Danger Diabolik is a Live Sound Cinema event featuring a live soundtrack by Morricone Youth.
He robs from the rich and gives to the girls.
Mario Bava’s film adaptation of the popular Diabolik Italian comic books is a stunning visual experience that epitomizes the swinging style of the late 1960s. Danger Diabolik is a mysterious man, thin and dressed in black and armed with his beautiful woman cohort Eva, who manages to outsmart, outrun, and outdrive all the European bad guys he encounters. Money and jewels are his game, and he’ll kill to get them. Bava’s scenic design and cinematography are at his innovative best in Danger Diabolik, particularly in our hero’s underground psychedelic crystal lair where he and Eva make magic happen…on top of money!
Providing the live score to Danger Diabolik is Morricone Youth.
Pandora’s Box is a Live Sound Cinema event featuring a live soundtrack by Mary Alouette. It is the first film in our Vamps and Virgins silent film series.
Pandora’s Box is the silent German melodrama directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst (based on Frank Wedekind’s plays Ergeist and Die Buchse der Pandora) that made silent film actress Louise Brooks a star. Providing the live score to Pandora’s Box is Mary Alouette.
Louise Brooks plays “Lulu”, a young, beautiful, and naive actress to whom life can’t seem to give a break. She is also her own worst enemy. A gorgeous silent film classic, Pandora’s Box gets down to all the dirty details we love about pre-code movies: betrayal, seduction, heartbreak, rivalry, manslaughter, lust, escape, and prostitution. Even one very famous serial killer makes an appearance. A more naturalistic approach to German Expressionism, Pandora’s Box and Louise Brooks career-making performance shouldn’t be missed.
Mary Alouette is an award-winning singer, composer, and bandleader. Together with her four gypsy jazzmen, she’ll orchestrate hot acoustic jazz guitar and blazing horns in the style of legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt that calls forth a sound that can be described as beautiful music and dangerous rhythm.
Pandora’s Box is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
Thirteen years after Sally escaped Leatherface’s chainsaw, the Texas-based murders have started up again in Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Part 2!
The Sawyers definitely like to keep it (inbreeding and cannibalizing) all in the family and they are back with a bloody vengeance in this ultra gory sequel to the notoriously unbloody 1970s original. Tobe Hooper revisits the cast of cannibal backwoods characters that made him famous with big budget success following Poltergeist. Besides the hacking, chainsawing, and cooking, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 revolves mainly around smalltown disc jockey “Stretch” (who winds up recording some of the new killings) and Texas Ranger “Lefty” (played by Dennis Hopper). As always, it’s a dinner party you’d never want to be invited to but definitely don’t want to miss on the big screen!
Starring: Kathleen Turner, Ricki Lake, Sam Waterston, Matthew Lillard
The satirical expression of saccharine domesticity turned violent and the complete obliteration American norms is why nine out of ten Nitehawk staffers agree that Serial Mom is their favorite John Waters film.
Kathleen Turner plays well-meaning suburban mom Beverly R. Sutphin who literally goes above-and-beyond her motherly duty by killing anyone who gets in the way of her family’s success or who makes the slightest offence. She also makes obscene phone-calls, harassing neighbors simply for the joy of it, and kills a jury member (Patty Hearst) because she wore white after Labor Day. Though this is Waters’ campy dark comedy fun, Sutphin’s unraveling grip on reality is more than a little frightening here. Serial Mom is homemaker bliss turned sour at its very finest.
Living in Oblivion is a three-part independent movie about one-day making an independent movie in New York.
Money, egos, and the heroic attempt to create something out of nothing. Living in Oblivion follows the difficulties no-budget independent film director Nick Reve (played by Steve Buscemi) experiences in one day trying to get his dream film made. This is real life director Tom DiCillo’s second film that apparently gleans from the process of making his first film, Johnny Suede, starring Brad Pitt in 1991. Director of photography, lead actors and actresses, and even the catering company present annoying problems in this three-part filmmaking comedy.
Ed Wood is Tim Burton’s beautifully weird film about the most notoriously bad director in film history.
From cross-dressing to epically cheap productions employing bad actors and inexpensive props, Tim Burton’s Ed Wood traces the life of Hollywood’s famously awful director. It’s a beautiful black-and-white homage to the legend of Ed Wood told in late-night horror television style. At its heart, Ed Wood is a love-story between two misfits, Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) and Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau in an Oscar winning role) who, at the time this story was told was an out-of-work actor hooked on drugs and recently released from a mental hospital. It’s their devotion to filmmaking that fuels the passion to create and is what makes Ed Wood one of Burton’s absolute best. Ironically, Ed Wood and his films such as Planet 9 from Outer Space are so well known and studied now that we need to re-think their “badness.”
A Goya painting, mind games, and money violently collide in Danny Boyle’s new psychological thriller, Trance.
“No piece of art is worth a human life.”
Simon (James McAvoy) is a fine art auctioneer who teams up with a criminal gang to steal a Goya painting worth millions of dollars. But after suffering a blow to the head during the heist, he awakens to discover he has no memory of where he hid the painting. After physical threats and torture fail to produce answers, the gang’s leader Frank (Vincent Cassel) hires hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) to delve into the darkest recesses of Simon’s psyche. As Elizabeth begins to unravel Simon’s broken subconscious, the lines between truth, suggestion, and deceit begin to blur.
Starring: Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn
Who could ever forget the sexual explosion Paul Verhoeven ignited with the early 1990s classic Basic Instinct? Michael Douglas is the alcoholic/trouble cop, Detective Nick Curran, hot on the trail of wild woman mystery writer Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) after authorities suspect she murdered a man after a climatic roll in the hay. Brilliant in her role of seduction, Stone toys and taunts with every man and woman she meets (including the police in the now-legendary, and often spoofed, leg-uncrossing interrogation scene) but we never quite know if she’s the one. So, if you like your murders with a side of sex, this film is one naughty with a sharp edge.
Nitehawk Nasties invites you to find out if cannibalism still exists with CANNIBAL FEROX (a 35mm presentation).
A bona-fide Video Nasty (as decreed by the British Board of Film Classification in the 1980s), Cannibal Ferox is the trashier sister to Cannibal Holocaust but still full of adventurous youth, needless animal torture, and gruesome special effects. Three young anthropologists head down to Columbia to prove the cannibalism no longer exists and was, in fact, a story concocted by greedy European colonizers. After meeting two New York-based drug dealers who have wreaked havoc on the Columbian village, most of them wind up proving this theory with their lives. Turns out, violent killing and cannibalistic urges do come about when prompted. Hungry for more?
Part of the 2016 Nitehawk Nasties I EAT CANNIBALS program.
Introduction by director Douglas Buck on Saturday night!
Family Portraits: a Trilogy of America consists of three short horror films – Cutting Moments, Home, and Prologue – that unearth and expose the disturbing secrets of three “ordinary” families.
Unflinchingly and violently taking apart the facade of the American familial utopia, Douglas Buck’s trilogy of shorts comprising Family Portraits: a Trilogy of America is both a physical and psychology undoing. The first, Cutting Moments (1997), shows a small family of three who house a disturbing secret of sexual abuse and abandonment through the eyes of the mother; it’s when this truth surfaces that the brutal self-inflicted punishment begins. Home (1998) is a pseudo-sequel/remake of Cutting Moments where the focus shifts to the father’s perspective; more psychological but no less damaging. And lastly, Prologue, shows us the violent return of a young maimed woman to seek revenge on her attacker one year previously.
“…this is the sort of filmmaking the world desperately needs more of – uncompromisingly honest works designed not to entertain an audience but to destroy them.” – Mitch Davis, Flesh and Blood Magazine
