Nitehawk Cinema and Mishka present a special screening of Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop from 1987.
In the not-so-distant future, a fatally wounded cop comes back to life as part-robot in a dystopian Detroit to fight crime and find his killers. As with any Paul Verhoeven film, RoboCop has a certain “quality” to it. At once campy yet serious, this film is a mix of science-fiction, crime thriller, action, and black comedy. In this very Nietschean tale of being “more human than human”, Robocop (Peter Weller) struggles with his new role as an indestructible being who still can’t escape the emotional past. I mean, what good is being part robot if your human side (with all the love and revenge involved) keeps getting in the way? The socio-political reach of RoboCop is wide too as it comments on everything from the media, capitalism, gentrification, and gender issues. Plus, it’s a blaaaaaast!
This special screening will include giveaways (some RoboCop themed!) during the film and more trivia giveaways afterwards in our downstairs bar. Courtesy of Mishka who will also be selling their merchandise following the film too!
SLP has had a good run here but Thursday is its last day at Nitehawk! Life has no rules but, even in the darkest of days, special friendships can form and make sense out of the madness.
Pat Solatano has lost everything – his house, his job, and his wife. He now finds himself living back with his mother and father after spending eight months in a state institution on a plea bargain. Pat is determined to rebuild his life, remain positive and reunite with his wife, despite the challenging circumstances of their separation. All Pat’s parents want is for him to get back on his feet – and to share their family’s obsession with the Philadelphia Eagles football team. When Pat meets Tiffany, a mysterious girl with problems of her own, things get complicated. Tiffany offers to help Pat reconnect with his wife, but only if he’ll do something very important for her in return. As their deal plays out, an unexpected bond begins to form between them, and silver linings appear in both of their lives.
A young boy befriends a lovable extraterrestrial (who loves Reeses Pieces, no less) in this science fiction adventure for kids!
Fear of the unknown mixed with intolerance of the unfamiliar are at the heart of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi family film about a lone alien stranded in an everyday town. When Elliot, himself a lonely and alienated young kid, finds E.T. (a harmless botanist on a mission from another planet) in his background neither himself nor his neighborhood will ever be the same. This discovery will ultimately offer valuable life lessons on confidence, friendship, family, loyalty, and loss for the boy.
Phone home.
Docks Of New York is a LIVE SOUND CINEMA event featuring a live score by GUIZOT.
Light and shadows play with human nature on the docks of New York when a blue-collar worker saves a young woman from drowning.
New York is not only the backdrop of this classic silent film but an integral character, showing us the landscape of back-alleys and flop-houses of the New York waterfront working class in the 1920s. During a brief shore leave, “roughneck stoker” Bill Roberts (George Bancroft) dives in to save a young dance-hall girl named Mae (Betty Compson) from drowning. Sadly, the poor weary Mae, who’s probably seen and done too much, was actually trying to kill herself. Bill falls hard for her but, as in life and love, things get overly complicated.
Guizot: Clifton Hyde (Guitars, Mandolin, & Composer), Chris Komer (French Horn), Grant Zubritsky (Bass), and Rich Stein (Percussion).
Country Brunchin’ gets down to our Spaghetti Western roots with the original Django and Morricone Youth doing the live Pre-show performance.
Considered one of the most violent films of its time, Sergio Corbucci’s Django is all about revenge and being the ultimate bad-ass. Django, played by the striking Franco Nero, ominously carries a coffin behind his horse as he saves a woman named Maria from bandits, seeks revenge for his wife’s murder, and steals gold from a Mexican fort. The film is worth seeing alone for the cemetery gunfight scene involving Django using the cross of a deceased friend as a trigger substitute for his totally smashed hands.
Side note: check for Nero’s cameo in Django Unchained.
Morricone Youth is a New York City septet formed in 1999 dedicated to performing and recording old film and television soundtrack and library production music.
“Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not. There are many things under the sun.”
King of the B’s Edgar G. Ulmer directors horror legends Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in this modernist post-WW1 revenge story.
Although named after Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” Ulmer’s film essentially breaks away from that storyline (although Lugosi’s character has a morbid fear of cats) to dive into the heart of post-war trauma. After Newlyweds Peter and Joan Alison, along with stranger Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) survive a car crash in Eastern Europe, they wind up at the modernist masterpiece of Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff). This structure has been built upon the graves of soldiers and houses many ill deeds…it’s also the planned final destination of Werdegast. He has returned to the site of such horrors after decades of being a prisoner of war to seek revenge upon the treacherous Poelzig; who has done more evil than Werdegast can even imagine.
It’s hard to believe that with so many shocking points (incest, Satanism, necrophilia, and skinning someone alive) that The Black Cat is at a brilliantly slow pace, but it is. The surrounding architecture provides the perfect stark background in which the old and new worlds collide.
Starring: Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, Sela Ward
Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) has is all until one day he interrupts a brutal attack on his wife, gets blamed for it, gets convicted, escapes jail as his bus is hijacked by fellow inmates and so on and so on. While on the lam and evading Deputy United States Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones), Kimble realizes the only way to save his skin is to find the real killer! Harrison Ford is at his gruffy intelligent best into this Academy-Award nominated feature based of the successful 1960s television series of the same name.
Man has created a machine. Now the machine wants to create a man.
Based on a novel by Dean Koontz, Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed is a science-fiction thriller that places the future of horror back into the everyday space of the home.
After her estranged husband Fritz leaves for work, Susan (Julie Christie) becomes imprisoned and eventually impregnated by Proteus IV, an artificial intelligence system designed by her husband that contains organic materials and, get this, the power of thought. Proteus wants to be free so he escapes the lab finding the one available portal to him – Fritz’s house. The future of power over women is here. What’s probably most intriguing about Demon Seed is that addresses what it means to be human and become human.
Starring: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Charles Durning, Austin Pendleton, Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, Edgar Bergen, Milton Berle, James Coburn, Elliott Gould, Bob Hope, Carol Kane, Cloris Leachman
The only thing that can stop Kermit the Frog’s fame and fortune in glamorous Hollywood is a persistent and slimy frog-leg merchant. But Kermit’s motley crew of friends – Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, The Great Gonzo, Animal – won’t let anything happen to their friend as they head cross-country to tinseltown. Cameos abound on this Muppet adventure, including Orson Welles, Mel Brooks, James Coburn, Elliott Gould, Madeline Kahn, Bob Hope and Milton Berle.
Great fun for the lovers and dreamers… and the whole family!
With an introduction by Adam Lowenstein, author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, and free “Green Beast” cocktails by Pernod Absinthe!
Death does not deter a young soldier from returning home after being killed in Vietnam.
I died for you…the least you can do is die for me.
Bob Clark (of Black Christmas and A Christmas Story fame) reworks the parable “A Monkey’s Paw” into post-Vietnam suburbia in Deathdream (also known as Dead of Night). Deathdream plays out the horrors coming home after Vietnam along with other horror films of the era like like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left but does so as a ghost story. In the beginning scene we see Andy Brooks killed in a Vietnam battle while his mother refuses to believe that his lack of communication means he is dead. Much to his family’s surprise, Andy shows up on their doorstep but something is terribly amiss. Starring Faces couple John Marley and Lynn Carlin, Deathdream puts to task America’s reluctance to deal with the trauma it brings upon itself while also showing the limitless boundaries of family love.
Thanks to Pernod Absinthe for the complimentary “The Green Beast” cocktails!
