THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE
Dir. Walon Green, 1971. USA, 90 min.
In English.

THURSDAY, APRIL 20 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 21 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 25 – 7:30 PM

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“If any living species is to inherit the earth, it will not be man. We will face competition from a lifeform we arrogantly ignore. We will be overrun, deposed, and succeeded by battalions of mindless soldiers entering the contest with capabilities beyond our imagination. Yes… I’m talking about insects!”

The genres of documentary and science fiction rarely intersect: Documentary captures what is, while science fiction imagines what is not… at least not yet. But it’s here where we find THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE, one of the strangest films to ever win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and the perfect dark trip to take on this year’s 420.

A sort of ecological horror film, the plot documents the work of an imagined entomologist named Dr. Nils Helstrom. According to the good doctor, unless we open our eyes to the threat of insects, who are mindlessly bent on taking over the world, we will be destroyed. What follows, in stunning 1970s macrophotography, is a parade of sequences that make an argument for the cold brutality of the insect world. As African driver ants consume iguanas whole and locusts destroy fertile farmland, the audience begins to wonder if we shouldn’t declare flat-out war on these damn bugs once and for all. A perfect evening for anyone who’s ever rolled their eyes at the rose-colored classes of Planet Earth, THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE is easily the most bizarre nature documentary ever produced.

JACK H. HARRIS: November 28, 1918 – March 14, 2017

Jack Harris passed away earlier this year at the grand age of 98, and Spectacle has been doing an ongoing tribute with the help of Jack’s family. After April’s EQUINOX and UNKISSED BRIDE, May’s 4D MAN and DINOSAURUS, our finale playing in June is DARK STAR. Harris, “the guy who could fix pictures and get them out”, took this early John Carpenter student project and brought it to feature length and quality. In case you don’t remember, read the description below!

DARK STAR
dir. John Carpenter, 1974
83 min, USA

SUNDAY, JUNE 4 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 8 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 16 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 23 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 30 – 10 PM

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Much like Dennis Muren’s almighty EQUINOX, DARK STAR was first made as a 68 minute 16mm student film by John Carpenter – with writing assistance from Dan O’Bannon, who also stars as Sergeant Pinback. Theatrical rights for DARK STAR were scooped up by Harris who provided funding for an additional 15 minutes of filming and a 35mm transfer. Upon completion he unleashed it on an unsuspecting public. The film cost a mere $60,000; in addition to gaining cult status and a seat at the throne of midnight movies, it would also launch the careers of Carpenter (VAMPIRES, GHOSTS OF MARS, THE WARD) and O’Bannon (DEAD & BURIED), alongside heavyweights like Ron Cobb (Disney’s SLEEPING BEAUTY) and Greg Jein (who won an Academy Award for CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) lending their visual and effects talents.

Only five years after DARK STAR, O’Bannon would reuse many of the ideas in what would become the sci-fi juggernaut ALIEN – including a restless game of mumbly peg, a face hugging extraterrestrial, and a claustrophobic chase scene through the air shafts.

While often tossed off as a stoner-grade spoof of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Carpenter’s film is at its core about loneliness. After spending two decades blowing up unstable planets together, this shaggy crew have grown to loathe each other, even forgetting each others’ first names. Beyond one another and the ship’s computer, their lone conversationalists are the smart bombs aboard the ship prior to their release.

Despite the cramped space and lack of real sleeping quarters after a collision with an astroid, they each manage to find isolation in their own ways. Talby retreats to the observation dome atop the ship after the death of Commander Powell, preferring the vast emptiness of space to his human companions. Lt. Doolittle slinks off to a secret nook to hone his craft on a makeshift organ of sort comprised of bottles pitched with water. Boiler takes great pleasure in bullying and antagonizing Sgt. Pinback – whose constant attempts at revelry and (albeit forced) camaraderie only serve to make him the resident scapegoat. Even the late Commander Powell, encased in ice below the hull, remarks to Doolittle (via telepathy) that it’s been so long since someone came to visit him. The film certainly has moments of humor, but even these are often solely for the amusement of the viewer, with the events happening to isolated individuals only to be relayed to the group after the fact. Everyone has stopped listening to one another, with phrases lazily repeated back and forth over tubes of liquid ham. In a rare moment at breakfast between Talby and Doolittle the men bond over their two opposite desires. Talby longs to see the fabled “Phoenix Astroids” deep within the Veil Nebula, while Doolittle pines for the California surf back on Earth. Not long after, Talby is pulled into space from out of the malfunctioning airlock and Doolittle fails to dissuade a bomb from detonating aboard the ship: in a perfect cacophony of celebration and sorrow, both men get what they want as the credits roll. For us DARK STAR comes as the bittersweet end of our humble tribute to a cinematic giant.

This series would not have been possible without the help of Judy Harris and Danielle Sinay. Special thanks to Jon Abrams, Daily Grindhouse and, of course, our audience.

EQUINOX
(a/k/a: The Beast, The Equinox… A Journey Into the Supernatural)
Dir. Dennis Muren / Jack Woods, 1970
80 mins, USA

THURSDAY, APRIL 13 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 17 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 22 – *7:00 PM* (SPECIAL Q&A!)
TUESDAY, APRIL 25 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 5 – MIDNIGHT

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In 1965 a young Dennis Muren had a choice to make. He was 17 and could use the money his grandfather had set aside for him to either go to college or do something sensible and make a feature length genre defining, effects pioneering film. Having made the right choice, Muren and friends David Allen and Mark McGee set about making their vision come to life – and over the course of the next two and a half years THE EQUINOX…A JOURNEY INTO THE SUPERNATURAL was born. Among their support group was none other than Forrest J. Ackerman (famed/revered/beloved editor of FAMOUS MONSTERS – who would also lend his voice to the film in an uncredited cameo!) who helped the gang to snag Fritz Leiber in the role of Dr. Waterman. Muren and Allen headed up the technical side and dove headfirst into the special effects. Monsters abounded, winged demons poured out the ether, and giants stomped around the screen with terrifying voracity. And all reportedly to the tune of less than $7,000!

With the film completed, Muren set out to show it to the world but that proved to be difficult. Initially trying for a TV release, Muren ended up shopping it around Hollywood. The premise and eye popping special effects grabbed the attention of Jack H. Harris – the man who picked up THE BLOB (and later DARK STAR, SCHLOCK, FEAR OF A BLOB PLANET, etc). Harris shortened the title to EQUINOX and hired Jack Woods to beef up the run-time. Rehiring the original actors and casting himself as in the role of Asmodeus, Woods (with Ed Begley Jr on ass’t camera duties) retooled the creature feature, and soon 35mm prints were stuck! The film was unleashed on the world and in the coming years would help mold the very essence of the “cabin in the woods” subgenre; arguably, without EQUINOX, there would be no EVIL DEAD series.

In the wake of EQUINOX many of its creators would flourish: Dennis Muren continued down the path of effects work and would soon have a wheelbarrow full of Academy Awards for his efforts on films like the STAR WARS trilogy, ET, JURASSIC PARK, DRAGONSLAYER, CAPTAIN EO, and more recently SUPER 8. David Allen also pretty much changed the game in terms of effects while working on films like WILLOW, HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS and became responsible for all things good in the world of Full Moon features with work on DOLLS, OBLIVION, and the PUPPET MASTER films to name a few. While this is Jack Woods’ only directing credit, he would end up with a lengthy sound department resume with titles like PHANTASM II and the STAR TREK franchise.

DINOSAURUS!
Dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. (1960)
USA, 85 min.

THURSDAY, MAY 4 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 12 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MAY 20 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 30 – 10 PM

In his 1960 review of DINOSAURUS!, Howard Thompson of the New York Times wrote “If ever there was a tired, synthetic, plodding sample of movie junk, it’s this ‘epic’ about two prehistoric animals hauled from an underwater deep-freeze by some island engineers”.

Howard Thompson was always a hack and the Times has always been, and continues to be, garbage.

On a mysterious island in the Caribbean, a team of scientists discovers two dinosaurs and a caveman held in suspended animation for 70 million years. While the caveman and the Brontosaurus befriend the locals, the T-Rex, or TYRANT LIZARD KING!, does not. Crammed with underwater photography, stop-motion animation, puppets and lovely St. Croix exteriors, it’s a film made for dinosaur kids ready to blow their allowances on a rock-em sock-em matinee. Written with THE BLOB’s Steve McQueen in mind as the star, the role of Ward Ramsey instead went to newcomer Bart Thompson, who’s ready to show these overgrown lizards what for! Our tribute to the great Jack Harris (who both produced and wrote the original story) is well served by DINOSAURUS! Goofs, stunts, derring-do and dinosaur fights: THAT is what cinema is truly about.

4D MAN (aka MASTER OF TERROR)
Dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. (1960)
USA, 85 min.

TUESDAY, MAY 2 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 20 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, MAY 23 – 10 PM

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Harris’ sensational followup to THE BLOB saw him working again with director Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., this time on a Faustian tale of prismatic fraternal jealousy. In 4D MAN, mutton-faced 20something scientist Tony (James Congdon) develops a technique that allows one object to pass through another (cf: the fourth dimension), while his older brother Scott (Robert Lansing) has coincidentally just invented a metal called Cargonite – so dense it can’t be penetrated. Tony’s recklessness and Scott’s pathological resentment double-helix vis-a-vis the latter’s girlfriend Linda (Lee Meriwether), instantly drawn to the younger brother’s devil-may-care attitude while furthering Scott’s descent into bitterness.

It doesn’t take an orthogononical physicist to figure out what happens next: incapable of stopping himself, Scott co-opts Tony’s experiment and turns himself 4D, tripling (or is it quadrupling?) down on the radiation exposure that was already giving him hellacious headaches – and, as it happens, accelerating his own aging in the process. Oscillating between unstoppability and death’s door in his solid state, Scott reaches out to suck up the lifeforce of a litany of victims including his old boss, as well as a little girl (played by Patty Duke!) – bringing Yeaworth’s narrative to a bitter interdimensional boil better seen than blurbed. From beginning to end, 4D MAN muxes a fine 1950s line between trenchant sci-fi boilerplate (ala print) and big-screen drive-in schlock-a-rama: the impossible object of earthly satisfaction drives both men to different dooms in a poetic crosshatch. You won’t believe your eyes when you see the film’s matte-intensive SFX (breathtaking in their lo-fi conviction), nor your ears from the first trill of Ralph Carmichael’s swingin’ jazz soundtrack!

Upon 4D MAN’s original release, Famous Monsters of Filmland published a full-page spread with the following edict/ultimatum: “In this exciting story you will watch a man cross the threshold into the Fourth Dimension; you will watch him perform feats that may seem totally unbelievable – but: what the 4D MAN does can be done! Jack H. Harris, the dynamic producer of THE BLOB, now amazes the world with his announcement of ONE MILLION DOLLAR CASH AWARD to the person who successfully performs the feats attributed to the 4D MAN… Find out from your local theater manager when he will be playing 4D MAN, and Remember: your admission ticket could be worth ONE MILLION DOLLARS!” As part of 98 YEARS: JACK HARRIS, Spectacle offers same.

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THE UNKISSED BRIDE
(aka MOTHER GOOSE A-GO-GO)
Dir. Jack Harris, 1966
USA, 82 min.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 15 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, APRIL 22 – 10 PM

The almighty Jack H. Harris’s only turn as director, UNKISSED BRIDE is the age-old story of a young couple named Ted and Margi (Tommy Kirk and Anne Helm) who have been saving it for their honeymoon, only to discover Ted has erectile dysfunction at the suggestion of nursery rhymes. It may seem like that’s an easy thing to avoid, but no matter how our randy paramours try, Mother Goose is always there to block the proverbial shot. Instead of turning that into a kink, Ted visits a psychiatrist (the great Danica D’Hondt in one of her last roles) who prescribes a hallucinogenic spray (I’m not kidding) and we’re off to the races.

It’s important to note Tommy Kirk (here tellingly billed as Tom Kirk) was trying to break free from his history as a child star (SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, OLD YELLER, the Mickey Mouse Club Hardy Boys series), mostly via a bunch of beach movies (MST3K fans know him from CATALINA CAPER and VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS). As a star who was fairly unceremoniously released from Disney (presumably but not officially due to Kirk’s homosexuality), he might seem an odd choice for a film about a man having difficulties having sex with a woman.

This is compounded when Ted squares off against ultra-lothario Jacques Bergerac (LES GIRLS, GIGI, but *especially* THE HYPNOTIC EYE!) who, as a guy married to both Dorothy Malone and Ginger Rogers, has little trouble flinging some woo. Madcap hijinx ensue (some of which are pretty much guaranteed to offend), and it’d be a mistake to give away the plot, but you just know this is a film with featured songs (including Kirk singing one himself), lots of great LA locations (our couple go to the Troubador at one point), speeding-up-the-film Benny Hill style, Henny Youngman AND Joe Pyne: to put it simply, it’s a gas.

 

STEWART HOME: FILMS (1986-2016)

Spectacle is pleased to present a survey of artist Stewart Home’s moving image works on the occasion of his cult classic, Defiant Pose, being put back into print by Penny-Ante Editions. Named the “Best Book of the Year” in 1991 by The Gay Times, today Chris Kraus describes Home’s “proto-porn pageantry” as “timely (and) timeless… a satirical masterpiece, as funny twenty-five years later as when it first appeared.” With STEWART HOME: FILMS (1986-2016) it is our hope that those familiar and unfamiliar with “cult writer” Stewart Home will gain new insight into his artistic practice.

AN EVENING WITH STEWART HOME – FRIDAY APRIL 7 – 7:30 PM
SCREAMS IN FAVOUR OF DE SADE – FRIDAY APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM
SHORT WORKS – SATURDAY, APRIL 8 – 7:30 PM & FRIDAY, APRIL 28 – 7:30 PM

Copies of Defiant Pose will be available at the screening on the 7th.

STEWART HOME is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, activist, and internationally-acclaimed author. Home’s writings include Pure Mania (Polygon, 1989), Defiant Pose (Peter Owen, 1991), Slow Death (Serpent’s Tail, 1996), 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), Tainted Love (Virgin Books, 2005), and Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Between 2007 and 2010, Home was the commissioning editor of Semina, a series of acclaimed experimental novels from London art publisher Book Works, to which he contributed, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010). In 2013, Stewart Home released Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane (Penny-Ante Editions), named one of the “Best Paperbacks of the Year” by the Guardian, followed by The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones published by Test Centre in 2014. He was born and continues to reside in London. (www.stewarthomesociety.org)

Thanks to Rebekah Weikel & Penny-Ante Editions, Sukhdev Sandhu & The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, and Triple Canopy.

AN EVENING WITH STEWART HOME

FRIDAY APRIL 7 – 7:30 PM
*ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE – ONE NIGHT ONLY*

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Stewart Home will be hosting and speaking on a selection of past short works such as TV FREAK and BAKED BEAN JUNKIE GROSS OUT, as well as his latest, 2016’s RE-ENTER THE DRAGON.

Copies of Defiant Pose will be available at the screening.

RE-ENTER THE DRAGON
dir. Stewart Home, 2016.
UK. 41 min.

In RE-ENTER THE DRAGON, Stewart Home uses found cinematic imagery and a dissociated soundtrack influenced by 1950s Lettrist cinema as a means of exploring cultural hybridity. The genre of martial arts films known as ‘Brucesploitation’ is theoretically dissected while onscreen an actor hyped as ‘the Bruce Lee of the Philippines’ explodes into action. ‘Brucesploitation’ deployed underhand marketing devices such as using actors with stage names including Bruce Le and Dragon Lee, to trick the unsuspecting into thinking they might be watching a film by Bruce Lee, a man who died before most of these super-cheap exploitation flicks were made. RE-ENTER THE DRAGON is where action cinema has a nervous breakdown and discovers that hypermasculinity inevitably finds itself tipping over into the feminine.

SCREAMS IN FAVOUR OF DE SADE (2002)
dir. Stewart Home, 2002.
UK. 72 min.

FRIDAY, APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM

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English language color remake of Guy Debord’s avant-garde classic from 1952. Like the original this film has no images, but whereas Debord’s consisted of black with silence and white with dialogue in French, Home employ black with silence and TV color bars with dialogue in English. The original dialogue is translated and in a number of places also rewritten. However, while Debord had five voices reading his script, Home uses one voice with an additional spoken indication of which voice is speaking.

The periods of blackness and silence in Debord’s film are strictly adhered to, with the final twenty four minutes being entirely black and silent. Although Debord never explained his original film in this way, Home’s intention is to transform cinema in theatre, turning the audience into actors rather than treating them as passive spectators. If this is the case, then it should matter little to viewers whether they watch Debord’s original or Home’s remake, what’s important is what happens amongst the audience, not what is on screen, which in a classical gesture of avant-garde iconoclasm is essentially nothing.

STEWART HOME: SHORT WORKS (1986-2004)
dir. Stewart Home, 1986 – 2004.
UK. 85 min.

SATURDAY, APRIL 8 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 28 – 7:30 PM

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A survey of past short works by Stewart Home, including 2004’s THE ECLIPSE & RE-EMERGENCE OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX. Full screening list is as follows:

THE EIGHTIES
1986, 4 min.

“This is an edit of a durational piece made in May 1986, which originally lasted one hour and only had incidental ambient noise on the soundtrack. It is more hardcore ‘art’ as it was originally made but this is the YouTube generation recut 21 years down the line. Other hour long durational pieces made in the eighties include a fabulous video of Pete Horobin and I taking afternoon tea that begins with a five minute static shot of the table before we sit down at it. We really knew how to make fun films back then… I love them, but YouTube doesn’t carry hour long works, so you got this instead. My song on the soundtrack was also composed in the eighties, although this particular version was recorded in the nineties. But this static record of my head being shaved from a curly mop sums up the eighties for me. Immediately prior to this a friend in Hackney used to do my hair for me, and she also worked on Mel & Kim’s barnets (so I met them a couple of times before they were famous when I headed down to Shakespeare Walk to get my hair cut)… and since I first put this up I have been getting a lot of comments about how much Britney Spears looks like me… don’t forget I did this 20 years before her…” (Stewart Home)

I WANNA DIE IN THE TV
1986, 1 min.

The screen is pure surface, it has no depth, and where there is no life there is no death….. The voices on the soundtrack belong to Stewart Home and Pete Horobin

TV FREAK
1986, 2 min.

“An oldie but goldie video piece from May 1986, but this is the length I always intended it to be. Looks just about perfect to me now I’ve added the titles, which I didn’t manage at the time I made it 21 years ago.” (Stewart Home)

BAKED BEAN JUNKIE GROSS OUT
1986, 7 min.

“The avant-garde art of boredom taken to new extremes back in 1986! A Neoist anti-classic! I performed for the camera and immediately after shooting I recorded the voice over in one take, sounding about as sincere as a snake oil salesman. Pete Horobin shot this and nearly all the edits are in camera because we didn’t have free access to proper edit suites at the time and tried to minimize whatever time we paid for. Any visual edits we made to what we did were crashed between a domestic machine and the camera, cruder than editing Super 8, hence our preference for in camera editing – and not even a master of multi-tasking like me was able to perform and simultaneously do in camera editing. That said VHS film was cheaper to the superior looking 8mm celluloid and enabled us impoverished dole queue ‘aesthetes’ to shoot a lot more ‘film’. As a result we didn’t title this piece or much other material at the time, the titles and credits were added just before I put this up here, but the rest of the visuals are exactly as we left them 21 years ago. I didn’t bother showing this anywhere at the time, but on reviewing it recently I realized I was making YouTube type shorts a couple of decades before most of you; it just looks different because we had clunky VHS cameras then, not digital… but the ‘spirit’ is the same. And please note the sacrifices I make for aesthetic effect; I even drink a can of Coke in this (well it looks like I did, but actually I poured the crud inside the can away and replaced it with water – couldn’t have got away with that using a bottle). And dig the Wm Low baked bean tin, a supermarket that could be found around Scottish north east back in the eighties but that disappeared a decade or probably more ago…” (Stewart Home)

REFUSE
1988, 5 min.

By Stewart Home, Andy Hopton, Art In Ruins, Denise Hawrysio, Ed Baxter and Simon Dickason at Galleriet Läderfabriken Malmö, October-November 1988.

“Note the sound on this was played at volume on a tape loop throughout the show; the lighting was ambient and while this couldn’t be captured on camera, video effects were used in an attempt to replicate this. Please note that the quality reflects both the video technology of when this was done (1988) and tape decay (the colors have faded considerably and there are other faults). It is presented here as a historical artifact to give something of the flavor of the site specific installation work I was doing in the eighties.” (Stewart Home)

TURN ON, TUNE IN, FREAK OUT
1989, 13 min.

Made with Neil Aberdeen, featuring Stefan Szczelkun, Gabrielle Quinn, Dick Arlen.

NO PITY
1993, 4 min.

Promo video for short story collection “No Pity” by Stewart Home (AK Press, 1993), made with Nick Abrahams and Mikey Tomkins and featuring music by Bloodsausage

RED LONDON
1994, 7 min.

Promo for Stewart Home novel Red London made with Nick Abrahams and Mickey Tompkins in 1994. Digitized from a VHS copy.

UT PICTURA POESIS
1997, 1 min.
“This was made as part of the Arts Council funded Blipvert Project in 1997, so it was one of six commissioned pieces cut into the ads at independent cinemas and was seen in that context by an audience of something like three quarters of a million people. It was shot at 50 Beck Road in Hackney (since I appear in it, Nick Abrahams was operating the camera) and edited at Artec at Highbury Corner. It was intended for cinema screening and the ‘alienation effect’ that is integral to it doesn’t work outside that context, so it is placed here as a curiosity. This was an attempt to distill the lettrist cinematic experiments of the early 1950s (and in particular the feature length pieces “Has The Film Already Started”, “Anti-Concept” and “Screams In Favour Of De Sade”) into 45 seconds. Proletarian post-modernism lives on…” (Stewart Home)

THE ECLIPSE & RE-EMERGENCE OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
UK. 41 min.

Made by Stewart Home while in Melbourne as visiting artist at the Victorian College of the Arts in May 04. In the movie avant-garde techniques and the avant-garde obsession with death interweave with reflections on the life and death of his mother Julia Callan-Thompson. Images of his mum working as a fashion model and club hostess during the sixties are cut against and at times deliberately dissociated soundtrack that uses stories about her to explore the limits of documentary cinema. This is simultaneously an expression of love and loss and an attempt to draw out the ways in which the avant-garde Lettrist cinema of the early fifties in France was commercialized in the later work of Godard, Marker and Resnais.

This April, Spectacle is pleased to present a collection of throwbacks on horseback from down Mexico way. Four supernatural westerns covering everything from witches to werewolves, from the devil to Dracula: it may still be chilly in NYC, but here at the Goth Bodega it’s Spring Break.

THE LIVING COFFIN
(aka EL GRITO DE LA MUERTE)
dir. Fernando Mendez, 1959
72 minutes. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, APRIL 7 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 16 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 27 – 10PM

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Lawman Gaston and his partner Crazy Wolf saunter into town to investigate an attempted murder. When they arrive, the family tells a harrowing tale of haunting and mischief that’s been keeping them up at night. Can the duo solve this mystery and release the family from their terrible curse? Are the tombs beneath the residence truly housing the dead? Has the Crying Woman returned to exact a terrible revenge? Will they escape the deadly swamp?

While the legend of The Crying Woman was done many times before and after this film, EL GRITO DE LA MUERTE (the original title, translating to “The Cry of Death”) owes as much to the gothic offerings of Poe as it does to the tropes of Scooby Doo.

Gaston Santos (a well known bullfighter turned actor) teams up once again with director Fernando Mendez, writer Ramón Obón and cinematographer Víctor Herrera who all earlier that same year made the beautiful and shadowy Spectober favorite THE BLACK PIT OF DR. M.

THE RIDER OF THE SKULLS
(aka EL CHARRO DE LAS CALAVERAS)
dir. Alfredo Salazar, 1965
80 minutes. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, APRIL 2 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 15 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 20 – 10 PM

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A masked rider (not Zorro) arrives in a sleepy Mexican villa in the midst of a slew of vicious werewolf attacks during what seems like a solid month of full moons. The Rider is given lodging by a señorita and her young son – Perico – who appear to be the next targets of the flannel-clad lycanthrope. The Rider, with the help of a local witch dispatches of the monster who turns out to be the boys father. As he rides off into the sunset with Perico by his side one may expect the credits to roll but don’t rise from the opulent comfort of your seat just yet, viewer, this adventure is far from over. The Rider (now taller and with a different mask) along with the help of a new boy and their manservant Cléofas (the films “comic relief”) fight a vampire in some highly unconvincing day for night photography. It’s worth mentioning that the vampire not only has the giant head of a bat but also has the power to change into an equally unconvincing rubber bat and flies off. Finally, The Rider faces his deadliest foe yet when he teams up with a woman in possession of the cabeza of none other than the Headless Horseman and his two robed skeleton henchmen leading to a machete fight at sunset.

Director Alfredo Salazar is best known for his contributions to Mexican horror in the form of many, many Santo/Blue Demon movies as well as penning such psychotronic fare as THE NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES and the should-be classic THE MAN & THE MONSTER (produced by and starring his brother Abel). Star Dagoberto Rodríguez had a 30-or-so year career in Mexican film and television, which is more than likely the reason he removes his mask and reveals his identity in the middle of the film. Due to its “monster of the week” feeling and suspicious change of companions/mask/location/etc the working assumption is that THE RIDER OF THE SKULLS is actually three episodes of a serial stitched together to make it feature length. Nevertheless, Salazar wears his love of classic Universal monsters on his sleeve and creates a film unlike any other.

GHOST TOWN
(aka EL PUEBLO FANTASMA)
dir. Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1965
80 min, Mexico
In Spanish w/ English subtitles

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 13 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 15 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26 – 10 PM

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The Rio Kid bursts onto the screen promising to lay waste to anyone claiming to be a faster gunslinger than he! Little do the townsfolk know that the reason The Rio Kid is so quick with the pistolero is because he’s been alive for 200 years and drinks the blood of his victims. Enter El Texano (clearing his family name) and his partner Don Nestor (fresh out of prison) – both vowing revenge!

More black and white genre blending from mid-60’s Mexico: while this film features more singing than the others in our series, it also has one of the more sympathetic antiheroes of the group. While The Rio Kid is in fact a literal monster, he also comes off as somewhat of a folk hero when he stops the assault of a young woman. In the end though, the duo save the town but cannot save the subtitles – that one’s on us.

THE DEVIL HORSE
(aka EL CABALLO DEL DIABLO)
dir. Federico Curiel, 1975
88 min, Mexico
In Spanish w/ English subtitles

SATURDAY, APRIL 1 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 22 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY APRIL 26 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 29 – 10 PM

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More songs, more comedy, and tons more fistfights and bar brawls than one might expect from a Faustian western but here we are. When a young man dies he makes a deal with the devil in exchange for his soul (classic) and returns to Earth. Despite being considerably more evil and taking it out on animals and family, no one seems to have a problem with him until the aforementioned Devil’s Horse gallops in.

Curiel like Salazar contributed to the seemingly never-ending avalanche of Santo films throughout the the 60’s and 70’s and 1968’s THE EVIL ONES but is most well known for his vampire films including – EMPIRE OF DRACULA and THE VAMPIRE GIRLS.