GLEN OR GLENDA
dir. Edward D. Wood Jr, 1953
USA, 61 min.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – MIDNIGHT THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 10 PM THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15 – 10 PM SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18 – 7:30 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 10 PM
“In the making of this film, which deals with a strange and curious subject, no punches have been pulled– no easy way out has been taken. Many of the smaller parts are portrayed by persons who actually are, in real life, the character they portray on the screen. This is a picture of stark realism– taking no sides — but giving you the facts — ALL the facts — as they are today… YOU ARE SOCIETY — JUDGE YE NOT…”
Opening with and extended monologue by The Scientist (Bela Lugosi, dead) he “explains” that in humanity’s search for the unknown many startling things come to light. While investigating the suicide of a transvestite, Inspector Warren seeks the help of Dr. Alton who tells him the sordid tale of a man named Glen (Ed Wood). Glen’s wife Barbara (Dolores Fuller, Ed Wood’s real life girlfriend at the time) accuses him of having another woman in his life but little does she know the “other woman” is Glen’s female counterpart – Glenda! Recounted in flashback we see Glen wearing his sisters clothes for Halloween and then never wanting to take them off. Shunned by his family, Glen must keep his desires a secret. Now it’s up to Glen to decide if he should tell his blushing bride-to-be about his double life…
One of 3 films directed by Ed Wood in 1953, GLEN OR GLENDA was shot in just 4 days, propped up by almost 14 minutes of stock footage, and padded out with erotic vignettes by producer George Weiss. The film was initially to be a profile of Christine Jorgensen who had dominated the headlines only a year before. After Jorgensen turned the filmmakers down they decided to go a different route, though many of the films promotional materials still tried to sell it as a profile of Jorgensen. Though no official sequel was ever filmed Glen/Glenda would show up in two of Wood’s novels later on. After film fell into public domain it was released dozens if not hundreds of times garnering quite a reputation along the way. David Lynch is such a fan of this film that he used the “blowing wind” sound effect from it in his film ERASERHEAD!
TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE
dir. Edward D. Wood Jr, 1970
USA, 77 min.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – MIDNIGHT MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – 10 PM TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM
“Ed gave you free reign, he let you do your thing. You showed him what you could do and then you went ahead and did it. Eddie let you improvise a lot. A lot. Because he was not stuck to any one particular concept or idea.”
– Michael Donovan O’Donnell, “Nightmare Of Ecstasy”
A private dick named Mac McGregor (Michael Donovan O’Donnell) is brought in to help Frank and Donna Stanley, a couple search for their missing daughter. The trail leads him to a house of ill-repute. Inside are all manners of perversions and titillating sights to behold…can he keep his nose to the grindstone and bring the girl home?
Thought lost for years TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE was rediscovered by Ed Wood biographer Rudolph Grey while doing research for his book “Nightmare of Ecstasy.” Additionally, in the 1990’s 3 reels of bloopers, behind the scenes footage, and alternate takes were discovered in a theater in Santa Monica, California. Not screened in NYC since Anthology’s massive retrospective in 2014, TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE is finally set for home release by AGFA later this month.
Note: Both of these films contain scenes of sexual violence which may be offensive. Viewer discretion is advised.
This November, as we gear up for the start of the nightmare that is HOLIDAY SEASON, Spectacle is serving up two heaping helpings of MORAL TERROR – films with black and white visions of good and evil, where every transgression is followed by a lesson (usually deadly).
Both of these offerings are made for TV, but that doesn’t lessen the thrills – including haunting scarecrows, nightmare children, and the hobo-ization of a Wall Street scumbag.
DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW
dir. Frank Felitta, 1981
96 min, USA
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 10 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9 – MIDNIGHT SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – MIDNIGHT TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – 10 PM
‘Mar-vel-ous! I was terrified!’ – Vincent Price
Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a made-for-TV horror film about a subject we’ve all become a little too familiar with lately: a gross miscarriage of justice.
When word spreads around town that little Marylee has been killed by gentle giant and local dullard Bubba (Larry Drake – Darkman, Dr. Giggles), five good-ol-boys decide to take ‘justice’ into their own hands by organizing a flash-mob and murdering Bubba in cold blood. Literal moments after the deed is done, word comes over the radio that Marylee is fine – in fact, Bubba saved her.
The murderers are acquitted on the grounds of ‘self-defense’ (lol) but its not long before a scarecrow turns up on the property of the ringleader…
If you like moody, creeping thrillers and a healthy serving of true karmic justice, this one is not to be missed. A true gem of a film.
Screening the blu-ray remaster courtesy of CALIFORNIA PICTURES INC.
ALIEN ZONE aka THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
dir. Shannon Miller
1978, USA
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 10 PM SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – MIDNIGHT FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – 10 PM TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – 10 PM
A rarely seen American anthology that attempted to capture the glory of the Amicus days in the UK, Shannon Miller directs this series of five alternately creepy and hilarious shorts, with a wraparound story centered on an adulterer who’s taxi accidentally drops him off outside of a funeral home.
After asking to use the phone, our adulterer is given a tour of the funeral home’s current residents by the caretaker, who takes him through each demise in great detail, each one addressing a different ‘sin’ of sorts.
Though it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Scarecrow, it is definitely a unique ride, featuring everything from evil trick or treaters to a hidden-camera-serial-killer to a cat-and-mouse game between rival Private Investigators.
The early 80s of West Berlin was accessible to David Bowie and Nick Cave, however it remained a secluded scene unto itself, a fallen city shared between the French, the Brits, and the Americans. Much of the architecture was unchanged from the war, and a post-war generation of musicians and artists were able to live cheap, work little, squat housing, and stay out all night. Muscha’s DECODER is a Spectacle favorite making a return appearance, paired for the first time with B MOVIE: LUST AND SOUND IN WEST BERLIN 1979-1989. The latter can be something of a companion piece, featuring a lot of the same faces in a more music-doc format. Muscha was from Dusseldorf, but came to Berlin for many of the same reasons as the English narrator in LUST AND SOUND. For both the Super 8 footage in LUST AND SOUND and the rich color portraits in DECODER, these are must-sees on a bigger screen with a bigger sound.
DECODER
Dir. Muscha, Trini Trimpop, 87 min.
West Germany, 1984
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 5 PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17 – 10 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23- MIDNIGHT MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 10 PM
This film should be watched stoned, on whatever substance, as both a tribute to William S. Burroughs and to ensure complete and proper absorption. DECODER is a quiet bureaucratic surveillance drama, but then it’s a color-soaked, Benjamin-tinged struggle over information and control. It stars Bill Rice (who you know from Andrew Horn’s DOOMED LOVE), a man impeccably sensitive and equally expressive under vibrant colored lights. There are fast food joints, great tunes, Genesis P-Orridge, Christiane F, and the true answer to whether music recorded from frogs in distress can incite revolution.
“Information is like a bank – some of us are rich, and some of us are poor. ALL OF US CAN BE RICH.”
New Poster by isabel lezcano
B MOVIE: LUST AND SOUND IN WEST BERLIN
Dir. Jörg A. Hoppe, Klaus Maeck, Heiko Lange, 92 min.
Germany, 2015
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 5 PM THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – 10 PM MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – 7:30 PM WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14 – 10 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 7:30 PM
This film follows Manchester-born and bored Mark Reeder, who is driven by a love for Can and Edgar Froese to West Berlin in the late 70s. As a budding band manager and eventual radio show host on the BBC, he immerses himself in the scene and documents his new love for the wild and vibrant city. He is present for the squatters rights skirmishes and nights out til 7 am at clubs and bars, where bands like Malaria!, Einstürzende Neubauten and Die Toten Hosen come to define new sounds in a limitless world of creative freedom and easy poverty.
This decade was also that of the Super 8, and Reeder dabbles in pornos and arty shorts as well as more conventional documentary filming. The resulting footage is grainy and raw – squatters clashing with police, punk shows in basement squats, and interviews with musicians unconcerned with commercial viability or trying to capture a scene on film. Reeder talks us through his transformation from a Virgin records employee in Manchester to a Berliner band manager, trying to expose the world to music sung in German. West Berlin acts like it doesn’t need Mark Reeder, but as a scene flourishes, dies out and is reborn, it is a favor that an outsider fell in love with it and wanted the world to know.
CALLING ALL LEFTISTS! The past few years have been a whirlwind: exhausting, invigorating,
and ripe with potential. It’s tremendously difficult, when in the thick of it, to pause, reflect, or
even find a moment to catch a breath. Especially when “it” refers to the rise of fascism on a
global scale, with any number of future cataclysms hovering just over the horizon. But we
digress.
Join us, then, for a series that asks: if not now, when? Come for great works of radical political
filmmaking, stay for the generative discussions, or even just to commiserate about how little has
fundamentally changed over the past 100 years (the span of time which the films in this series
will cover). The hope is that this forum for authentic representations of successes, defeats, and
the messy work of political action, will be thrilling, edifying, and maybe even inspire your next
organizing project.
To butcher the title of a great film for the sake of a moderately applicable pun: “Throw away your dogma, rally in the cinema.”
I’ll Be Your Eyes, You’ll Be Mine
dir. Keja Kramer and Stephen Dwoskin
France, 2006
In French with English Subtitles, 47 mins
THURSDAY, JUNE 13 – 7:30 PM (double feature with It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve)
TUESDAY, JUNE 25 – 7:30 PM (double feature with It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve)
Stephen Dwoskin: I think [Robert Kramer] was getting worn out in his search a bit, finding a way through, in an abstract sort of way, not knowing any longer exactly how to handle the material without getting into a repetition. Not knowing how far to go! You need a lot of energy to do it, you need a lot of motivation, because making films is a bit like a drug – and if you OD on it, it’s pretty hard. You can get lost very easily in it, like being stoned, and then demobilised, don’t you agree? I don’t know where Robert was in his private life, you probably know better.
Keja Kramer [Robert’s daughter]: I don’t think there’s another life than the film when you are in it.
Dwoskin: Well, making a film is life!
Kramer: Exactly, so he wasn’t living at home; he was shooting every day.
Dwoskin: But it’s also about how one feels about a relationship to one’s self at that time. To keep the ball bouncing – sometimes it’s very easy to give up. Making films for many people … it’s really hard work. If you lose your motivation for a moment, the whole thing could fall apart; it’s very heavy, very intense, and that intensity can be very exhausting …
Kramer: I was laughing to myself about shooting I’ll Be Your Eyes, and the idea of all those situations of dragging the tripod on a bicycle because it was too heavy to carry, and all these cameras on my back, walking out to the middle of a field to change into that green suit and turning the camera on, having nobody behind the camera, wandering around … In those moments, when you’re working within such a lonely configuration, you have only your own motivation to go on, your own self …
Dwoskin: Yeah, it’s the same.
Kramer: … for acknowledgement. But, even working here, when it’s just the two of us, you feel like there’s no world – the whole world is just this world, these images that we’ve pulled in.
-conversation between the directors recorded 2/11/ 06, published online in Rouge #9
It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve: Masao Adachi
dir. Nicole Brenez and Philippe Grandrieux
France, 2011
In French with English subtitles, 74 min
Avant-garde cinema is not primarily defined by its economic origins, nor by a doctrinaire platform, nor a singular aesthetic: it diverts a technology born of military and industrial needs, reinscribes it within a dynamic of emancipation and therefore participates in a vast critical movement that culminates in the 18th century with the philosophy of Kant and the Enlightenment. If the work of art’s primary territory is that of the conscience or the work of faculties, its challenge consists of continuously reconfiguring the symbolic, to question the division between art and life, such as the humiliating division between the ideal and reality. For an avant-garde artist, art only has sense in its refusal, in its contesting, its pulverization of the limits of the symbolic; it exists as an end within itself or as a means of directly intervening in the real…
The portrait here is not a link, not a report, not a clarification, nor an unveiling. It gathers and gives itself the means (visual, stylistic) of reconstituting the unsounded, volumetric, immeasurable properties of a presence, a fortiori when it concerns the presence of a creator with an exceptional historical journey. A two-dimensional image provides us with an approximate figure; it cannot open us up to the being whose contours it adjusts like a skimpy outfit and, more often than not, falls back on an archetype or a cliché. Far from the usual portraits, that of Masao Adachi by Philippe Grandrieux resembles nothing aside from James Joyce’s Ulysses, an inverted Ulysses: a psychic odyssey that guides us from an internal monologue, through confidence, by the objectification of external witnesses, by spatial and temporal contextualization, by epiphanies born of the appearances of faces, by the constructivist revelation of the means of its production, and in its conclusion, describes to us the utter complexity of a being without having consigned him to an identity—as we are wont to do to those we love because, seen through a loving light, they flood us with an inexhaustible infinity.
-from “Cultural Guerrillas,” Brenez and Grandreux’s manifesto on the substance of their collaboration, published 3/1/12 at Moving Image Source
For May Day, two films on occupation and “claiming space:” one a testament to the strength of female workers, the other a salvo against the legitimacy of state borders.
COMPAÑERAS
Grupo Alavio, 2004
Argentina, 38 min
MONDAY MAY 6 – 7:30 PM TUESDAY, MAY 21 – 7:30 PM
Grupo Alavio is an anarchist film collective, their name an homage to the itinerant workers of the early 20th-century who would disseminate propaganda kept in their avios (knapsacks). Drawing inspiration from these fleet-footed labor activists of yesteryear, the group travels from town to town filming the struggles of laborers endeavoring to build collective strength and overcome socioeconomic injustice. These documentaries subvert many of the bourgeois tendencies common to the genre; they are self-funded and screened in the break rooms of municipal and factory workers in order to build solidarity and show the nuts-and-bolts process of workers unionizing and, in some notable cases, seizing the means of production. This particular film spotlights female Argentinian workers under diverse circumstances, united in their pursuit of personal and collective autonomy.
TECTONICS
Peter Bo Rappmund, 2012
US, 60 min
MONDAY MAY 6 – 7:30 PM TUESDAY, MAY 21 – 7:30 PM
(Part of a double feature with COMPAÑERAS)
A border is both a place and an idea; it is a line on the ground that cuts through people, destroying the land onto which it is forced. But what does a border look like? What are its sounds? And how can these sights and sounds be presented in a manner that is decolonizing in its effects? Rappmund attempts this by closely observing the U.S. Mexico borderland itself, its monuments, cacti, air traffic, flags, walls and fences. These objects hide as much as they reveal, so Rappmund’s methods depict this territory as both familiar and strange, resulting in a landscape documentary that is also animation. Whatever the border is, however many borders there are to know and fight, some of its realities are contained within this film.
Exactly a month after the innocent pranks of April Fools come the fiery clowning of May Day. On April 1st, join us for a Surprise Screening that looks at the connection between these holidays, and find out what it means to have your soda and drink it, too (politically speaking). Both films are playing in succession at 7:30 and again at 10:00 PM.
MONDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 and 10 PM
In December 1970, the Polish government announced price raises on many basic goods, including dairy and coal. Strikes, demonstrations and workplace occupations spread across the Baltic coast. This film is not about that. It is about something that happened in the months before those events. It is about something that is still happening now.
MONDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 and 10 PM
This past January, one of the great radical filmmakers passed away. A filmmaker whose work has been referred to as “anarchic,” in its form and political antics, perhaps more than any other. Burning Frame has decided to celebrate this director how he would have wanted, which is to say in the most perverse way possible: by screening his anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Outback comedy, the only film that dares address the deliciously diabolical role of carbonated beverages in planet-wide corporate hegemony. Journey with us back to a time when the Left didn’t want you to eat candy or have fun, when watching primetime resulted in false consciousness, when discrepancies in musical taste were a cause for division and ad hominem finger pointing. For Just One Night we take a break from our regularly scheduled doom and gloom for a program devoted to the questions that are really on our minds: Does the industrial nature of most 20th-century cinema make it inherently bourgeois? Is art class war by other means? Are you a Pepper™?
TO DIE IN MADRID
Dir. Frederic Rossif, 1963
85 min.
Frederic Rossif’s masterful To Die In Madrid was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1963. Not that awards matter: plaudits or no, this is the greatest film about the Spanish Civil War ever made, and a seminal work in the documentary genre. Filled with indelible imagery from the war, and accompanied by narration that is by turns rousing and heartfelt, this is a vivid elegy to the brave efforts that were made against the fascist front. A film which demands to be seen by radical leftists, and anyone who believes that our revolution one day will come.
An explicit work of docu-propaganda that was screened in London with assistance from Emma Goldman, Fury Over Spain resonates today, both as an insightful vision of from the past and a powerful call to arms today. Produced as a collaborative effort by, and featuring copious footage of, the F.A.I. (Iberian Anarchist Federation) and C.N.T. (Anarchist National Confederation of Labor) as they mounted a defense of the besieged Madrid and launched offensives in Catalonia.
playing with: THE WILL OF A PEOPLE
Louis Frank, 1938
45 min.
An impressively wide-ranging survey of the terrain of lived experience during the Spanish Civil War, The Will of a People presents the nuts-and-bolts of the war effort (everything from weapon-making to food-harvesting) woven throughout with commentary on Spain’s historical iconography.
REBELLIOUS CITY
Dir. Willy Lindwer, 80 min.
Netherlands, 2015
TUESDAY, JANUARY 22 – 7:30 PM
A recent, under-seen documentary, chronicling the Provo movement, a loose-knit collection of Dutch radicals and artists who captured the popular imagination and spurred change with boldly confrontational happenings. Featuring the likes of Cor Jaring, Roel van Duijn, Saar Stolk, Luud Schimmelpennink, Hans Metz, Bernhard de Vries, Irene van de Weetering, and Robert Jasper Grootveld, as they talk about the creative, playful and inspiring Sixties and the rise and fall of the Provo Movement.
THE TROUBLEMAKERS
dir. Robert Manchover, 50 min.
USA, 1966
TUESDAY, JANUARY 22 – 10 PM
In the late 60s, the Newark Community Union Project was created as a bloc within the Students for a Democratic Society. Their aim was to engage with the inner-city black community in Newark. The result is an unflinchingly honest film about the difficulties of community organizing, particularly attempts to engage across divides of race and class. Despite the group’s work to overcome these hurdles, the government does not bend to the community’s small demands — demonstrating the utter futility that is engaging with government bureaucracy. Produced with involvement from the late Robert Kramer.
screening with: COINTELPRO: THE FBI’S WAR ON BLACK AMERICA
dir. Denis Mueller and Deb Ellis, 53 min.
USA, 1989
A clear-eyed run through of how the U.S. Government conspired to violently quell the Black Power movement.
THE EDGE
Dir. Robert Kramer, 100 mins.
USA, 1968
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 7:30 and 10 PM
Shot in 1967, at the height of the American antiwar protests, The Edge captures a particular strain of ideological tension felt by the radical organizers of the time, between the pragmatism of peaceful organization and movement building, and the appeal of individual acts of insurrectionary violence — a tension that necessarily threatens the cohesion of the organizing bodies which, in this film, ultimately fracture under the weight of the resulting discord. A piercing study of the dangers of disillusionment and isolation in radical spaces, the film also perceptively deals with the friction that often exists between radicality and the maintenance of personal relationships. A radical work of narrative filmmaking, both in content and form. The late, great leftist filmmaker Robert Kramer, a founding member of the legendary Newsreel outfit, shot this ambitious project on a microbudget, fashioning aesthetic limitations into a political tool. The imagery is stark and no-frills, the overdubbed dialogue disembodied and distant — at once an expression of interiority and a seething, repressed exteriority that painfully rises to the surface.
This film will be followed by a special Encore Program at 10:00.
REBELLION IN PATAGONIA (aka LA PATAGONIA REBELDE)
Dir. Hector Olivera, 1974.
Argentina. 110 minutes.
REBELLION IN PATAGONIA represents a sterling work of Anarchist memorialization bravely brought to the screen by it’s director, Hector Olivera. Based on Oswaldo Bayer’s historical novel Patagonia Rebelde, about an anarcho-syndicalist labor union’s insurrectionary uprising against the Argentinian elite in the 1920s, which was banned and publicly burned in the 70’s along with the aforementioned feature film adaptation.
The film begins with an anarchist-led hotel workers’ strike so successful one forgets how the working class could ever lose sight of its inherent collective strength. But soon after the workers’ victory, cold reality swings back into sharp focus as the landowners conspire with the government to violently repress the strikers and rollback the gains made, a turn which the strikers had not foreseen. A cautionary tale for trusting state powers to uphold hard-won gains in worker’s rights.
For decades, Argentinian politics swung between the Nationalist populism of Juan Peron and a series of military coups, eventually centrally coordinated under Operation Condor, aimed at suppressing the socialist elements that made Peron so widely popular.
In 1976 the military seized power once again, ushering in a brutal 7 year dictatorship in which the film was banned, Bayer, Olivera, and several of the film’s actors were blacklisted, and Cepernic was imprisoned. In jail, he asked his warden if he deserved such cruel treatment simply for being a member of a Left-of-center party. “No, you’re not a prisoner because of your affiliation,” the warden reportedly said. “You’re a prisoner because you allowed Rebellion in Patagonia to be filmed.”
This film will be followed by a special Encore Program at 10:00.
!?!?!? dir. ?????
19??, ?? mins.
In English (????).
Ahhh, Halloween night: also known as All Hallow’s Eve, Samhain, Hallowmas and, for those of us lucky enough to live in the Big Apple, “Straight Pride Day”. Back when a certain subversive zombie classic still belonged in the public domain, Spectacle proudly hosted an annual October 31st screening as a public service, a respite from the undying procession of Premature Santas, Sexy Trumps and pumpkin-spice vomit hurricanes scaring the living hell out of Bedford Avenue. Even if those days are long-deceased, we still want to do little something special to celebrate our favorite holiday – “special” being a flexible and perhaps unhelpful word for the secret feature in question, a damnable horror-comedy mashup nobody involved in this ONE NITE ONLY SPECIAL 16MM SCREENING has ever actually seen. Pair that with some haunted house noises, a few rare one-reel educational frighteners, maybe a cartoon or two… and join us to find out how well it spooks.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 10:00 PM FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5 – MIDNIGHT MONDAY, OCTOBER 22 – 7:30 PM
and SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 – 10:00 PM [*Q&A* w/ Bill Bragg (dir), Vicky Walsh, & Kim Akins]
($10) ONLINE TICKETS FB EVENT
Special thanks to Jon Dieringer and director Bill Bragg.
Two lunatics, Nick and Vick, celebrate their wedding day at the local asylum like any couple would – by kicking off a killing spree in style (with a gonzo, saxed-out theme song behind them.) After running a man down the two lovebirds hit the trail leaving the bodies of hitchhikers, fast-food employees, and local bowling champions in their wake. That is, until the duo cross paths with an old woman in the midst of a run-in with a creepy cult. After saving her, Nick and Vick find out she’s being set up by her son who wants to take all of her money. She takes them back to her house and the three hatch a devious plan…
With the vast catalog of cinema at one’s fingertips in 2018, the hunt for lost films often leads to dead-ends, headaches, and heartbreak. But sometimes, with a little luck and a lot of elbow grease, there’s still treasures to be found. Such is the case with 1988’s gore/comedy ROAD MEAT. In it’s sparse mentions around the World Wide Web this slice of homemade Ohio goodness only gets mentioned in hushed tones and is often cited as “unfinished.”
Directed by Bill Bragg, starring Nick Baldasare (THEY BITE), with DP duties by Spec favorite Jay Woelful (BEYOND DREAM’S DOOR) ROAD MEAT was all but a rumor for almost 30 years. While the only remaining 16mm print is being scanned for an upcoming blu-ray release we’re proud to present a version that absolutely no one knew existed – an alternate cut (peppered with extra scenes to entice would be distributors) from the 3/4″ video master provided by the director himself.
AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL
(A MEIA-NOITE LEVAREI SUA ALMA)
Dir. José Mojica Marins, 1964
Brazil. 84 minutes.
In Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 7:30 PM SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 15 – 10:00 PM FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 10:00 PM
“What is Life? It is the Beginning of Death. What is Death? It is the end of life. What is existence? It is the continuity of blood. What is blood? It is the reason to exist!” So ushers in both the twin obsessions of death and progeny in the cinema of Zé do Caixão, and the first incarnation of Brazilian horror cinema. José Mojica Marins entered into the iconographic canon a figure who is both constructed of pieces from other famous monsters and a wholly original, idiosyncratic, definitively Brazilian figure who has yet to be duplicated (possessing the most disgusting nails you’re likely to come across).
With Marins’ third film, AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL, we are immediately familiarized with a fully-formed icon: the dreaded Zé do Caixão, whose reign of terror over the small mountain town in which he resides carries with it the certainty that the man is aided by the unnameable forces of evil.Operating on Nietzchean levels of religious irreverence and self-preservation, Zé’s main concern is the securement of an heir, an end in which the fury of his conviction knows no bounds. Cruel sadism defines his interactions with nearly person he comes across, acts aided by his diverse repertoire of violent methods, including his sheer strength, fueled by disdain (more often than not in misogynistic iterations), tarantulas and other creepy crawlies, and the manipulation of fear on display in all of Zé do Caixão’s appearances.While nothing in the diegesis explicitly reveals Zé’s powers to be sourced in the devil, the dark surrealism of Marins’ mise-en-scene never allows the film to leave the precarious position it holds on the edge of the supernatural.
Read over the years as an allegory for Brazilian military repression, a queer text, an epitome of paracinema, and countless other fields of discourse, AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL undoubtedly kicks off one of cinema’s most singular visions of an extended universe, held together by the essentially DIY ethic and “dirty screen” aesthetic that defines much of the Brazilian underground, a movement for which Spectacle holds nothing but whole-hearted admiration.
Content advisory – This film contains scenes of traumatic violence committed against women. While we believe these acts are dramatized with a critical perspective, we realize the adverse affect seeing such imagery potentially has on viewers.
NEXT OF KIN
dir. Tony Williams, 1982
92 mins. Australia.
*U.S. PREMIERE OF THE REMASTERED VERSION!* MONDAY, OCTOBER 1 – 10:00 PM SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6 – 7:30 THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 10:00 PM SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 – 7:30 PM
Directly between a slow burn haunting and a black-gloved giallo slasher sits NEXT OF KIN, Tony Williams’ grossly underseen (and hard to find) Australian horror film.
Linda Stevens has just inherited the Montclare estate, now functioning as a retirement home for the elderly, from her estranged and recently deceased mother. Shortly after moving in, strange things start to happen – taps turning on by themselves, power blowing out, a strange figure at the edge of the woods– and then one of the tenants is found dead in a bath. Linda searches for answers in her mother’s diary and finds startling similarities between the entries and the strange phenomena. Is Linda losing her mind, or is something deeply wrong with the Montclare house?
Favoring a thick mood over gore, though its not without its moments, it feels something like Peter Weir by way of Dario Argento. Featuring Ozploitation regular John Jarratt (WOLF CREEK) and a killer pulsing synth score by Klaus Schulze (coming off a brief stint in TANGERINE DREAM), NEXT OF KIN is a moody nightmare well worth a fresh look.
THE EVIL
dir. Gus Trikonis, 1978
89 mins. United States.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 1 – 7:30 PM FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19 – 10:00 PM SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 29 – 10:00 PM
Just when you thought you’d seen every ‘house built over a portal to hell’ flick, along comes Gus Trikonis’ THE EVIL.
Dr John Arnold and his wife Caroline have just purchased the Civil War-era Vargas mansion, with plans to turn it into a modern rehab center. As a motley crew of students and patients pile in to clean out the house, a ghostly presence makes itself known. Caroline tries to warn John, but the no-nonsense, all-logic, capital D-doctor will hear none of it.Of course it isn’t long before someone unlocks the portal to hell, night descends and the demonic force locks them in. Will any of them escape the grasp of THE EVIL???
Directed by Gus Trikonis (Indio in the original WEST SIDE STORY) and featuring earthquakes, at least two more electrocutions than you’d expect, and no less than one instance of a wire-gag-made-visible-by-remaster, this is the THE HAUNTING / THE SENTINEL mashup you didn’t know you needed.
MARQUIS
Dir. Henri Xhonneux. 1989
78 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6 – MIDNITE
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 – MIDNITE
Clumped in your history book between the chapters on French Revolution and pioneering 18th century erotic fiction grows a horny, pornographic mold called MARQUIS.
Immersed in a world in which uncanny animal masks mirror the spirit of the character within, a canine Marquis de Sade serves a prison sentence for allegedly raping the bovine Justine… but the situation may be more complicated than it seems. In between bouts of banter with his anthropomorphic, meter-long penis Colin, the Marquis gets down to writing a few of his more infamous scenes—many depicted in surreal claymation. Before too long the Revolution has begun, but where will it leave the Marquis?
Co-written by Henri Xhonneux and Roland Topor—animator of 1973′s inimitable surrealist classic FANTASTIC PLANET — MARQUIS’s bizarre tone swings at will between irreverent perversion and clear-headed satire, never failing to entertain and utterly confound.
“This is one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. I found it to be discomforting and just weird. It makes you squirm in your seat and wonder what the people making this are like in real life. It’s definitely entertaining and it sort of sucks you in, especially if you don’t know French and have to read subtitles. It is certainly not American and it is certainly very peculiar. I have never seen a movie where everyone is wearing life-like animal costumes and acting like humans in very abnormal ways. This movie gives me the chills. However, I would watch it again just because it is so fascinatingly WEIRD.” –IMDB user ‘ethylester’
“NOT FOR THE PRUDISH.”-Variety
HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5
dir. Richard Casey, 1985
Ohio. 91 mins.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19 – MIDNITE
“They were young, and in love. He was crazy. She was dead.”
INVASION OF THE GIRL SNATCHERS (aka THE HIDAN OF MAUKBEIANGJOW)
dir. Lee Jones, 1973
Kentucky. 93 mins.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 – MIDNITE
“Nice glyphs!”
New wave parody? Secret truth about UFOs? Stoned goof? INVASION OF THE GIRL SNATCHERS is all three and more to boot. Made using some of the same sets, equipment and crew as the William Girdler scuzz-epic THREE ON A MEATHOOK, this film was originally titled THE HIDAN OF MAUKBEIANGJOW (Hidan meaning “high place”) by Don Elkins and Carla Rueckert, two UFO researchers (see http://www.llresearch.org/default.aspx for more info) asked by director Lee Jones (who produced Supervan, Grizzly and Honey Britches) to write any script they wanted so long as it had sex and violence. With befuddled aliens, tracking devices hidden in bras, a safecracker named Freddie Fingers, body-switching, topless sorcery and more, GIRL SNATCHERS is like a zero budget MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE with metaphysical digressions, goofball puns and a lovely rural Kentucky quality that puts more self-conscious parodies to shame.
Before home video became a household thing, porn was a theatrical experience. It was also the first real commercial format that LGBT filmmakers could employ to place their lives on screen. Dirty Looks is thrilled to return to NYC with Sesion Continua, our free-spooling 24-hour porn theatre program, including six rare 16mm print screenings pulled from the archive of porn preservationists, Vinegar Syndrome. Dirty Looks has assembled a free flowing program that queers and diversifies gay porn’s oft-limited lens of focus, while also paying homage to New York’s distinct role in porn and underground film production.
From midnight Friday through midnight Saturday, Dirty Looks will screen rare and classic works of gay, lesbian and bisexual erotica in “sesión continua”-style: no schedules, no set attendance times. Slip in and out or stay a while, come together to witness a public approach towards explicit cinema that blended avant-garde film forms with titillating, haunting, and forbidden erotic imagery.
A *partial* list of films to be screened:
Jack Deveau’s “Fire Island Fever”
Francis Ellie’s “Navy Blue”
Michael Zen’s “Falconhead II: The Man Eaters”
Tom DeSimone’s “Dust Unto Dust”
Rob Simple’s “American Cream”
Jack Deveau’s “Just Blondes”
Zebedy Colt’s “The Devil Inside Her”
Arch Brown’s “Muscle Bound”
Linus Gator’s “We’ll Meet Again”
Peter North’s “Mondo Nexus”
Jason Sato’s “Brothers”
Duddy Kane’s “Wet Rainbow”
Joe Gage’s “Heatstroke”
Roger Earl’s “Gayracula”
Jack Deveau’s “Drive”
October rings in the next GET REEL with heavy church bells. GET Reel, the movie-based comedy show, returns with the theme “Unholy Communion.” Come pray away the un-Christian abomination of H*llowe’en. Comedians will live-dub over movies that fit the month’s theme, and hosts Joe and Max will ensure everyone has a very sacred evening.
D E E P is a showcase of experimental films, web videos, and art pieces unearthed from the darker side of the internet, lovingly curated by filmmaker Chris Osborn. Founded in 2013 by Osborn during his time working as a Vimeo staff member, D E E P began as a channel that existed to showcase a burgeoning community of artists making groundbreaking work designed with the internet in mind. Now, with over 100,000 followers online, four years of IRL screenings and a monthly webseries in collaboration with Memory, D E E P is suiting up to premiere its first feature length film: Roger Hayn’s CONGRATULATIONS DEBBY.
Debby, already a proud mother of three, is overjoyed to learn that she is pregnant once again. Thrilled with the bright possibilities of the future, she is determined to share her good news with friends, family, and acquaintances. Yet despite the magnitude of her announcement, nobody in town seems to be quite as excited as Debby. To make matters worse, her children are too busy to even return her phone calls. The further Debby pushes to surprise her loved ones with the news, the faster her world hurtles in a direction she never imagined. A warped, uncanny melodrama which plunges into the depths of its protagonist’s interiors, CONGRATULATIONS DEBBY is both a shape-shifting mystery film as well as an exercise in formal distortion.
A conversation between Hayn and Osborn will follow both screenings.
“Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it. But is all looting progressive, are all copies an improvement on their originals? What if the future came to depend on the looting of the professional looters ‒ of the class that multiplies financial, legal, and cultural claims to capital ‒ by those with ever less to lose
Bookended by the London riots of 2011, DEAD THE ENDS is a dizzying, urgent retelling of the story at the heart of Chris Marker’s La Jetee.
Deploying dystopian sci fi, animated gifs, emojis and La Jetee ‘derivatives’ such as 12 Monkeys and The Edge of Tomorrow, it creates a nervous montage inspired as much by Ponzi fraudster Bernie Madoff’s forged trading receipts as Eisensteins’s notes for a film version of Marx’s Capital. Beginning in a future London ravaged by global war, the film time-travels back to the suspension of dollar-gold convertibility in 1971, and forward to the cop-infiltration of activist groups in the 1990s, ending with the urban insurrections that flamed the UK in August 2011. Recursive-convulsive, structure-busting-looping, Dead The Ends is militant cinema at its wildest.”
BENEDICT SEYMOURis a filmmaker, writer, and musician. His published work includes video, fiction, and criticism, as well as several film soundtracks with artists such as Melanie Gilligan and Maija Timonen. His (mostly collaborative) music projects include Petit Mal, Antifamily, Traum and 트G. He is a long-term member of the editorial collective of Mute Magazine and Lecturer on the Fine Art MFA at Goldsmiths. He lives and works in London. His feature-length film, Dead the Ends, premiered in LUX’s Experimenta strand at the London Film Festival last year.
HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5
