| SUMMER "CAMP" (curated by george kuchar) / Fridays in August (see listings below for showtimes) |
 Mommie dearest, I love it here at the Cinefamily Summer Camp. All we do is watch wonderfully bad movies and eat s'mores every Friday night. Well, not exactly "bad" movies; they're just so silly and melodramatic, and try so hard that you can't help but start giggling. Everything is so exaggerated, over-the-top, and artificial --arch acting, hulking he-men, buxom bombshells, mock exotica, and backyard special effects. It's wicked awesome! Our counsellor, underground filmmaker George Kuchar, loves this stuff too; in the '50s as a teenager in the Bronx, he started making all these crazy home movies inspired by this stuff, running around on rooftops with his twin brother, his freakazoid friends, his mother's' wardrobe, and a Super-8 camera. George has picked campy classics for us to watch all summer long. Oh, and my favorite part of Summer Camp is when we sing the motto together: "It's absurd to divide movies into good or bad; movies are either charming or tedious." I think Oscar Wilde came up with that.
8/22 @ 10pm / SERIES: summer "camp"
 Fuego
shown with
Criminally Insane
Fuego is a piece of smut so kitschy, pervy, and curvy that Russ Meyer himself would get a woody if he wasn't already stiff...in the grave! Isabel Sarli was Argentina's answer to Jayne Mansfield, or perhaps we should say their amplification: she was even more voluptuous, had even less acting skills, and best of all seemed willing to take her clothes of and writhe around any time her cheeseball rhumba theme song kicks off on the soundtrack ("Fuego!"), which happens a lot. Never has eroticism been more fiery! More repetitive! More Fuego, Fuego, FUEGO! Kuchar sez, "Isabel Sarli, the true amazon of South America, in this, one of her most out-of-control roles in what are in reality family pictures, since she makes them with her husband who directs and stars opposite (and on top of her). A truly breathtaking journey of unbridled obsessions with some medical themes thrown in for purient purposes." Criminally Insane will follow the screening of Fuego, at midnight.
Fuego Dir. Armando Bo, 1969, 35mm, 81 min.
Criminally Insane Dir. Nick Millard, 1975, digital presentation, 61 min.
Tickets - $10
8/29 @ 10pm / SERIES: summer "camp"
 The Shanghai Gesture
shown with
Sextette
Legendary director Josef von Sternberg is renowned for his critically praised, sensitive films offering insight into the delicate male-female dynamic. The Shanghai Gesture is not one of them. Shot mostly while the director was laid up flat on his back in pain, this wonderfully overheated 1941 melodrama follows the misadventures of pretty Poppy (Gene Tierney), who slides into the booze and gambling world of Shanghai, thanks to the unholy influence of Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson, sporting some of funniest hairdos in Hollywood history), while her estranged dad (Walter Huston) tries to intervene. This dreamlike orgy of Art Deco excess, quotable juicy dialogue and surreal plotting offers one compulsive guilty pleasure after another, showing exactly where Kenneth Anger got most of his ideas. For years this was considered an embarrassment for the director, but its avid cult following would certainly argue otherwise.
Next -- nothing will tap into your cinemasochistic impulses more than Sextette, our other half of this double feature, a film you will stare at in slack-jawed horror but be unable to tear yourself away from. Kuchar sez: "Sextette is Mae West living a fantasy in another country and in another dimension, with music from various time zones pretty much out of sync with everything else. A time capsule that insanely keeps running even though the batteries are dead." West, looking positively taxidermied at the tender age of eightysomething, plays a movie star impossibly married to a British aristocrat sixty years her junior (Timothy Dalton, trying his best not to vomit in his mouth); the whole affair is like some absurd Phillip K. Dick description of an dystopian future TV sitcom…no, wait, it’s like “Love, American Style” done by Takashi Miike on Robitussin…no, no…it’s as if Gaspar Noe hooked up with Mel Brooks and put on a show! It hurts…it hurts….
(Restored 35mm print of "The Shanghai Gesture" courtesy of courtesy of George Eastman House)
The Shanghai Gesture Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1941, 35mm, 98 min.
Sextette Dir. Ken Hughes, 1978, 35mm, 91 min.
Tickets - $10
| WHEN COUGARS ATTACK / Fridays in September (see listings below for showtimes) |
 You know what we're talking about: virginal inexperienced young men, adam's apples bobbing, sweat beads forming; sexy schoolmarms with big glasses ready to be whipped off; and bunned hair waiting to be lustfully released into a wild mane, completing a look of pure horniness. Maybe a fog machine too, if there's a dream sequence. These sex comedies are a celebration of hormonal amplitude, full of nostalgia for when us boys were overwhelmed by female sexuality, and a beautiful, mature woman was the most powerful creature on the planet. And there's something for the ladies as well. The older women in these films have healthy sexual appetites—they know a hunk of guy flesh in a pair of tight blue jeans when they see it, and aren't afraid to take a bite. Everyone gets an eyeful in these good-humored, high-spirited movies about what happens...when cougars attack!
9/5 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: when cougars attack
 Class
with
Weird Science
In Class, Andrew McCarthy transforms from a wide-eyed schoolboy into an awkward heartthrob whose charm inspires bombshell MILF Jacqueline Bisset to deflower him in a glass elevator, a scene that inspired wet dreams across the nation. The film co-stars nascent hotties John Cusack, and a believably smarmy Rob Lowe as McCarthy's prep-school roommate who eggs McCarthy into "planting his seed," which he does by heading for the city and hooking up with...his roommate's mom?! Next, John Hughes' underappreciated comedy Weird Science follows a couple of hapless horndog nerds who, with the help of an electrocuted dot-matrix printer, conjure up a living, breathing composite of every gorgeous woman of the era. The result is ultimate '80s vixen Kelly LeBrock—a pin-up robot whose double-density disks are anything but floppy. The result is the ultimate cougar girlfriend: someonewho teaches you how to dress, stand up to bullies, get a good fake I.D.—-and fuck your brains out.
Class Dir. Lewis Carlino, 1983, 35mm, 98 min.
Weird Science Dir. John Hughes, 1985, 35mm, 94 min.
Tickets - $10
9/12 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: when cougars attack
 "Sexy Schoolteacher" Triple Feature
The appetizingly fleshy, pneumatically gifted giallo queen Edwige Fenech starred in seemingly every Italian sleaze-o comedy of the '70s, including this infamous series of "hot for teacher" teen sex romps. These films are crammed with jokes so unfunny, they go through unfunny and back around again to funny—or at least to really, really weird. Picture the worst Police Academy jokes sifted through a bad Google translation and doused with predatory Guido sexuality, making them extra-uncomfortable. Like the Porky's movies, the Sexy Schoolteacher series always featured the same relentlessly unfunny, shtick-addicted comedy hacks leering at Fenich's assets over and over again, but, just as fun as the T&A, is the hilariously awkward dubbing, and the equally ridiculous, insane immature pranking. These films were made for an audience with the regressive intelligence of a child, and the overloaded sexuality of a middle-aged provolone delivery man. So of course we'll see you there, right?
Dirs. various, 1975-9, digital presentation
Tickets - $10
9/19 @ 10pm / SERIES: when cougars attack
 My Tutor
Smokin' older hottie Caren Kaye skinny-dipped her way into adolescent hearts everywhere with this wish-fulfillment fantasy about a live-in French tutor who teaches her teenage pupil all about the facts of life. My Tutor was intended as a cash-in on the similar Private Lessons by the drive-in impresarios at Crown International Pictures, and it's better than it had any right to be thanks to the two leads and a surprisingly savvy script. Make no mistake, though; amongst the tender storyline, the picture's loaded with bare boobage, and plenty of boy bootie to boot from the youthful Matt Lattanzi (future husband of Olivia Newton-John). As an added bonus, Crispin Glover also makes a suitably weird impression in an early role as Lattanzi's best friend, appearing typically unhinged throughout!
Dir. George Bowers, 1983, 35mm, 97 min.
Tickets - $10
9/26 @ 10:15pm / SERIES: when cougars attack
A Night in Heaven
No cougar film melodically whistles the tune of blatant beefcake more than A Night In Heaven, the go-go-boy-sploitation final chapter in the lusty Christopher Atkins shirtless triptych (which also includes The Blue Lagoon and The Pirate Movie). Atkins stars as a tanned, chiseled jock paying for his college tuition by stripping; one night on the job, he lap-dances one of his MILFy professors (Lesley Ann Warren), a horny wildcat hidden underneath a mousey exterior of schoolmarm chic. Thinking flirting with her will get him a better grade, he unwittingly unleashes her long-dormant passions, and her jealous husband's deadly rage. Fans of gaudy fare like Xanadu will thrill to the sight of Atkins's strip numbers, in which his perfect body is framed against a halo of tacky disco glitz--and the infamous sex scene between him and Lesley Ann, which still elicits cheers today.
Dir. John G. Avildsen, 1983, 35mm, 83 min.
Tickets - $10
| george romero / Fridays in October (see listings below for showtimes) |
 Romero is one of those natural-born directors whose gift for storytelling and imaginative ideas has infected the independent film world like so many flesh-eating zombies. The urgency and passion he has for filmmaking bleeds through the celluloid, and you get the sense that he would make films under any circumstances--and did. As it happened, he used a community of local Pittsburgh actors and small budgets, crafting horror films that were both skillfully made and conceptually potent. The result is a body of work full of brutal vitality, a showcase of techniques that exemplify all the best qualities of amateur filmmaking while exponentially exceeding the sum of their parts. With this series, the Cinefamily is excited to bring a retrospective full of rarely screened gems from a genuine master that transformed the craggy face of horror cinema.
10/3 @ 10pm / SERIES: george romero
 Night of the Living Dead
with
Day of the Dead
Romero's '68 masterpiece, elegant in its simplicity and stark in its depiction of an American populace sleepwalking through the Vietnam era, remains the template for the modern zombie film, even after all these years. Even if you think you know the film inside and out--when's the last time you actually sat down and watched it? In 35mm? Come give it another whirl with us, and rediscover its brutal beauty. We then speed forward to 1985's Day Of The Dead, whose real star is arguably makeup effects wizard Tom Savini's showstopping gore taking a front seat, as zombie hordes attack the few remaining humans holed up in a military bunker. The way that they claw their way through living flesh is a crimson marvel, so visceral and spectacular that you'll stand up and cheer for the undead to cannibalize every last living character pronto!
Night of the Living Dead Dir. George Romero, 1968, 35mm, 96 min.
Day of the Dead Dir. George Romero, 1985, 35mm, 102 min.
Tickets - $10
10/10 @ 10pm / SERIES: george romero
 Season of the Witch
with
The Crazies
After his first zombie classic, Romero produced these two atmospheric, endearing early-'70s experiments worthy of rediscovery. Season Of The Witch tried to find an audience under other titles (Jack's Wife and Hungry Wives), none of which capture the full surreal experience of this intense look at a housewife resorting to suburban witchcraft when her husbands and friends fail to provide any fulfillment. And Romero turns his eye towards mass hysteria as a government-engineered virus called Trixie accidentally turns a small Pennsylvania town into The Crazies, with society itself breaking down in the process. Even more unnerving in today's political and economic climate, this sweat-inducing look at the miltiary's capacity to demolish everyday life is the perfect movie to watch in a Presidential campaign year. Don't miss your chance to catch these two ultra-rare slices of Romero in bona fide 35mm prints.
Season of the Witch Dir. George Romero, 1973, 35mm, 89 min.
The Crazies Dir. George Romero, 1973, 35mm, 103 min.
Tickets - $10
10/17 @ 10pm / SERIES: george romero
Monkey Shines
with
The Dark Half
The bizarre Monkey Shines concerns a recent quadrapelegic who's supplied with Ella, a cute little helper monkey, to help him out around the house--a monkey who also belongs to a test group scientifically manipulated to become intelligent and responsive to human commands. The two bond a little too closely, and when the recipients of his mounting rage turn up dead, you can guess who's responsible. Then, in another film about a man's id manifesting itself physically, we're showing The Dark Half. Romero's second Stephen King adaptation (his first being Creepshow), The Dark Half is one of Romero's personal favorites. Tim Hutton is fantastic in the dual roles of a novelist who "kills off" his pseudonymn in a mock ceremony, and the vengeful incarnation of this "dark half" hellbent on revenge. Don't miss the photographer character being killed with his own artificial leg!
Monkey Shines Dir. George Romero, 1988, 35mm, 113 min.
The Dark Half Dir. George Romero, 1993, 35mm, 122 min.
Tickets - $10
10/24 @ 10:30pm / SERIES: george romero
 Martin
"Don't worry, I'm always careful with the needles," advises the troubled Martin to a female victim as he injects her with a sedative. In a dim train car, he embraces her unconscious body and uses a razor blade to open her veins and drink her blood. With this unforgettable opening, Romero reveals the same precision found in his previous studies of zombies, though Martin finds him taking vampire lore into devastating waters. The teenage Martin (John Amplas) lives with his stern uncle, who claims that Martin is actually an ancient, traditional vampire who stalks the streets at night; the viewer is never completely sure about the true nature of Martin's identity, with eerie gothic flashbacks reinforcing the uneasy coexistence between past and present in his family. The kind of film that horror buffs adore, Martin is Romero's true masterpiece, a perfect example of his personal expression as a filmmaker, and very rarely screened--so don't miss it.
Dir. George Romero, 1978, 35mm, 95 min.
Tickets - $10
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