An animated cat gets saucy in 1960s New York in Ralph Bakshi’s directorial debut, FRITZ THE CAT. A 35mm presentation!

First things first, Fritz the Cat was the first animated feature film to receive an X-rating in the U.S. (so you know it’s good). It is also based on legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb’s comic strip but he infamously objected over the film’s political content. Fritz the Cat centers around an anthropomorphic college-aged and sex obsessed cat named Fritz who romps through New York during the 1960s exploring hedonism and sociopolitical consciousness. It covers everything from Black Panthers to Hell’s Angels, race relations, free love, and drugs. As far as adult oriented animations, this one is the best!

Part of Nitehawk’s April TUNE IN, TURN ON midnite series.

Music Driven presents a special screening of RYE COALITION: THE STORY OF THE HARD LUCK FIVE featuring a post screening Q&A with director Jenni Matz & members of Rye Coalition and an after party in our Lo-Res bar downstairs featuring DJ Lobster Tears!

When they signed with one of the world’s biggest record labels, Rye Coalition was primed to finally get their glory, or so it seemed. Like countless rockers before them, childhood best friends started a band in a basement with a couple simple goals in mind: have fun and play good music.  As one of the first bands to develop the new “emo” sound, they were at the forefront of a movement that included Shellac, Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker and Karp (with whom they later recorded a legendary 12? split). Rye Coalition’s first recording was a demo cassette tape (1994?s “Dancing Man”, self-released), backed by an East Coast tour in a beat up school bus long before most of them had their driver’s license.  For over a decade they blasted through a seemingly endless array of basement shows and dive bar gigs as their talent and fan base grew. They released albums on indie labels and toured the country on bigger and bigger bills: (At-the-Drive-in, Mars Volta, Queens of the Stone Age , Foo Fighters). After gaining momentum from 2002?s “On Top” LP, engineered by Steve Albini, they were signed to Dreamworks Records and none other than Dave Grohl (Nirvana) came on as their producer. Then, it all imploded. As Henry Owings of Chunklet put it- “Rye Coalition has had the worst luck of any band I can think of.”

This film traces their career (culled from over 20 years of home movies and unseen tour footage) supplemented with new interviews with the band and those who know them best. Although the band was praised by critics and supported by an absurdly dedicated grassroots fan base, somehow these Jersey rockers never got their due. Until now.

A journalist seeking a Pulitzer Prize commits himself into a mental institution in Samuel Fuller’s SHOCK CORRIDOR. Presented in 35mm (courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive)!

In Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor, journalist Johnny Barret concocts an elaborate scheme to fake his way inside a mental institution (he’s fighting an attraction to his sister who is really his stripper girlfriend) in order to uncover the truth behind an unsolved murder and win a Pulitzer Prize. Provocative for its release in the 1960s, not only does the film include innovative camera angles and sequences (taking place nearly exclusively within the institutional walls) but it also dives into issues such as racism, incest, and mental illness. Shock Corridor also masterfully explores the very fine line between madness and insanity as the journey of our main character leads to very unexpected, and electric, places. 

Preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation.

Part of Nitehawk’s March COMMITTED brunch series.

Doctors in a mental hospital find themselves in a love story wrapped up in murder, amnesia, and psychoanalysis in Alfred Hitchock’s SPELLBOUND.

The doctors who run the mental hospital are the ones questioning sanity in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Spellbound. When Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck) comes to replace the outgoing director at the Vermont mental hospital, it’s soon revealed that he is not who he says he is and, in fact, believes he is a murderer. That when psychoanalyst Dr. Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) decides to assist Edwardes in seeking the truth and his innocence. They break beyond their institutional confines but what they discover is an intricate web of twisted identities and fever pitched delusions that puts them back where they started. Furthering its interest in Freudian dream analysis, artist Salvador Dali produced the film’s haunting surrealist dream sequence in which the “truth” is revealed.

Part of Nitehawk’s March COMMITTED brunch series.

A young socialite is committed after the gruesome death of her cousin in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER.

From the Tennessee Williams play of the same name comes the rather shocking film that tackles homosexuality, social class, and incestual feelings, Suddenly, Last Summer. Young socialite Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor) has been committed to a mental hospital because of her breakdown following the gruesome death of her poet cousin, Sebastian. The truth behind her European vacations with him and the circumstances surrounding his demise are so unseemly that her Aunt Violet (Katherine Hepburn) will do anything to keep them secret, including bribing the hospital doctor to give Catherine a lobotomy. She tries to escape but as she finds herself dangling from a balcony above a room of disturbed men, compounding her disorientation and fear stemming from her cousin’s indiscretions. For her, the trouble is that as a beautiful woman who knows too much, the more she rallies to prove her sanity, the more mad she seems. It’s only until she is able to leave the confines of the mental institution that she’s able to find her stability.

Part of Nitehawk’s March COMMITTED brunch series.

Nitehawk presents a special one night screening of VICE Sports’ THE MIRACLE MAN with WBA Middleweight champion Danny Jacobs in person!

This incredible short film by VICE Sports shows Brooklyn native Danny Jacobs’ inspirational journey to winning the WBA title after battling cancer. Doctors told Jacobs he would never be able to walk again, nonetheless step back into the ring, but the middleweight boxer is back and owning his title as the first cancer survivor to become a world champion! Screening also includes additional short films by VICE Sports.

In the Iranian ghost town Bad City… A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT.

The first Iranian Vampire Western ever made, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut basks in the sheer pleasure of pulp. A joyful mash-up of genre, archetype, and iconography, its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, horror films, and the Iranian New Wave.

Starring: Urbano Barberini, Natasha Hovey, Karl Zinny

Saturday’s show will be hosted by members of the Mahoning Drive-In staff with prize giveaways, classic intermission snipes and more fun, recreating a night at The Historic Mahoning Drive-In for indoor audiences.

Usually taking in a late night horror movie at the local theater is a bit of harmless (if gross) fun. You see some folks get mauled, squirm in your seat a bit and then head home for a night of uneasy sleep. Things aren’t so easy for the moviegoers in Lamberto Bava’s Demons. Given a free ticket from a masked stranger, a group of night owls head off to a West Berlin movie house to take in a bit of ultra-violent Italian horror. Lulled into a sense of safety by the flickering light of the projector, the real horror begins when an honest-to-God demon rips its way out of the screen and starts slashing its way through the crowd. With their only exits bricked off, as if by magic, the surviving members of the audience must take up arms and fight off the growing demon horde.

Demons is a a grotesque bit of meta-horror from Bava and producer Dario Argento, filled with ruthless baddies, cheeseball heavy metal, and every color of blood, bile and pus you can imagine. Don’t be frightened, though: it’s only a movie.

Starring: Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni, Giovanni Frezza, Silvia Collatina

A New York professor moves out to the sticks to pick up the work of a colleague who got into a bit of a Shining situation when he murdered his mistress and then killed himself. Undeterred by his friend’s grotesque end, the good doctor packs up the wife and kid and moves into a dilapidated mansion that comes complete with a basement door that’s been nailed shut and a ghostly young girl that constantly tells everyone to get the hell out of there.

Brutal and borderline incomprehensible, even by the loose standards of Italian horror, The House by the Cemetery closes out director Lucio Fulci’s The Gates of Hell trilogy, the director’s loose collection of atmospheric apocalyptica (with The Beyond and The City of The Living Dead). Set atop a wintry hill, constantly swept in fog, The House by the Cemetery passes along like a dream. Slick with rot, the particulars of its motives and story fade away in favor of atmosphere and imagery.