Starring: Gary Snars Allan, Olly Bassi, Shaun Davidson, Mark Burdett, Valerie Birss, Adam Harper, Andy Moore, Irvine Welsh
It’s the first day of April in 1945, the Axis shaken after a round of blockbusters decimate buildings around the Nazi occupied war-torn city of Kassel. A group of German soldiers huddle round to keep the heat, smoking cigarettes in buildings almost reduced to rubble telling tales of a one man wrecking ball who seems impervious to German bullets, striking fear into the hearts of Wehrmacht and Schutzstaffel alike. No, it’s not the skull cracking, baseball bat wielding Bear Jew, it’s not Stepan Petrenko the deadeye sharpshooting Russian, this man is those two combined and then some, It’s the Nazi-crushing, Panzer-eating Dick Dynamite.
Starring: Kit Zauhar, Scott Albrecht, Tiye Amenechi, Isabelle Barbier, Mae Claire, Jackson Crook
NoBudge Presents is a new series of feature films made by young and emerging filmmakers with limited budgets and distinct visions. For our third screening, we’re happy to present Actual People, the debut film of writer/director/actor, Kit Zauhar — one of our favorite micro-budget features from the last couple of years. Screening beforehand is Semen Retention for a Better Tomorrow, a striking stop-motion animated short from Alexandra Neuman. Both filmmakers will be present.
Actual People: In her final week of college, a young woman goes to great lengths to win the affections of a boy from Philadelphia and ends up confronting escalating anxieties about her love life, family and future. Written and directed by Kit Zauhar. Presented by NoBudge and Factory 25. Q&A following with Zauhar and NoBudge programmer, Kentucker Audley. (RT: 84 min)
Semen Retention for a Better Tomorrow: Motivated by the causal relationship between patriarchal domination and the climate crisis, the film integrates climate science, ecofeminism and tantric alchemy into a speculative ethos for bodily and planetary healing. Directed by Alexandra Neuman. (RT: 6 min)
Starring: Artemis Shaw, Prashanth Kamalakanthan, Cynthia Talmadge, Olivier Sherman
Sunday screening followed by Q&A with Prashanth Kamalakanthan, moderated by filmmaker Graham Mason; co-presented with NoBudge
Kallia and Ram have just begun their first vacation as a couple, and they’re already bickering. Though a mysterious new illness is on the brink of exploding into a pandemic, and despite Ram’s protestations, Kallia insists that they are going to have a fun week in New York City. Within hours of their arrival, a nation-wide lockdown is announced, ruining their plans. Over the course of their stay, they descend into a toxic pattern of jealousy and codependency. Is their childish behavior simply the result of cabin fever, or is it something more?
Starring: Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Tetsuro Sagawa, Gorô Naya, Toshiko Fujita, Reiko Muto, Kumiko Takizawa
A man hires superhumans to eliminate brutal Golgo, the paid assassin who killed his son.
Starring: Tôru Furuya, Shuichi Ikeda, Hirotaka Suzuoki, Yoshiko Sakakibara, Fuyumi Shiraishi, Maria Kawamura
The final battle between Char Aznable and Amuro Ray.
Starring: Soledad Miranda, Dennis Price, Paul Muller, Ewa Strömberg, Heidrun Kussin
Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Stroemberg) is an American living in Istanbul. After having a recurring dream in which she is seduced by a gorgeous vampire, Linda is sent to a small island for her work. There, she meets and is actually seduced by Countess Nadine (Soledad Miranda), a dark, beautiful nightclub owner whom she immediately recognizes as the seductress from her dreams. When the conniving Dr. Seward (Dennis Price) learns of this, he contacts Linda, hoping to use her to become undead himself.
Live Nude Girls Unite! is a fierce and funny first person documentary about a group of strippers who win the only union of exotic dancers in the United States. Stripper/Comedian Julia Query takes the audience on a turbulent journey beginning with her decision to leave graduate school and start stripping through the victory with the union, stopping along the way to tell her Jewish mother.
Starring: Ruby Keeler, RUBY Keeler, RUBY KEELER! RUBY! KEEEEELER!! and: Walter Baxter, Bebe Daniels, Una Merkel, Guy Kibbee, Dick Powell, Ginger Rogers
This December! Come and meet those dancin’ feet! On The Deuce! The movie named after the street for which we do this whole dog-and-pony show! A bona-fide classic in your favorite bozo-hosted setting – as only The Deuce can do it! 42ND STREET!!
A Broadway director on his last dollar and last legs makes a last attempt to turn the show-world on its head with what he promises will be the biggest bestest production The Great White Way has witnessed… sugar-daddies, disillusioned leading ladies, taskmaster stage-managers, gold-diggers and Anytime Annie’s.. and the novice waiting in the wings…
Canadian-born, NYC transplant Ruby Keeler at her most endearing in her break-out movie role as the archetypical ingenue whose big break via a big break propels her into overnight and much-merited stardom! Hoofin’ it like a heifer and warbling like a Bronx blackbird! In other words: INCREDIBLE!! Just… the best! Keeler’s command of the film’s pinnacle titular 20-minute Busby Berkeley number KILLS!! Jaw-on-the-floor fantastic movie-magic!!
The first in a whole slew of Warner Bros. Broadway-set Depression-era musical bonanzas – a template film that pushed the medium of movie-makin’ into extra large! Seeing it on the big-screen will leave you literally breathless – a Deuce promise!!
Obviously a movie so named would make big use of the moniker come premiere time – for which – centered around its Strand Theatre opening – 42nd Street turned the totality of Times Square into its own party-zone… as will The Deuce!! Don’t miss the party of the year, Deuce-dopes!!
Starring: Hope Stansbury, Jacki Scarvellis, Berwick Kaler, Joan Ogden, Noel Collins
The Deuce keeps the Halloween hoots rolling into November and whets your appetite for Thanksgiving with a feast fit for both: THE RATS ARE COMING! THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE! Our perennial Deuce fave freak madman genius Andy Milligan’s mash-up Mulligan-stew of costume melodrama, monsters and mayhem! And mother-hating! Misanthropy and Lycanthropy!!
A “Victorian England” tawdry tenement-bound gathering of the Mooney family to meet daughter Diana’s fiancé reveals a fearsome family secret… eventually… maybe in the last reel… but the title + family name should be enough to clue you in… Until then, it’s all screaming nastiness between the nuttiest buncha fake-Victorian “Brits” imaginable… unimaginable even! Swathed in strange Milligan-made “period” costumes… engaging in strange games of power and manipulation… literally spitting venomous vehemence in each other’s faces! Spiraling, unending diatribes of dislike! Actors cackling dialogues as if to the rafters of the local theater! Emoting emotions!! And with a dunce of a brother chained in a room of chickens to spice things up!
And what about those rats?? They’re coming!! Story goes that the Staten Island auteur’s long-time penny-pinchin’ producer, William Mishkin – who never gave the guy more than a pittance to deliver a picture anyway – made Milligan add rat scenes to his already “finished” film (then titled Curse Of The Full Moon) with the idea of “cashing in” on the then-current craze for the rodents – riled up by the likes of Willard and Ben – one of the many pleasures of “TRAC! TWAH!” is in witnessing the delightfully hate-filled way he went about it – with no attempt at fitting them into the plot in any way and basically making the rat scenes just literally torturous to watch – only adding to the overall bewildering bizarrity of the whole whatsit!!
Wander off-Deuce with us bozos on up to West 49th’s The World Theatre for this wacky wonder and maybe you’ll “Win a free rat for your mother in law!”
It was the end of the seventies. Surrounded by wheat fields, cowboys, and cars, four bespectacled misfits in Kansas — Bill Goffrier, Brent Giessmann, John Nichols, and Ron Klaus — grabbed instruments and blasted out “a ravenous strain of rock ‘n’ roll” as tuneful, brainy, and enthralling as anything coming from the coasts. They worshipped the Stooges and witnessed the Sex Pistols bring punk to the Great Plains, igniting within them an uncontrolled prairie fire to do-it-themselves.
As the Embarrassment, they threw a house- wrecking party and invited “a thousand loving friends” into their underground world of “weirdo New Wave freaks” in Wichita and beyond. They played Chicago, D.C., and New York, drawing the attention of influential figures like Allen Ginsberg, John Cale, and Jonathan Demme. But their independence and refusal to sell out sparked tension within the group and kept mainstream success at bay, meaning they never quite claimed their rightful place in American rock history alongside other post-punk icons like Hüsker Dü, Mission of Burma, Pylon, Wipers, the Replacements, R.E.M., and Minutemen.
Through original interviews, restored concert footage, the band’s inimitable songs, and appearances by fans including Evan Dando, Freedy Johnston, Grant Hart, and Thomas Frank, this documentary shows how the Embarrassment rose out of nowhere in Reagan-era Middle America to become a post-punk legend that’s almost been forgotten — until now.
Followed by an after party in Trees Lounge with DJ Harry Howes from Almost Ready Records
