| psychedelia italiano / Fridays in May at 10:15pm |
 In the late 60s, Italian cinema, already rich with sensuous, colorful and lyrical filmmaking became, with the use (or at least the excuse) of LSD, sumptuous visual feasts so vivid you could almost taste them. Beloved local genres like giallos and peplum (sword-and-sandal epics) transformed into adeptly free-associated orgies of bright colors, psychologically potent dream logic imagery, and crazy, crazy clothes that you could hang in an Op Art exhibit. These experiments in narrative and style weren’t just sensationalist spectacles casually cooked up to appeal to the counterculture, but were directed with skill and craft by the premiere Italian arthouse heavyweights of the day. So slip on your best Armani, open your ears to the tasty tunes of Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, and let your eyes devour these out-there, with-it offerings from the boot-shaped land of indulgent artistry.
5/2 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: psychedelia italiano
 Fellini Satyricon
Even after the style orgies of his Juliet And The Spirits and “Toby Damnit” segment from Spirits of the Dead, no one was prepared when Fellini unleashed this bizarre, druggy adaptation of the ancient (and incomplete) Petronius classic. In first-century Rome, two attractive students (Martin Potter and Hiram Keller) fight it out over a young boy, which sets them all off on a series of bizarre adventures involving hermaphrodites, impotence potions, dwarfs, and opulent costumes and sets from such greats as Dante Ferretti and Danilo Donati, all shot in gorgeous Cinemascope. The obvious inspiration for Caligula, it remains the wildest Roman spectacle of them all and cheerfully revels in the fact that it makes no damn sense, right up to the cliffhanger final scene. Many critics hated this when it opened, but it’s now rightfully regarded as a classic. And look fast for a very early, chubby role by hairy fitness guru Richard Simmons!
Dir. Federico Fellini, 1969, 35mm, 128 min.
Tickets - $10
5/9 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: psychedelia italiano
 A Quiet Place in the Country
In a nether region located on the border of gothic horror and experimental psychodrama, Franco Nero finds his dream home in this way-way-way out pop-art Poltergeist. Nero has a grand time as Leonardo Ferri, an uncommonly flipped-out painter whose paranoia and self-doubt drive him out of claustrophobic Venice and into the crusty chambers of a dilapidated villa. From the first moment, in which he and the luscious Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave) engage in some violent sexual shenanigans, it's quite clear that Ferri's “outside the box”, but the depravity of Elio Petri's paint-spilling thriller really starts to flow when the ghost of a sex-crazed countess shows up, pushing Leonardo into a googly-eyed, sweaty-browed fervor. Petri jam-packs this lurid fable with grotesquery and kink, but perhaps the most perverse thing about A Quiet Place In The Country is the setting, which is not so much the titular landscape as the psyche of a tortured artist, a place where truly any bizarre and unseemly fixation can rampant.
Dir. Elio Petri, 1969, 35mm, 106 min.
Tickets - $10
5/16 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: psychedelia italiano
Death Laid an Egg
The first and only murder mystery to revolve entirely around a farm for mutant chickens, this explosive oddity has become a huge cult favorite over the past 15 years. You still won’t believe it either, as director Giulio Questi (fresh off one of the world’s weirdest spaghetti westerns, Django, Kill… If You Live, Shoot!) spins out a gruesome satire on industrialism with an aging Gina Lollobrigida (Trapeze), a confused Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Great Silence), and a very sexy Ewa Aulin (Candy) doing the love triangle thing at a high-tech breeding factory designed to produce headless poultry, while a knife-wielding maniac runs around, cast members drop dead and reappear, and jazz pioneer Bruno Madera goes nuts on the soundtrack. Twist piles upon twist in a film picked by the folks at EurotrashCinema.com as their favorite of all time. Abrasive, delightful and still one of a kind.
Dir. Giulio Questi, 1968, 35mm, 86 min.
Tickets - $10
5/23 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: psychedelia italiano
 Dillinger is Dead
Meet Glauco (Michel Piccoli), an industrial designer living contentedly with his wife (Anita Pallenberg) in an ultramodern flat outside the city. He's got all the luxuries: a hi-fi with tons of groovy records, cameras and tape recorders with which to pester the bedridden wife, a beautiful, lusty maid (Annie Girardot) — and a rusty old revolver. For ninety minutes, we watch Piccoli charmingly inhabit this peculiar bourgeois so-and-so, he communes with his belongings, one by one, taking pleasure in the little things — pantomiming along with his home movies, and lubricating his pistol in olive oil. With impeccable craft, director Marco Ferreri luxuriates in the simple elements of cinema such as light, sound, performance and mise-en-scène, but the self-satisfying games and immaculate surfaces expose a chilling, ultimately shocking purpose. If Fassbinder had co-directed a Jacques Tati film, the deliberate, elegant, devilish and perverse Dillinger Is Dead would be the result.
Dir. Marco Ferreri, 1969, 35mm, 90 min.
Tickets - $10
| HIGH SCHOOL HELL / Fridays in June at 10:15pm |
Welcome to hell — high school hell. Adolescence is bad enough without being caged in a prison with a thousand other hormonally overloaded, sexually frustrated, socially inexperienced maniacs lacking fully formed pre-frontal lobes (i.e., teenagers). Sure, nothing that bad is really happening, but in this overheated emotional environment, everything becomes a big deal. The cliques, the pricks, the bullies and toadies in the teenager’s mind all become monsters capable of terror, bloodshed, and mayhem — and, they’re all gonna laugh at you. That teacher’s like a cyborg, man, and that girl's, like, totally insane, and did you see what she was wearing? These movies take these feelings literally, and create a world so overloaded with angst and melodrama, you might even get nostalgic. In June — the month school thankfully ends, at least for a stretch — we’ve got four short weeks of cathartically horrible High School movies, one for each hellish year.
6/6 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: high school hell
 Class of 1984
shown with
Class of 1999
You’ll feel a whole lot better about any lingering high school traumas after catching this riotous two-fer from director Mark L. Lester, who earned a little place in cinematic heaven with Commando. First up, new teacher Perry King locks horns with malicious students from the Class of 1984, led by Timothy Van Patten at a school with mandatory metal detectors (imagine that!). Featuring Roddy McDowall as the doormat principal, Michael J. Fox as a terrorized freshman, and a theme song by none other than Alice Cooper, it’s a gory, fast-paced updating of The Blackboard Jungle with the nastiest shop classroom scene ever. Then the story gets a sci-fi makeover in Class of 1999, as unruly kids are under the thumbs of robot teachers; the B-movie dream cast includes Pam Grier, Stacy Keach, Malcolm McDowell and Joshua Miller (that spooky kid from Near Dark). Must-see viewing for anyone considering a career with the L.A. educational system.
Class of 1984 Dir. Mark L. Lester, 1982, 35mm, 98 min.
Class of 1999 Dir. Mark L. Lester, 1990, 35mm, 99 min.
Tickets - $10
6/13 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: high school hell
 Massacre at Central High
shown with
Three O'Clock High
Used to be that movies told kids with bully problems that you either got the cops involved or you outfought them, also telling them once the threat was gone, everyone would be nicer to each other. With Massacre At Central High, director Rene Daalder says both these thoughts are bullshit: the authorities don't care about kids, bullies have muscle and cunning you don't, and if you hand outcasts the whip they will gladly become the new oppressors. The only permanent solution to the problem is to kill them all yourself. Watch Robert Carradine, Andrew Stevens and hottie Rainbeaux Smith as they upend or are consumed by the social upheaval. Also showing is Phil Joanou’s underappreciated ‘80s black comedy Three O’ Clock High, featuring an unforgettable anxiety-laden turn by Casey Siesmaszko as the hapless nerdy lead forced into an inescapable schoolyard fight with perfectly-cast bully Richard Tyson (Two Moon Junction!).
Massacre At Central High Dir. Rene Daalder, 1976, HDCAM, 87 min.
Three O’ Clock High Dir. Phil Joanou, 1987, 35mm, 97 min.
Tickets - $10
6/20 @ Midnight / SERIES: high school hell
Carrie
In the face of the recent head-scratchers The Black Dahlia and Dreamcatcher, it's easy to forget what potent storytellers both Brian De Palma and Stephen King once were. Back in 1976, both men were hungry and at the top of their game, and the result of their unholy union was the undisputed prom queen of horror, Carrie. Shot through some sort of azure haze, few films of the era capture the crystallized mythical landscape of the ‘70s high school like this film, a menstrual cycle nightmare from the first trickle down Sissy Spacek's freckled thighs to the blood-soaked telekinetic climax. The cast is a who's-who's of 70's stars; Amy Irving, John Travolta, PJ Soles, William Katt to name a few — add to that Piper Laurie's legendary performance as Carrie's religious nutjob mom, and you have the sort of lightning-in-a-bottle rarely seen in horror films since.
Dir. Brian De Palma, 1976, 35mm, 98 min.
Tickets - $10
6/27 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: high school hell
If...
One of the first and greatest adolescent revenge fantasy films, this landmark entry in Lindsay Anderson’s “Mick Travis” trilogy with Malcolm McDowell is the cinematic equivalent of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” and still one of the most subversive films ever released by a major studio. (It was one of the first features to get slapped with an “X” rating, though it’s easily an “R” today.) Surrealism and experimental touches add further juice to this rallying cry against the oppressive hell of Western education, as Malcolm and pals take arms against the oppressive regime designed to turn them into dutiful grist for the British governmental mill. Even more potent for Americans now in the wake of real-life high school shooting sprees, this excellent late-’60 pop culture milestone can still be appreciated as a rousing absurdist comedy or a gut-wrenching glimpse of things to come.
Dir. Lindsay Anderson, 1968, 35mm, 111 min.
Tickets - $10
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