Smash TV live TONIGHT at the Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg. Skinemax at 7:30 and Replicant City at 9:30. NYC people, don’t sleep on this!
Drug Cinema with Hamilton Morris
Mushroom Movie Night Thursday, July 7th - 8:00pm
Hamilton Morris (who writes the Pharmacopeia blog for Vice) brings his pharmacological
expertise and his drug movie collection to Spectacle for a visit to the glorious kingdom of the psychoactive fungus. A selection of clips on the mushroom experience and the Shroomsploitation feature films Attack of the Mushroom People (Japan, 1963) and Shrooms (2007). With Fruit of the Gods and a lecture on the toxicity of Galerina Marginata.
Watch a trailer, and another trailer!
Hamilton’s drug blog for Vice
Georges Franju’s JUDEX and
Fritz Lang’s THE 1,000 EYES OF DR. MABUSE
MONDAY, JULY 11 AT THE SPECTACLE THEATER
Two separate films // $5 each
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JUDEX
7:30 pm • View a clip from the film
Georges Franju (1963, 104 min.) Louis Feuillade created Judex to appease opponents of his earlier work, which was criticised as glorifying crime and violence. But compared to Fantômas and Les Vampires, Judex is merely the opposite side of the same coin: a master of disguise and gentleman sadist avenging those even further morally debased. Seizing the opportunity to recraft Fueillade’s material after a proposed Fantômas remake fell apart, Franju spins Judex as a baroque Victorian Gothic fantasia with a sinister bent. Collaborating once again with cinematographer Marcel Fradetal, who shot his 1949 slaughterhouse documentary Le Sang des bêtes, Franju delivers some stunning images of flickering daggers and blackclad henchmen scaling buildings like silhouettes in the night. Most unforgettable is an ornate costumed ball inspired by the illustrations of 19th century French caricaturist J.J. Grandville, an unmistakable influence on Eyes Wide Shut. It’s surreal moments like these, as well as a wonderful nostalgia for early French cinema, that makes Cocteau comparisons especially apt—but he never made a film as dangerous or sexy as this.
In French with English subtitles. Digital projection.
THE 1,000 EYES OF DR. MABUSE
9:30 pm • View a vintage trailer
Dir. Fritz Lang (1960, 103 min.) For his final film, Fritz Lang returned to Germany and the most notorious creation of his Weimar period: the nebulous criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse. When a series of murders follow the long-thought deceased Mabuse’s M.O., Kriminalkommissar Kras follows a ghastly psychic’s leads to a luxury hotel outfitted with Nazi surveillance technology. Among the characters ensnared in its machinations are a dashing American arms dealer, a cold-blooded assassin and a suicidal woman with a grave secret—and perhaps even the doctor himself. Featuring homages to works across Lang’s entire oveure alongside a direct, unequivocal confrontation with Nazism, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse is a fitting and unjustly neglected swan song from one of the masters of cinema.
Presented with it’s rare, original German soundtrack and English subtitles. Digital projection.
La Prisonniere (1968)
Henri Georges Clouzot
Clouzot’s swan song was La Prisonnière, a curious excursion into voyeurism and emotional game-playing, exploring a love triangle involving Gilbert, a kinetic artist (Bernard Fresson), Josée, a film editor (Elisabeth Wiener) and Stanislas, a photographer/gallery owner (Laurent Terzieff). This was the only film Clouzot made entirely in colour, although he had been planning to shoot L’Enfer in a combination of B&W and colour to differentiate reality from lurid fantasy.
La Prisonnière is pure Clouzot thematically – jealousy, sadism, control, attraction and repulsion. Anyone who can make Hitchcock uneasy deserves closer examination, and Hitchcock was nervous that Henri-Georges Clouzot might unseat him as “the master of suspense”. Although not as prolific, Clouzot’s is undoubtedly a comparable talent, and Wages Of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955) regularly make it into lists of the greatest thrillers ever made.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/great-directors/clouzot/
CULT MOVIE TUESDAY at The SPECTACLE Theater! An outlaw gang of Harley-riding hellions led by Adam (Stephen Oliver of “Motor Psycho” and “Peyton Place” fame) and his ol’ lady Helen (D.J. Anderson) - troll the dusty highways of the American Southwest in search of the next great kick, whether it be sex, drugs, or violence. After dispatching a pair of rednecks unfriendly to their lifestyle, the Advocates run roughshod over a gas station before taking to the road again, where they encounter a cloistered sect of Satanic monks led by high priest One (Severn Darden). A mass-drugging, a ritual sacrifice, a topless snake-dance, and a scene-clearing fistfight ensue, but it’s too late: the spell has been cast … Equal parts road movie biker pic and black magic monster flick, this 1971 cross-genre film marked the directorial debut of Michel Levesque, art designer on the Russ Myers films (“Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-vixens”), and also starred Billy Gray (TV’s “Father Knows Best”) and pop singer Barry McGuire. An early experiment in docu-drama (in many scenes, footage was used of real bikers with no experience or training in acting going about their lives as normal) Werewolves defies classification. Is it art? Is it exploitation? The answer is a resounding yes. Werewolves on Wheels Watch a Trailer for Werewolves on Wheels! It triggered Australia’s exploitation explosion, sparked a worldwide censorship battle, and remains one of the most infamous biker movies in genre history. The full-throttle saga of an undercover cop (Ken Shorter) who infiltrates the outlaw Grave Diggers (led by producer/director/co-writer Sandy Harbutt) on a one-way trip to hell with vengeance in their hearts, violence on their minds, and 150 horsepower of screaming steel between their legs. Helen Morse (Picnic at Hanging Rock), Bill Hunter (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), members of the Sydney Hells Angels, and Hugh Keays-Byrne, Roger Ward, Vincent Gil and Reg Evans of Mad Max fame co-star in the ultimate down-under cult classic, now fully restored. Stone
Dir Michel Levesque, 1971, 77mins
Tuesday, June 21st - 7:30pm
Dir. Sandy Harbutt, 1974, 10mins
Tuesday, June 21st - 9:30pm
MIDNIGHT MOVIE at The SPECTACLE!
Saturday, June 18th
THE MAN FROM HONG KONG (1975)
starring Jimmy Wang Yu!
The Man from Hong Kong, known in the U.S.A. as The Dragon Flies is a 1975 action film that was the first Australian-Hong Kong co-production being filmed in both nations. The film was also the first Australian martial arts film.
The Far East and the Land Down Under are about to have a head-on collision in this action drama. Fang (Jimmy Wang Yu) is an undercover detective from Hong Kong sent to Australia to crack open the operation of a Sydney mob boss named Wilton (George Lazenby). Fang puts his skills as a hang glider pilot and martial arts master to work as he sets up Wilton for a literally explosive finale. Samo Hung (aka Kim Po Hung), later to become a major martial arts star in his own right, appears in a supporting role and has an impressive battle with an Australian cop. The film also features the song “Sky High” by Jigsaw, which would go on to become a Top 40 hit.
Cult Movie Midnight Saturday 6/11:
Boxer’s Omen at Spectacle
Description: KCCS presents Boxer’s Omen (Chih-Hung Kuei, Hong Kong, 1983, 105min) one of the strangest, most hallucinatory visions ever put on film, from the legendary Shaw Bros. Epic horror by way of martial arts action, kung-fu mystery, tinged with Buddhist mysticism and nightmarish psychedelia. Hoping to avenge his brother – paralyzed in the ring by a Thai gangster – and lift a centuries-old family curse, a Chinese boxer travels to Thailand and joins with a band of fighting monks in a supernatural odyssey fraught with crazed wizards, ghosts, monsters, rabid bats, and the reanimated corpses of fully naked women.
Details:
Saturday June 11th, midnight, Spectacle Theater
124 S3rd @ Bedford Ave, Brooklyn. $5
A BIG GREY-BLUE BIRD
(Thomas Schamoni, 1971)
Tonight at the Spectacle Theatre at 7:30pm
via Screen Slate
Midnight Grindhouse Fri June 3
at the Spectacle Theatre
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE
How often does a supposedly trashy, exploitation film, a perfect example of the rape/revenge subgenre, get its biggest defense from a feminist horror film scholar? How often do you get the chance to see Buster Keaton’s grand-niece, defiled and humiliated, wreck serious Medieval revenge (‘70s style) on country bumpkin, scum bag tormentors?
Camille Keaton gives an unforgettable performance as Jennifer Hills, a New York City-based writer who journeys up to the woods of Connecticut to focus on her work, only to be attacked by a gang of white trash pigs and left for dead… until she licks her wounds and gets down to business.
Banned in a dozen or more countries and described by critic Roger Ebert as a “a vile bag of garbage without a shred of artistic distinction,” Meir Zarchi’s notorious and reviled film also received lengthy coverage (and praise) in Carol J. Clover’s seminal feminist study, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws”.
It may be one of the most appalling motion pictures ever made, but it is also a grossly misunderstood one.
