Whether it’s the collision of punk rock and science-fiction in Repo Man, the war film with political agitprop in Walker or the Spaghetti Western with screwball comedy in Straight to Hell, Alex Cox has always been an inventive, engaging filmmaker about ten steps ahead of the mainstream. Since the relative commercial failure of Walker in the 80s (happy ending- it’s since been rediscovered for the masterpiece it is), Cox moved comfortably from Hollywood to making his films almost exclusively independently (and on occasion for the BBC), making projects as diverse as a sci-fi Borges adaptation, Revenger’s Tragedy, a documentary about Emmanuelle films, and a wacky, ultra-low-budget-and-proud-of-it spiritual sequel to Repo Man, called Repo Chick. His most recent, a return to his favorite genre, the western, is the crowdfunded Tombstone Rashomon, and Spectacle is proud to present it along with two of his other overlooked gems- The Searchers 2.0 and Three Businessmen. At Alex Cox’s request, 1/3 of the proceeds of all of these screenings will be donated to a homeless charity.

TOMBSTONE RASHOMON
Dir. Alex Cox, 2017
83 Minutes, USA, English

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 10 PM

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NY Debut!
“Our subject is the Gunfight at the OK Corral, as it has come to be known (though it took place closer to Third and Frémont Streets, in Tombstone). This has been made into several films, including some great ones. Most tell the story from the perspective of Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and his friend the tubercular gambler/dentist, Doc Holliday. Usually Wyatt was depicted as the sheriff, or town marshal, defending Tombstone from a deadly outlaw ring. Occasionally films and written histories went the other way, depicting Wyatt as a ruthless, ambitious killer…

…The gunfight which concludes all these films was a significant event, depicted differently in every movie. Despite the myth of the face-to-face gunfight, most shootings out west were simple ambushes: the gunman hid out and bushwhacked his opponent. But on 26 October 1881, in Tombstone, eight men faced each other after several slights and face-offs; three of them died. Two long accounts of the gunfight appeared in the Tombstone papers the next day. It was reported in the San Francisco press, and treated in entirely partisan terms: Republican journals supported the Earps, Democrat papers supported the cowboy faction.

TOMBSTONE RASHOMON is a unique attempt to relate these events – and what led up to them – from the different perspectives of the individuals involved. Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp each had his story, and Doc Holliday his; Sheriff Johnny Behan was present at the shootout, having tried to prevent it; Ike Clanton and Billy “the Kid” Claiborne survived the gun battle and told their tale; Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers did not; Kate Fisher, Holliday’s partner, was lodging in the adjacent building and may have been a witness, also.

They are part of our cast of characters – the town of Tombstone is a character as well. Silver-mining towns enjoyed an average “boom” of three years, and Tombstone turned three in 1881. In the three years they lived there, the Earps saw a collection of tents and shacks grow into a mini-metropolis. Now the mines were beginning to flood, and by April it was intolerably hot and dusty. In June, a barrel of bad whiskey exploded, setting four city blocks ablaze. Then the rains came.

When the gunfight between gambler lawmen and cowboys erupted, there was snow on the ground…” -Alex Cox

THE SEARCHERS 2.0
Dir. Alex Cox, 2007
90 Minutes, USA, English

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24 – 7:30 PM

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Cox returns to his favorite genre, the western, by way of the existential road picture, and reunites with longtime collaborators Sy Richardson (Repo Man, Straight to Hell, Sid & Nancy, Walker), Del Zamora (also Repo Man, Straight to Hell, Sid & Nancy, Walker) and Ed Pansullo (yup, Repo Man, Straight to Hell, Sid & Nancy, Walker) in an equally comedic and tragic story about two washed-up Western character actors, Fred and Mel, who seek revenge against a sadistic stuntman, Fritz Forbusher, who tormented them as children on the set of a film. Features cameos by Cox, Roger Corman and Leonard Maltin.

“Every screenplay I’ve written (how many is that? 40? 50?) has had the same initial response: ‘the characters are unsympathetic.’ Perhaps this is why so few of them were made. Financiers are simple, twisted souls who like a simple story with false breasts, perfect white teeth, and a muscular, anti-intellectual action hero. Fred lifts weights while watching TV but he is otherwise unheroic: bogarting the joints and the beer, telling ridiculous and untrue stories, bitching about Al Gore and Michael Moore. Mel is, if anything, worse: a penniless deadbeat dad who gets itinerant workers fired and lies to his daughter. And Fritz Frobisher, beater of little children, is the worst of all…

…the story was about actors, and the politics were in the sub-plot (we follow a trail of sad memorials to those killed in WWII, Afghanistan and Iraq)…

At one point in SEARCHERS 2.0, Mel and Fred are mistaken for homeless people by a Mexican guy who gives them a dollar. This follows the revelation that neither of them has health insurance. Not a big deal – 40% of the people living in the US [didn’t] have any [at the time the film was made], either. But imagine Bill Murray or Cheech Marin, or any other pair of upper-middle-class, Hollywood actors, trying to say those lines. It would be impossible. Worse, it would be despicable – like Jack Nicholson and Madonna playing homeless people, in a film for Universal.” -Alex Cox

THREE BUSINESSMEN
Dir. Alex Cox, 1998
80 minutes, UK, English

MONDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 10 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 23 – 7:30 PM

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One of Alex Cox’s lesser seen films, and perhaps his funniest, in which he himself stars alongside frequent collaborator Miguel Sandoval (Repo Man, Straight to Hell) as two businessmen who cross five countries over the course of one while night looking for a good place to eat.

“It is always good to cast the director because you have to pay one salary less, one less airplane ticket, one less per diem. It’s even better if you can persuade them to edit the film as well, and to go and get coffee for the security guys.” -Tod Davies, producer

“It’s extremely exciting. Thrilling is not too strong a word. But it creeps up on you. It isn’t a rock’n’roll themed piece like REPO MAN…Yet it’s 100% subversive, and threatening to the MTV value system. It’s also very funny, but again, not like TV. And it all happens in the course of one night.” -Alex Cox

This fall, Spectacle is pleased to unveil a series celebrating Australian auteur Albie Thoms and what would become the Australian New Wave – featuring three seminal features by Thoms practically never exhibited in North America.

A multivalent filmmaker and theatre artist, Albie Thoms (1941-2012) was a hardcore avant-gardist, responsible for bringing the works of Arrabal to Australia and founding the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative and the UBU collective, alongside Aggy Read, John Clark and David Perry. The restorations of his work made available by ArtFilms provide invaluable insight to a disjunction in Australian cinema that dominated the 1960s and 70s – between state-subsidized works (some of whose makers would indeed eventually migrate to Los Angeles) and a relentless, drugged-out underground community, which drew as much from Artaud and Beckett as it did from Thoms’ more lauded contemporaries in Europe and New York City. As ever, crossover between these spheres happened early and often; to cite just one example, Thoms codirected his short film …IT DROPPETH AS THE GENTLE RAIN with Bruce Beresford, who would go on to direct Hollywood productions like TENDER MERCIES and DOUBLE JEOPARDY.

This trio – each title made with grants on low budgets, heavily improvised and deeply influential within the Sydney experimental scene – are Thoms’ only three features. Each betrays his signature interest in using juxtaposition and particularly sound montage to push the narrative envelope, collapsing conventional narrative cinematic tropes into a new language that’s as trangressive now as it was in the 1970s.

Special thanks to Jesse Pires (International House Philadelphia), Kriszta Doczy (ArtFilms), soda_jerk and Sukhdev Sandhu (New York University Colloquium for Unpopular Culture).

MARINETTI
dir. Albie Thoms, 1969
85 mins. Australia.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 9 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29 – 5 PM

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“MARINETTI is not a Hollywood film of predigested responses. Unless an audience is prepared to give itself for the duration of the film, to accept the delirium, then communication is stifled… the audience at the film’s Sydney premiere were not willing to do this, and by their own hostiligy created an unpleasant experience. Images relayed at the rate of twenty four per second might be ‘murder on the eyes’ for some people, but for others they can create the ‘delirium that is communicative.’ Those that booed and walked out of MARINETTI might think of the opening of Jarry’s Ubu Roi in 1896, where a similar demonstration took place. Film enthusiasts might recall audiences who booed and hissed when the first screen closeup was used – that the audience, resentful that they couldn’t se the actors’ hands and feet, felt that something was being denied to them. MARINETTI is feature length because I hoped it would be an experience that would affect people’s lives…. Joan Kerr of Nation (Sydney) saw the theme of MARINETTI as ‘the inevitable myth of 20th century man as he progresses from an idyllyc view of life through personal madness to the final realization that the whole world is insane… and the only solution to it all is to endure it. But the final words of the film are not endure but enjoy… Audiences can avoid or endure it, or enjoy it. The responsibility is with them. My responsibility ended when I completed the film.” – Albie Thoms, Polemics For A New Cinema

SUNSHINE CITY
dir. Albie Thoms, 1973
118 minutes. Australia.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 10 PM

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SUNSHINE CITY is Albie Thom’s sprawling, protoplasmic experimental portrait of his hometown of Sydney. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia call it “a structured diary film which investigates the process of living in Sydney, which uses a repeating light modulation to intensify experiences of light, heat, colour”.

It also probes the city’s Yellow House art community and includes interviews with significant members thereof, including Mick Glasheen, Martin Sharp, Aggy Read, Brett Whiteley and Germaine Greer. Like the entirety of Thoms’ second film, the interviews are shot in an innovative and unconventional manner, shooting single continous takes and ending when the film in the camera runs out. With near-every other frame flash exposed, the film harkens to contemporaneous works by Jonas Mekas and Peter Kubelka

Before production began, Thoms wrote that “SUNSHINE CITY will be a record of my responses to the people and places of the city of Sydney. It will show the visual environment and synthesize the sound environment. It will allow the people to speak, and will try and relate their lives to the environment, to try and express the way the environment, the light, the sunshine, the visual stimulation, the cultural history of the city, conditions the lives of people and creates their character. It will be an analytic film, determining its own aesthetic, forcing attention to the filming process, to the materials of the film experience.”

PALM BEACH
dir. Albie Thoms, 1980
88 minutes. Australia.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 7:30 PM

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“Paul was looking for work… Joe was looking for drugs… Leilani was looking for good times… Larry was looking for Leilani… They all ended up in…”

Four characters, all misfits of a sort, cross paths over one weekend on the northern beaches of Sydney. Leilani (Amanda Berry) is a runaway 16-year-old; Larry (John Flaus) is a private eye who’s looking for her; Joe (Ken Brown) needs to score some LSD to get him out of trouble. Paul (Bryan Brown) is unemployed and broke, until he steals a gun.

Described as “the ultimate surf movie”, PALM BEACH is an entirely different kind of magnum opus from MARINETTI: a restless multi-character drama (anticipating the “hyperlink cinema” of the 90s and 2000s) centered on these disparate plotlines, each shot in long tracking-shot takes. It is a peerless feat of improvisation drawn in just over a hundred shots; what really sticks is Thoms’ use of overlapping dialogue and diagetic audio to stitch scenes together, a daring juxtaposition that grates in the fleeting moment but creates an overwhelming depiction of society as blissed out as it is logjammed.

“PALM BEACH is a film of casual but cunning construction […] a terrible reminder that there are people of great ability who have never been able to pursue their craft in the Australian film industry, while dozens of mediocrities have had the chance to squander countless dollars and a multitude of opportunities.” – Geoff Gardiner, Australian Film 1978-1992

HACK-O-LANTERN
dir. Jag Mundhra
USA, 1988

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27 – 10 PM

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“A bloody moon…A scream of fear…A night of Living Hell…”

Now 18 Tommy’s seemingly kindly, pumpkin delivering, Foghorn Leghorn sounding grandpa is ready to show him “the power of the blood” and bring him into the fold.

Long available only on bootleg HACK-O-LANTERN has been lovingly restored from it’s original 35mm negative by our friends at Massacre Video and presented this Spectober as a sacrifice to our lord Satan.

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY
Dir. Sergio Martino, 1972.
Italy. 97 min.
In English

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 7:30 PM

“I don’t feel like being involved in one of your spectacles.”

Made between ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK and TORSO, YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY is a misanthropic, brooding, manipulative and beautiful treatment of Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Black Cat.” It also has a drunk (racist, incestuous, loathsome) author getting J&B shipped by the crate to his house, which might be the gialloest thing ever. Fans of Sergio Martino’s earlier film THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH (from which this film gets it name) might be thrown a bit by the subdued, sullen quality, but it’s part of a greater plan, a plan that includes commune freak-outs, slaughtered mistresses, gratuitous POV (on line with Martino’s next film, TORSO) and perhaps greatest of all, Edwige Fenech, of whom we can say nothing without getting the vapors. With a storyline that’ll satisfy no-loose-ends mystery fans, enough jaw-dropping cinematography and costuming to please the art crowd, and Martino’s thoughtful and visceral style (there’s also a great Bruno Nicolai score to sweeten the pot), YOUR VICE…might be Martino’s finest.

“A film with that wears its dubious morality on its sleeve, “Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key” is a tasty bit of giallo goodness. Kinky and cruel, it lives up to its purple prose title and will surely satisfy the appetites of Eurotrash fans.” -Tenebrous Kate, Love Train For The Tenebrous Empire.

THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA
Dir. Alan Gibson, 1973
UK, 87 min.
English

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 10 PM

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“Evil rules, you know. It really does.”

The last in Hammer’s run of Lee vs. Cushing Dracula films, the last Hammer film to use actual occultists as consultants, and a lurid stew of spy tropes, supernatural horror, black masses, THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA is considered a lesser Hammer by Anglophiles and dilettantes, but we know better, don’t we? Just consider one of the absolute best-ever monologues of cosmic dread and horror from Freddie Jones, playing Julian Keeley, a professor commanded to create a virulent variant on the black plague in order to serve the whims of The Dark Lord Lucifer! Sidestepping earlier period-piece Gothic trappings for a thoroughly contemporary London, it’s both sleek and pulpy, with as many gunfights, dirtbike chases, double crosses, regular crosses, basement nightgown covens of undead brides and occult goings-on as anyone could possibly want. A secret sect of British VIPs perform unholy rites of sacrifice in order to appease their abominable lord! It’s always fun to watch Lee and Cushing face off, the secret agent/cop drama aspect keeps everything at a brisk clip, and if that’s not enough to sell you it literally starts with a black mass in which a woman is sacrificed and returns from the dead!

A BELL FROM HELL (La campana del infierno)
Dir. Claudio Guerin, 1973
Spain, 93 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27 – MIDNIGHT

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On the final day of shooting A BELL FROM HELL (La campana del infierno), director Claudio Guerin fell from the aforementioned bell tower to his death.He had only one other film (THE HOUSE OF THE DOVES) to his credit. This is all of a part for a film fixated on death, on revenge, on morbidity. A young man returns home from the asylum, where he was committed to usurp his inheritance, to wreak vengeance upon his family: or is it that simple?

Warning: there are several scenes of slaughterhouse footage some viewers might find objectionable.

YETI: GIANT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
dir. Gianfranco Parolini, 1977
118 mins. Italy/Ontario.
In American-Canadian English.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20 – MIDNIGHT

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Man, where the hell was GIANT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY during last June’s MISSING LINKS series? At any rate: some movies are so bad they can only horrify in a new way, redistricting the parameters of imagination further afield than previously considered or conceded. That’s Gianfranco Parolini’s jawdropping YETI (GIANT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY) an epic Italian-Canadian cash-in whose particulate special effects (stitching the nominal YETI into myriad locales around 1970s Toronto, somehow barely beveling the same frames as his puny human victims/lovers) posed an extraordinary challenge to the idea of monster movie verisimilitude forever. Even if the nominal attraction more clearly resembles a screaming white dude covered in (hopefully fake) animal fur, YETI is one for the history books, proudly chest-thumping a sonorous disco theme from “The Yetians” and an unabashed new perspective on Toronto as tax-shelter competitor to Dino De Laurentiis’ fantasy-land NYC. Both Parolini and his GIANT are after bigger things than your approval (or even your five dollars): this movie represents an evolutionary psycho-industrial-sexual shakeup whose true lessons have never fully come to pass.

BEYOND THE GATES
dir. Jackson Stewart, 2016
84 minutes, USA

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28 – MIDNIGHT

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Filmmaker Jackson Stewart brings a tribute to the evil’s of VHS and tabletop gaming to Spectacle for a special Halloween treat. Barbara Crampton (FROM BEYOND) stars alongside Chase Willamson (THE GUEST) and Brea Grant (Robert Zombie’s HALLOWEEN II) in a flick certain to make you reconsider picking up the dice ever again. Jackson’s film weaves grief, loss, family, laffs, and gore together and crams them all in a clamshell case of doom. Barbara Crampton steals the show as the host of the deadly game and easter eggs abound for the keen eyed viewer. In an ear so obsessed with nostalgia BEYOND THE GATES delivers for those who ever rolled the bones against the Gatekeeper in the NIGHTMARE board game series. See it to jump-start your Hallo-weekend!

CINAP CINATAS II: WHERE EVIL SMELLS
Various directors, compiled by Darren Bauler
United States Of American Death, 50 min.
Fuck Your Secular Laws

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When the original CINAP CINATAS showed in 2015, a number of viewers considered it nostalgic, a look back at a simpler time when militant Christianity was ascendant and fearmongering politicians ruled the land, a time now made somewhat quaint by our evolution into contemporary rational neoliberal humanism.

As Bobby BeauSoleil would say, ain’t life peculiar.

We return to the maelstrom of thrash metal, gut-churning 80s video nasties, televangelistic rants and teenage nihilism with more clips from police training videos, VHS sermons, intercepted broadcasts and piss-yellow journalism, thrown together in a mishmash meant to recreate the mindscape of a kid weaned on 20 sided dice, Slayer bootlegs and unblocked satellite tv who took all of this as absolute fact. Intended not as a history lesson nor as a moral fable, we dismiss all attempts to contextualize this material as folly, content to mainline apocalyptic jouissance with no regard for mental health or reasonable discourse. No answers, no solutions, no thinkpieces, no escape. SMELL AWAITS.

Following Cinap Cinatas II will be two short intermission films, then the original Cinap Cinatas (which played in 2015) in its entirety.

Buckle up, assholes! It;s time once again for the Spectacle Shrek Show!!!!!!!!111!!!!!!!111!!!!!! Eevry shrek movie back to back and then backwards while we dose you with a ton of brown acid. As usual all the money goes right in to our pockets and we scream at you and change the temperature a bunch. Forced donkey meat eating contest to follow! FUCK OFF.

Noon: Shrek
2pm: Shrek 2
4pm: Shrek the 3rd
6pm: Shrek Forever After
8pm: Shrek in the Swamp Karaoke Dance Party
10pm: Shrek 4-D
Midnight: Far Far Away Idol
2am: Donkey’s Caroling Christmas-tacular
4am: Shrek the Halls