martian Invasion” tropes, and uses the spaceman’s naiveté of our greedy and malevolent ways to drive the humor. Stranded in Buenos Aires, the sad and lonely Martian (who looks like a cross between Charlie Brown and a pickle) wanders through a city that has been devastated by poverty, corporate greed, violence, and uncertainty, all the while chased by trigger-happy cops (dub the flick into English and you could say he landed in NYC). In an attempt to “phone home,” the extraterrestrial steals a laptop, but instead winds up befriending a teen sci-fi geek. But the kid’s yuppie-executive father is plotting total global consumer enslavement—and he intends to use Mercano’s outer space technology to get it, eventually entrapping the unfortunate alien in a giant test tube. But those foolish humans don’t know what tricks those “men from Mars” have…

Originally released in 2002, this was the first independent Argentine full-length animated film in 30 years. MERCANO EL MARCIANO was originally produced as a series of shorts for Argentina’s MTV, and the flick is certainly a kissing cousin to South Park and Beavis & Butthead—and not just because of the outrageous gross-out humor, deliberately crude animation, and a propensity for musical numbers, but as a barbed and absurdist take on contemporary capitalist society.

Created while Argentina’s economy was melting down, the film has even greater resonance today with a global recession, thuggish world leaders in the pockets of corporations, and nightmarish austerity measures forced down people’s throats ruining social services. “Now… the whole world [has] started to collapse and I am not surprised at all,” said director Juan Antin in 2013. Antin has gone on to make the family-friendly Netflix hit PACHAMAMA (2019), which, among the plucky adolescent protagonist’s misadventures and antics with various cute animals, actually has a strong, subversive anti-authoritarian streak running through it.

Featured in multiple international film festivals, MERCANO was the winner of the Audience Award at Spain’s Catalonian International Film Festival in 2002, as well as the Special Jury Mention at the Festival du Film d’Animation Annecy 2002 in France. Mercano el Marciano has also been shown at the Melbourne Latin American Film Festival, San Sebastian Film Festival, the Latin American Film Festival of Washington D.C., the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and many others.

Hankering for a good old-fashioned slasher, but sick of all those slick production values and coherent plots? Look no further than Spectacle’s very special October retrospective of early Tim Ritter joints.

The offerings in this series were all written and directed by Ritter between the ages of 16 and 19, and boy does it show, as he delves into insecure white-male panic head on. If that sounds too serious or self aware, don’t worry, these SOV classics are neither of those things. They are a great deal of fun, though!

TRUTH OR DARE: A CRITICAL MADNESS
dir. Tim Ritter, 1986
87 mins. United States.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30 – 7:30 PM

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Mike Strauber is just your average Joe, working a 9-to-5 to support his doting wife Sharon. That is, until he comes home early from work and catches her in the throes of passion with his best friend Jerry. Mike spirals into madness, hallucinating a new female companion who nudges him into some playful self mutilation and murder via a game of, you guessed it, Truth or Dare! The bodies begin to stack up quickly in increasingly unique ways, including a brief side-trip through a mental hospital and a golden mask for some reason.

KILLING SPREE
dir. Tim Ritter, 1987
88 mins. United States.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30 – 10 PM

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What can you say about a film starring a man named Asbestos Felt? Not much.

Tom is convinced his wife is sleeping around on him, so he goes on a killing spree, offing anyone he suspects might be philandering with his her – but this time, the victims aren’t staying dead!

KILLING SPREE is essentially TRUTH OR DARE? turned to 11, trading in the same themes and paranoia as his previous feature but managing to go even more berserk, indulging in cheap porn-parody setups to kills as Tom reads sleazy short stories his wife has written and fantasizes himself into a murderous rage.

The best suburbia takedown this side of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, with exterior locations so bland they’re dreamlike, and interiors so stylishly decorated and warped by neon lighting they become a nightmare. Also make sure to stick around for an end-credit-rap-recap that will truly blow your mind.

Special thanks to American Genre Film Archive.

The Imagine Science Film Festival has been melding art and science in interdisciplinary hybrid programming since 2008. While the festival travels throughout New York City each year, we always save some of the most audacious memorable reconfigurations of scientific themes for Spectacle. This year, this will extend over three full programs of recovered memories, post-anthropocene flicker film, and dystopian data massage.

ISFF 2019 PROGRAM 1: SELF CARE, ALCHEMY, AND OTHER LIFE HACKS
dir. Various, 2016 – 2019
83 mins.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

ONLINE TICKETS

How do we preserve ourselves in uncertain times, when even body and identity may become commercially harvestable data and threats take on unpredictable forms? Our annual wide-ranging program of animation and experimental film explores all this and more. Watch for: unsettling sociologies of social media, unconventional conversations on health, technological history informing personal visions, and a literal preservation process in the frames of stop motion.

Freeze Frame (Soetkin Verstegen | 5 min | Belgium | 2019)
Shalva (Danna Windsor | 3 min | USA | 2018)
Slug Life (Sophie Koko Gate | 7 min | UK | 2018)
Las del Diente (Ana Perez Lopez | 5 min | USA | 2018)
The Desert (Ben Bigelow | 14 min | USA | 2018)
Reverie of the Puppets (Kathy Rose | 5 min | USA | 2018)
Pwdre Ser the rot of stars (Charlotte Pryce | 7 min | UK | 2018)
Cyanovisions (Tiare Ribeaux & Jody Stillwater | 14 min | USA | 2019)
iBooks (Odile Postic | 4 min | USA | 2018)
Call of Comfort (Brenda Lien | 9 min | Germany | 2018)
Your Last Day on Earth (Marc Martínez Jordán | 13 min | Spain | 2019)

Content Warning: Male genitals undergoing wax strip hair removal.

ISFF 2019 PROGRAM 2: MODERN HAUNTINGS
dir. Various, 2018
65 mins.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22 – 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY! 

ONLINE TICKETS

As the night goes on, we’ll allow some of the phantoms banished by science back into the discourse. Here, the psychiatric myth of the “recovered memory” drives the Satanic Panic of the early 1980s, ghosts are reanimated by 3D scan, and information itself haunts deep water and the margins of international law.

Demonic (Pia Borg | 29 min | Australia | 2018)
Tropics (Mathilde Lavenne | 14 min | France / Mexico | 2018)
Cablestreet (Meredith Lackey | 22 min | USA | 2018)

ISFF 2019 PROGRAM 3: TWILIGHT GEOLOGIES
dir. Various, 2018-2019
85 mins.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23 – 7:30 PM

ONLINE TICKETS

Otherworldly mineral landscapes glisten and flicker, sunset throws vast shadows across the clouds, craters dream, and the entire anthropocene Earth shivers and collapses in a deathly shimmer. This program collects four brilliant experiments in light, landscape, and perception, harnessing the luminous photochemical mechanics of film and projection itself to heighten the experience of climactic celestial and earthly events. These are films that demand to be seen splashed large and in the total darkness of a cinema, in their full apocalyptic and regenerative power.

CW: Viewers should be advised that several films in this program make use of strobe effects.

Altiplano (Malena Szlam | 16 min | Chile/Argentina/Canada | 2018)
Umbra (Johannes Krell & Florian Fischer | 20 min | Germany | 2018)
It Has to Be Lived Once and Dreamed Twice (Rainer Kohlberger | 28 min | Austria | 2019)
Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu | 21 min | France / Portugal | 2019)

“There are people through the decades who become regular fixtures in the pages of Variety – everyone from Al Jolson to Jimmy Durante to Michael Ovitz to Harvey Weinstein. But no one’s presence has been as constant as that of Zack Norman.” – Variety

🔥 NEIL COHEN & ZACK NORMAN (aka HOWARD ZUKER) IN PERSON ON OCTOBER 15 🔥
🔥  ZACK NORMAN (aka HOWARD ZUKER) IN PERSON ON OCTOBER 14 🔥
🔥 NEIL COHEN & ZACK NORMAN (aka HOWARD ZUKER) IN PERSON ON OCTOBER 15 🔥

Filmed in the dead center of Reagan’s second-term, CHIEF ZABU was conceived as as a send-up of the get-rich-quick American mentality of the yuppie ’80s, following a couple of loudmouths who get themselves into an ill-conceived real estate venture in the fictional Polynesian island nation of Tiburaku. Zack Norman (of SITTING DUCKS and Robert Downey’s AMERICA) co-stars—and co-directs under his the name Howard Zuker—alongside the legendary Allen Garfield and Allan Arbus. Filmed over a two-week period at Bard College’s campus with a small indie crew (lensed by Frank Prizzi, who also DPed for SLEEPWALK and LIVING IN OBLIVION), it also enlisted a 22-student fleet of Bard interns padding out the shoot. The shoestring budget was so ludicrously scrappy, the production was profiled in a special “film centennial” issue of Life magazine.

Perhaps in an act of life imitating art, the production was subjected to its own comedy of errors, toiling for well over a year to find a distributor and eventually languishing after its would-be acquirer declared bankruptcy mere weeks before its planned premiere. But the story didn’t end there: the film achieved an unexpected second life as a running gag on MST3K, its hosts echoing the long-running page-3 ad ran in Variety for three years—”Zack Norman is Sammy in CHIEF ZABU”—every time a newspaper is shown on screen.

In October 2016, the political ascendancy of a certain real estate tycoon who rose to prominence in Reagan’s America—and whose own conquests had been a literal inspiration the film—motivated Norman and producer Neil Cohen to dust the film off, showing the film as a series of road show screenings across the US. Its influence is slowly but surely paying off: if you’re ever at Ft. Lauderdale tiki bar The Mai-Kai, you can order a rum speciality drink called “The Chief Zabu.” Indeed, it’s probably worth a revival—it’s a handsome 73 minute character-driven comedy, carried not only by its heavies Garfield and Arbus, but by Zack Norman’s gabby, desperate, puppy dog comedic ingenuity.

Norman, a real estate mogul in his non-celluloid life, is an actor, stand up comedian, and film financier (under pseudonym Howard Zuker), whose industriousness helped fund Spaghetti westerns, cult lesbian vampire film DAUGHTERS OF THE DARK, Peter Davis’s epochal Vietnam documentary HEARTS AND MINDS, and many of the films of Henry Jaglom. In honor of his forthcoming appearance at Spectacle and decades-long dedication to the seventh art, we also show selections from his on-screen career—the early ’80s buddy comedy SITTING DUCKS; the much-maligned Robert Downey Sr. film AMERICA; Henry Jaglom’s film festival send-up FESTIVAL IN CANNES; and a very odd, porno-chic parody of JAWS titled GUMS, directed by Robert J. Kaplan (director of the Holly Woodlawn midnight SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS) and starring Brother Theodore .

🔥 ZACK NORMAN (aka HOWARD ZUKER) IN PERSON ON OCTOBER 14 🔥
🔥 NEIL COHEN & ZACK NORMAN (aka HOWARD ZUKER) IN PERSON ON OCTOBER 15 🔥
🔥 ZACK NORMAN (aka HOWARD ZUKER) IN PERSON ON OCTOBER 14 🔥

CHIEF ZABU
dirs. Howard Zuker and Neil Cohen, 1988/2016
73 mins. United States.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 7:30 PM

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The storied 1988 feature from Howard Zuker (Zack Norman’s film financier alter ego) and Neil Cohen, a fast-talking duo who met during the production of Robert Downey Sr.’s AMERICA. Finally resurfacing in a post-Trump America, it’s a romp on a shoestring, featuring appearances from heavies like Allan Arbus (GREASER’S PALACE, M*A*S*H), Allen Garfield (NASHVILLE, BEVERLY HILLS COP II), Norman himself, and Marianna Hill (THE GODFATHER PART II).

FESTIVAL IN CANNES
dir. Henry Jaglom, 2001
100 mins. United States.

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SITTING DUCKS
Dir. Henry Jaglom, 1980
90 mins. United States.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 7:30 PM w/ZACK NORMAN in PERSON for Q&A!

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Initially shown in May as part of our Jaglom ’80s series EMOTION TIME, SITTING DUCKS has Zack Norman and Michael Emil as neurotic petty criminals en route to Central America, caught up in a romantic carousel. An envoy of the eighties: self-help morphs into opportunism, the American landscape becomes a string of motels and strip-malls—the perfect pre-game for CHIEF ZABU.

AMERICA
(aka MOONBEAM)
dir. Robert Downey Sr., 1986
83 mins. United States.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9 – 10 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 10 PM w/ZACK NORMAN in person for Q&A!
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 7:30 PM

ONLINE TICKETS       FACEBOOK EVENT

GUMS
dir. Robert J Kaplan, 1976
70 mins. United States.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER  18 – 10 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 21 – 10 PM

ONLINE TICKETS       FACEBOOK EVENT

An endlessly odd relic from the age of porno chic, GUMS stars comedian and metaphysician Brother Theodore in a ribald, bad taste parody of JAWS. From Robert J. Kaplan, director of the Holly Woodlawn midnight classic SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17 – 10 PM
w/Fred H. Berger in person for Q&A, moderated by goth historian and DJ Andi Harriman
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 10 PM
w/introduction by author Deirdre Coyle
(These events are $10.)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31 – 7:30 PM

ONLINE TICKETS        FACEBOOK EVENT

While the magazine covered nightlife, music, and fashion, Berger followed through on his cinephilic inklings and produced, wrote and directed three companion “videozines” in the early 1990s. The videos starred Propaganda supermodels John Koviak, Scott Crawford and Tia Giles and sold around 20,000 VHS copies, as well as screening at parties and goth clubs such as Mother in NYC, Helter Skelter in Los Angeles, and House of Usher in San Francisco.

Loaded with iconic imagery, the tapes alternate between lush and stark, lo-fi and haute fashion, fetishistic and tongue-in-cheek. The Trilogy finds the gorgeous androgyne John Koviak roleplaying in a variety of historically fascist roles while suffering a crisis of conscience, Blood Countess depicts the noble serial killer Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, and The Ritual is suitably pagan. The tapes are as follows:

Volume 1, The Trilogy (1991)
Volume 2, Blood Countess (1992)
Volume 3, The Ritual (1994)

Spectacle is excited to present new high definition transfers of the tapes from the surviving BetaSP dubs in collaboration with Fred Berger in a celebrative look back at the subculture that swept the eighties and its aesthetic evolution, from Siouxsie and the Banshees to the Cocteau Twins, from Victorian vampiria to shocking iconography to heroin chic queerness.

CONTENT WARNING: The first tape contains a scene featuring offensive iconography — namely, an actor is dressed as an SS officer in a scene that also depicts dead bodies. While the programmers and Spectacle understand that these symbols, both in the film and in broader goth and queercore culture of the time, are being used to subvert and strip them of their power, we would like to take a moment to restate our policy: under no circumstances will fascists ever be allowed or tolerated in our space.