Starring: Peter Weller, Ellen Barkin, John Lithgow, Carl Lumbly, Christopher Lloyd, Lewis Smith, Vincent Schiavelli, Jeff Goldblum
Dr. Buckaroo Banzai is a real renaissance man: a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and even a rock musician. Is there anything he can’t do?! Well, when it comes to saving the world from the band of inter-dimensional aliens the Red Lectroids, he and his crew The Hong Kong Cavaliers are really put to the test. Buckaroo Banzai (aka The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension) is brilliantly adventurous and unique film that spans so many genres and has a rather complicated backstory that involves a secret device called an “oscillation overthruster,” traveling to other dimensions, alien hitchhikers, and a madman scientist. A must see!
Produced by Roger Corman and based on Lovecraft’s short story of the same name, the psychedelic DUNWICH HORROR visits the fictional Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts where a hidden evil resides.
Dr. Henry Armitage, an expert in the occult, goes to the old Whateley manor in Dunwich looking for Nancy Wagner, a student who went missing the previous night. He and Elizabeth, a friend and classmate of Nancy’s, are turned away by Wilbur, the family’s insidious heir, who has plans for the young girl. But Armitage won’t be deterred. Through conversations with the locals, he soon unearths the Whateleys’ darkest secret — as well as a great evil.
Roger Corman’s THE HAUNTED PALACE was marketed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace” but is actually derived from the plot of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” It stars Vincent Price, as it should.
Condemned warlock Joseph Curwen curses a New England village just before being burned alive. All of them witches! More than a century later, Curwen’s kindly great-great grandson Charles Ward arrives in town and moves into Curwen’s old mansion. Caretaker Simon Orne helps Charles and his wife Ann adjust to their new home but the ancient curse, however, soon takes hold of Joseph, awakening inside him a long-dormant evil passed on through blood.
Starring: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ted Sorel, Ken Foree
Co-presented by Brooklyn Horror Society.
Obsessive scientist Dr. Pretorius (Bride of Frankenstein reference alert) successfully discovers a way to access a parallel universe of pleasure by tapping into the brain’s pineal gland. When he is seemingly killed by forces from this other dimension, his assistant, Dr. Crawford Tillinghast, is accused of the murder. After psychiatrist Katherine McMichaels and detective Bubba Brownlee take the case, the trio risks a return to the other world in order to solve the mystery.
A portion of proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the Heidi Paoli Fund.
Brooklyn Horror Society is a community created to celebrate all things horror. With events ranging from classic movie screenings to horror trivia to screenings for local indie directors, we’ve got something for the diehard gore hounds, the nervous horror-curious, and everyone in between.
2016’s THE VOID is pure Lovecraftian: grotesque monsters, hospitals, the gateway to hell and the unknown space of the void.
When police officer Carter discovers a blood-soaked man limping down a deserted road, he rushes him to a local hospital with a barebones, night shift staff. As cloaked, cult-like figures surround the building, the patients and staff inside start to turn ravenously insane. Trying to protect the survivors, Carter leads them into the depths of the hospital where they discover a gateway to immense evil.
Starring: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins
When five college friends arrive at a remote forest cabin for a little vacation, little do they expect the horrors that await them. One by one, the youths fall victim to backwoods zombies, but there is another factor at play. Two scientists are manipulating the ghoulish goings-on, but even as the body count rises, there is yet more at work than meets the eye.
Starring: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, Charlton Heston
When horror novelist Sutter Cane goes missing, insurance investigator John Trent scrutinizes the claim made by his publisher, Jackson Harglow, and endeavors to retrieve a yet-to-be-released manuscript and ascertain the writer’s whereabouts. Accompanied by the novelist’s editor, Linda Styles, and disturbed by nightmares from reading Cane’s other novels, Trent makes an eerie nighttime trek to a supernatural town in New Hampshire.
Starring: Koji Imada, Sayaka Maeda, Takashi Fujii
Director Masaaki Yuasa’s masterful mash of visual styles, Mind Game is a psychedelic trip into the grave and beyond, following a down-on-his-luck loser named Nishi nursing a lifelong crush on his childhood girlfriend. On a particularly bad day, Nishi finds out that his dream girl’s engaged… and then he’s murdered by the Yakuza. Nishi’s death sets him off on a twist-turny, loop-dee-loop journey where he meets God, winds up in the belly of a whale and beyond. Told using an innovative blend of animation techniques, Mind Game hops from experimental photography to slapdash storyboards to beautifully rendered CG and back again.
Starring: Megumi Hayashibara, Tôru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori
The final film of visionary director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Millenium Actress), Paprika takes place in a near future where a device allows therapists to explore the dreamscapes of their patients. The head of the scientific team behind this new treatment, Atusko Chiba, creates an alter-ego named Paprika to help patients navigate their subconscious. When a thief steals the device and begins entering the minds of the public, the worlds of dreams and reality merge into a single psychedelic carnival.
This screening of Robot Carnival will feature a 35mm print of the U.S. theatrical dub of the film produced by Streamline Pictures.
Released on video in Japan, but theatrically in the U.S., animated anthology film Robot Carnival collects nine shorts on robotics and artificial intelligence from nine up-and-coming anime directors of the day. Featuring a wide-range of styles and influences, the film kickstarted the careers of directors like Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Yasuomi Umetsu (Kite, Mezzo Forte), and Hiroyuki Kitakubo (Roujin Z, Golden Boy) and several others who graduated to some of the most popular titles of the 1980s (Bubblegum Crisis, City Hunter, Char’s Counterattack, Urotsukidoji).
35mm original theatrical print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
