Starring: Robby Rackleff, Alan Resnick, Megan Koester, Jamel Johnson, Stavros Halkias, Sarah Sherman, Conner O’Malley, Nate Varrone, Anthony Oberbeck
A loser gets dumped. A weird experiment goes nuts. A dangerous Dance Freak runs wild.
A FEATURE LENGTH MOVIE: In a secret government facility, a team of scientists have done impossible, indescribable things. Genetic mutations, inter-dimensional experiments: nasty top secret stuff. They played GOD. And like GOD they are all probably dead. The filmmakers only had $45,000 to make this movie and they ran out of that money almost immediately so a lot of that stuff is just implied through dialogue. There is dancing, but it isn’t that crazy. Also the movie gets loud sometimes, but it’s not that long.
Starring: Ge Hu, Lun-Mei Gwei, Fan Liao, Regina Wan
A gangster ends up making a mistake that causes every gun on both sides of the law to point at him. While on the run, he comes across a mysterious woman who might get him out of trouble or make things worse.
Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova develops an unlikely friendship with the man who stole two of her paintings.
Starring: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut
Alfred Kralik (James Stewart) and Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan) are employees at Matuschek and Company, a general store in Budapest. Klara and Alfred are constantly at odds with each other, butting heads and disagreeing on almost everything. Both are enamored of their respective pen pals, who serve as welcome distractions in their lives. Little do they know, they are each the other’s pen pal and, despite outward differences, have unwittingly fallen in love through their letters.
Starring: Jack Oakie, W.C. Fields, Ben Turpin, Lyda Roberti, George Barber, Andy Clyde, Hank Mann
W. C. Fields stars as an eccentric strongman leading his broke, fake country at the 1932 Olympic Games in Million Dollar Legs, a wild satire of politics, patriotism, and professional sports! Far off in the hinterlands, the humble nation of Klopstokia is short on dough – but rich with athletes! Thankfully, American salesman Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie) hatches a scheme to repair the country’s coffers with Olympic gold medals – but only if he can whip those Klopstokian amateurs into shape!
Brimming with sight gags and nonsense dialogue, Million Dollar Legs deserves a gold medal for its well-deserved place among the pre-code era’s most surreal and anarchic screwball comedies.
Starring: Kathleen Chalfant, Carolyn Michelle, Andy McQueen, H. Jon Benjamin
Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), a retired cook, prepares breakfast in her sunny and cozy kitchen — a dish she seems to have made many times before, although small and puzzling errors now punctuate her comfortable routine. When her son (H. Jon Benjamin) arrives to dine with her, she mistakes him for a suitor. Their “date” takes them to an assisted living facility, which Ruth does not remember that she had previously selected for herself. Among her fellow memory care residents, Ruth feels lost and adrift, certain she has found herself somewhere she does not belong. As she slowly begins to accept the warmth and support of care workers Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle) and Brian (Andy McQueen), she finds new ways to ground herself in her body, even as her mind embarks on a journey all its own. Writer-director Sarah Friedland’s coming-of-old-age feature compassionately follows the winding path of octogenarian Ruth’s shifting memories and desires while remaining rooted in her sage perspective.
Starring: Mohammad Bakri, Saleh Bakri, Tarik Kopty
To make an additional $10 donation to The Sameer Project, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.
A father and his estranged son must come together to hand deliver his daughter’s wedding invitations to each guest as per local Palestinian custom, in this rousing family drama.
Starring: Joe Franklin, Debbie Rochon, Abe Sukenick, Carl J. Sukenick
“A public access show made by aliens on bath salts.”
Mondo Schizo is a deranged no-fi horror fantasy clusterfuck trapped inside a negative-budget Oedipal nightmare from real life schizophrenic artist Carl J. Sukenick. Aliens battle terrorists inside a sorority house crawling with mutants, monsters, and secret government agents. Chaotic, unstructured, and stitched together from recycled home movies, static images, perverted camcorder fantasies and conspiratorial ramblings, it unfolds less like a movie and more like a psychotic broadcast from an alternate earth timeline — gloriously equal parts exploitation filth and cursed outsider art.
Described by critics as “a public access show made by aliens on bath salts” and a piece of art that “aggressively rejects all cinematic norms,” the result is an unsettling anti-movie artifact of underground VHS collage dressed up as a sci-fi horror movie — but is actually an interdimensional primal scream from the depths of the unsettled human soul.
Starring: Bill Hinzman, Tim Lovelace, Ron Asheton, Jeff Rector, Heather Fine
From the director of The Necro Files! A brilliant but doomed scientist cracks the code on reviving dead flesh, only to have his human experiments hijacked by the mob and turned into unstoppable zombie assassins. When it all goes south and the doc is taken out, his son and loyal assistant swear bloody revenge, unleashing the gang of killing machines back on the mafia bosses responsible. But these sadistic, undead robots don’t take orders from anyone — instead, they tear through the city in a frenzy of murder and destruction leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.
A blast of renegade action-horror, Legion of the Night is pure regional indie goodness and is stuffed with mad science, gratuitous gun violence, and mutant carnage. Shot on gritty 16mm film, it soaks the screen in rubber guts, oozing squib hits, and delirious 90s direct-to-video energy. Director Matt Jaissle (The Necro Files) cements his outlaw status with a furious cocktail of gore, grit, and midnight-movie tropes that found its way onto Blockbuster Video shelves in the heyday of VHS.
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Ben Lyon, Joan Blondell, Clark Gable
Special guests Danny Reid and Kim Luperi, co-authors of the new book Pre-Code Essentials: Must-See Cinema from Hollywood’s Untamed Era, join hosts Caroline Golum and Cristina Cacioppo to introduce the film. The book will be available for sale before and after the show courtesy of Terrace Books.
Heralded, alongside Baby Face, as one of Barbara Stanwyck’s most iconic pre-code roles, Night Nurse finds our tough-as-nails heroine “going straight” as a live-in caretaker for a pair of sickly society children trapped in a web of wealth and dysfunction. While their dipsomaniacal mother flits from bender to bender, household chauffeur Nick (a dastardly and dashing Clark Gable) takes household matters into his own hands – to lurid and shocking results!
Can Barbara, aided by co-star and “world’s greatest trooper” Joan Blondell, save these forlorn waifs from the jaws of destruction? How many times will our slinky stars change clothes on screen? And what’s really behind Gable’s pencil-thin mustache? Find out this month at the Pre-Code Parade!
Following this screening, join us in the bar for cocktail specials and merriment while also purchasing a copy of Pre-code Essentials!
