CineFile Video

Howdy CineFiles,

I have some exciting news! In the last couple months, I’ve been working with Dan and Sammy Harkham, owners of the Silent Movie Theatre, to open a new revival house based out of their beautiful, historic theatre…The Cinefamily. We’re bringing the same sense of fun, wonderment, and enthusiasm that I hope we’ve communicated here at CineFile (and the bookshop Sammy co-owns, Family Books) to the programming at CineFamily, with a wide range of cinema from arthouse fare to Asian genre films to found footage nights and obscuro trash. Not only that, we’ve done some really great restorations to the theatre, including new sound , new screen, new concessions, ridiculously comfortable leather sofas in the front two rows, and, my personal favorite, speakers in the bathrooms so you can track the movie if you have to take a break.

One of my big concerns about programming a theatre was something I dubbed “The Big Lebowski Trap”. Now, I love Big Lebowski as much as the next person. It’s a great movie, worthy of the cult-like adulation, and consistently large turnouts it gets every time it pops up on the big screen. But I don’t particularly feel like it needs to be shown anymore. The Nuart’s done it just fine. Unfortunately, when you show a great movie that nobody’s heard of, but people would love if they saw—like Zulawski’s arthouse freak-out Possession, for example—no one shows. Why should they, if they haven’t even heard of it? So, as a programmer, you have to show Lebowski, and Goonies, and Evil Dead 2,and so on…but then, over time, I believe, enthusiasm is lost. Without the excitement of discovery, something is critically missing from the theatrical experience.

Now I could tell you our programming is gonna rock, that each film as been as personal selected for you as a track on a mixtape for a girl I’m trying to impress, and that every show’s gonna be as generous as possible, with bonus shorts and rarities from our personal archives, and but that’s still asking an awful lot of trust. $10 worth, to be exact.

So here’s what we’re gonna do. If you pay a reasonable flat rate—$25 bucks a month, the cost of two movies and a bucket of popcorn—I’m gonna let you come as much as you want—and I’ll give you that bucket of popcorn, too. Seriously. I want you to be able to take a chance, to check something out just cause you’re intrigued, or bored, or, just really like our popcorn. Cause I want to be able show Ninja 3, and say, “really, it’s a good trashy time, try it, you just might like it.”

Also, I’ve decided to make it easier to catch a whole series, if you’re interested. I don’t know about you, but these days, unless I’m totally obsessed, I can rarely make more than one or two movies of a week-long festival. So, for example, if you wanted to see our Toho monster movies in December, you could come just once a week—every Sunday—and catch them all. You know, like poker night. To make it more of a hangout, we’re gonna open the doors half an hour early, if you want to grab a coffee and a cupcake (supplied by New York’s legendary Crumbs),

Every day of the week is going to be a different theme, covering all kinds of cinema, from high art, to total trash. Here’s the breakdown:

Silent Wednesdays
Music Thursdays
Feature Fridays (2 different movies, one high art, one low)
Early Feature Saturday
Holy F*cking Sh*t Saturday night (you know, like our section—the weirdest, most other dimensional movies we can find)
Sunday Noir Matinees
Asian Sunday Nights (one high art, one low)

If you want to download the whole calendar, check out this PDF

To buy tickets, go to www.silentmovietheatre.com

To launch the theatre, we’re starting with a little Halloween festival, and if you look close, you’ll notice that we’re having a different horror movie for every theme.

Here’s the schedule:

10/25 Hell’s Bells
8pm

Our Halloween festival begins with a mind-bending, soul-stealing, ear-shattering tribute to the Satanic roots of heavy metal. Tonight, The CineFamily opens its vaults and unspools some of the rarest, weirdest and scariest film and video evidence of heavy metal’s awesome power to corrupt our youth. Witness how rock and roll mocks Christ, tempts the libido and promotes the worship of Satan, through album covers, music videos, backwards messages and occult iconography. The evening continues with a debauched performance by fallen woman Diamondback Annie, and culminates in the supremely evil concert film Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare. Hosted by Vincent Price, and “written” by Alan Rudolph, this rarely-screened movie from 1975 will be our final piece of damning evidence. If Halloween is the Devil’s favorite holiday, then surely heavy metal is his favorite music.

Our festival of Heavy Metal Casualties continues on Music Thursdays, through November.

10/26 Possession- Director’s Cut & US Cut (1981)
7:30pm & 10:30pm

It’s every director’s worst nightmare when studio hacks take the axe to their babies. Witness Polish director Andrej Zulawski’s delirious arthouse shocker and its mutated American offspring. Zulawski’s original film is possibly the best high art horror movie ever made, a shocking, surrealist masterpiece that functions as both a slimy creature feature, and a harrowing psychodrama about divorce. Possession is a totally unique film; the performances have the stylized emotional hysteria of a Ken Russell movie (characters are prone to seizures and self-mutilation, when they get too upset), but constrained within the formal rigor of a Roman Polanski, who not-coincendentally attended the same legendary Polish film school as Zulawski (Lodz.) Isabelle Adjani, whose primal scream performance won Best Actress at Cannes, was so disturbed by the final result she dubbed it “emotional pornography.” American producers, unsure what to do with this cinematic chimera, re-cut the film drasti

cally, making an already abstract plot flat-out nonsensical, and adding a screwy, solarized ending in a misguided attempt to turn it into a mainstream, psychedelic horror flick. Renamed The Night The Screaming Stopped, this version has become its own lost, grindhouse classic. The only thing madder than that, is what we’re doing—showing both movies in one night– the original monster and its diabolical doppelganger.

10/27 Process Media Presents: Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) introduced by Roky Erickson
7:30pm

Texas psychedelic legend Roky Erickson, lead singer of the 13th Floor Elevators and subject of the acclaimed documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me knows a thing or two about horror stories, as writer of classic spook-rock songs like “Stand for the Fire Demon,” “I Think of Demons,” “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer,” and the aforementioned “Creature with the Atom Brain”. Erickson will be on hand to introduce this feverish 50’s B-picture, his favorite horror film. Think of it as “The Godfather” meets “Dr. Strangelove” in Frankenstein’s castle: an exiled American gangster bent on revenge hires a maniacal ex-Nazi scientist to create radio-controlled killer zombies. Soon, the police, the army and the kitchen sink show up to battle it out in a climax your nightmares will take notes from. A signing of Process Media’s new biography Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound will follow the film, with author Paul Drummond and Erickson in atte

ndance.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
10:30pm

“Four more days to Halloween…Halloween…Halloween. Four more days to Halloween…Sil-ver Shamrock.”

If the lyrics of the above jingle make your hair stand on end, it’s probably because you were one of the legions of kids scarred by Halloween III: The Season of the Witch– the only entry in John Carpenter’s horror franchise not to feature the Michael Myers character. It’s set in the strange, all-Irish California suburb of Santa Mira (actually Humboldt County, which might explain the pervasive cloud of goofy paranoia), where the Silver Shamrock toy company manufactures Halloween costumes with a sinister side effect. If a child watches the company’s subliminal TV ad while wearing their signature Jack-o-lantern mask, they’re turned into a seething pile of snakes and bugs. The threat of ancient Celtic rituals aside, this compellinglyweird 1982 film may itself have been a conspiracy against critic Rex Reed, who claimed that Halloween II was so bad that he’d turn in his press card if they ever made a third. We’re still waiting, Rex.

Our festival of Threes (film franchises gone wild!) continues on Holy F*cking Sh*t Saturdays through November.

10/28 Nightmare Alley (1947)
1pm

Tyrone Power plays a con-man who gets mixed up in a sordid circus in this dark, cynical noir. Features a sultry femme fatale, alcoholism and a circus geek who bites the heads off of chickens. A cult classic!

10/28 Onibaba (1964)
7:30pm

One of Japan’s all-time greatest horror features, Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba plunges us to the depths of despair in war-torn feudalist Japan. In a barren rural landscape, an old peasant woman and her daughter-in-law eke out a meager existence by ambushing samurai and stripping them of their armor and goods. When a brutal mercenary imposes himself on their scheme, the women turn violently on one another. Jealousy, rage, and the haunted mask of a dead warrior transform the mother into a vengeful demon. Much like Akira Kurosawa or Masaki Kobayashi, director Shindo focuses on periods of feudal chaos and civil war to critique the lawlessness at the core of Japanese society. Masterfully shot in B&W ‘Scope and scored to propulsive tribal drums, Onibaba masks its stark realist themes with powerful images of supernatural possession.

Hausu (1977)
10:30pm

A delirious pop-horror fantasy from one of Japan’s foremost cult filmmakers, Hausu could be the most legendary horror film you’ve never seen. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi twists horror conventions inside out with a ghost story so visually over-the-top it makes Suspiria look like Leave it to Beaver. The plot, such as it is, follows Oshare (Kimiko Ikegami) and six schoolgirls as they take an ill-advised summer trip to visit her spinster aunt. Obayashi uses the thin story to cram in as many dazzling experimental effects as the human retina can absorb. Humans turn into piles of bananas, pianos devour their players, animated demons spew blood and appendages– Hausu is a gleeful genre-smashing melee and the weirdest horror film ever made.

This introduces a regular Sunday night series of Asian Cinema.

10/29 Creature Double Feature!
8pm

Pumpkinhead (1989)

Screen legend Lance Henriksen stars in this gothic horror flick directed by creature effects guru Stan Winston. When Ed Harley’s hillbilly son is accidentally killed by some no good city slicker teens, he calls upon the titular demon to reap his unholy vengeance. But at what price, Lance? AT WHAT PRICE?!?! As one would expect, the creature itself is spectacular, but Pumpkinhead also surprises with some spooky atmosphere and a career-making performance from its gaunt, craggy lead.

With…

Rawhead Rex (1986)

Horror writer/kinky sex guy Clive Barker disowned this
adaptation of his short story, directed by British no-name George Pavlou, but one has to really wonder why. Sure the creature looks like an 80’s metal guitarist with Down Syndrome; the story is mangled into a nearly incomprehensible mess and the script is uniformly terrible, but its still no less entertaining, in its own way, than Barker’s classic Hellraiser. Maybe if Barker would just loosen up his nipple clamps for a second he might find himself enjoying this dizzy, warts-and-all creature feature, or at least come to appreciate it long enough to allow for a decent DVD transfer to be released.

10/30 Homophobia! Homo-horror hosted by Jer Ber Jones
8pm

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

In the much maligned sequel to the seminal Wes Craven classic, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 features horror icon Freddy Krueger as a metaphor for the fey teenaged protagonist’s repressed homosexuality. Director Jack Sholder somehow failed to notice the clear homoerotic “subtext” of the film, despite a sequence that starts in a leather bar and climaxes in a boys locker room ass-whipping death.

With…

Jeepers Creepers (2001)

If Freddy’s Revenge is too subtle for you, prepare to be terrified and titillated by Victor Salva’s modern masterwork Jeepers Creepers. Salva fashions a creature from his own tortured id with the titular Creeper, a fiend that will stop at nothing to get his claws on hairless boy-toy Justin Long’s “peepers”. So come set your gaydar to “scream” for these homo-horror classics.

10/31 HÄXAN w/ Bob Mitchell on the organ (1922)
8pm

Join us for an evening of transcendent strangeness as we present Danish director Benjamin Christensen’s alternately horrific and hilarious 1922 pseudo-documentary about the history of witchcraft. Somewhere between a live-action Hieronymous Bosch painting and a painfully awkward session of Show-and-Tell, the vignette-style film features Christensen himself in the role of Satan. What begins as a dry instructional doc soon veers into mondo territory as Christensen catalogs ancient occult sordidness: nuns flip out, monks torture monks, flamenco-dancing witches make out with the devil. Häxan is acknowledged by most as the strangest silent film ever made. To be preceded by a shorts program and featuring live accompaniment on the organ.

This re-introduces our Silent Film series, which will continue every Wednesday night.

About The Cinefamily?

The Cinefamily is an organization of movie lovers devoted to finding and presenting interesting and unusual programs of exceptional, distinctive, weird and wonderful films. The Cinefamily’s goal is to foster a spirit of community and a sense of discovery, while reinvigorating the movie-going experience. Like campfires, sporting events and church services, we believe that movies work best as social experiences. They are more meaningful, funnier and scarier when shared with others. Our home is The Silent Movie Theatre, one of Hollywood’s most beloved and beautiful cultural landmarks. There, The Cinefamily will provide a destination spot for Los Angelenos and others to rediscover the pleasures of cinema.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 1:20 pm and is filed under New Arrivals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.