Nitehawk celebrates May Day with a double-feature (our first!) screening of THE WICKER MAN!
Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man is a provocative British film challenging sexuality, religion, nature, and the value of life. Oozing with sexual references (phallic inferences on regeneration, growth, and fertilization abound), every gesture is a seductive act: sex in the graveyard, young women jumping over a fertility fire, the “innkeeper’s daughter”, boys dancing around the Maypole. And all of these devious acts lead up to the big May Day spring festival when the slightly kooky Scottish community turns full-on creep – it still shocks audiences today! (We’ll be screening the new director’s cut!)
But of course, it’s the 2006 American re-make by Neil LaBute that is actually the campiest of the two. Deemed “absurd” by its star Nicolas Cage, pitting the two against each other will be the most daring gesture of all!
Starring: Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Frank Braña, Edmund Purdom
Never say that demented killers don’t have any goals. The beginning of Pieces shows an innocent young puzzle-loving boy killing his over-bearing mother with an ax and, thus, setting the course for a rather interesting obsession. Fast forward to forty years later, a college campus in Boston is experiencing a series of murders, all of young women whose body parts are stolen. Could it be him? Enter the Lieutenant who has his secret agent pose as a young college co-ed in order to lure the murderer and reveal his identity. Bloody and a favorite amongst horror fans, and surely one that has some serious mother issues, Pieces shows us that apparently you don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!
Starring: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson, Jeannine Taylor
Things don’t go so well for the reopening of Camp Crystal Lake as the new counselors are stalked and slashed… but by whom? As the site for a young boy’s drowning many years earlier, someone or something is none-too-pleased that a new batch of sexually crazed young adults who will be the caretakers of young children. Stemming from tropes established in Italian giallo films like anonymous killer-point-of-view stabs and punishment for sexual activities, Friday the 13th produces one of the most iconic “Final Girls” in horror (Alice Hardy) and has enduringly made teenage activities a frightening cautionary tale. No real spoilers from us so you’ll have to wait until the end to discover why its maternal instincts are series worthy.
After spending 12 years in prison for keeping his mouth shut, notorious safe-cracker Dom Hemingway is back on the streets of London looking to collect what he’s owed.
Dom Hemingway (Jude Law) is a larger-than-life safecracker with a loose fuse, funny, profane, and dangerous. Back on the streets of London after twelve years in prison, it’s time to collect what he’s owed for keeping his mouth shut. Traveling with his devoted best friend Dickie (Richard E. Grant), Dom visits his crime boss Mr Fontaine (Demián Bichir) in the south of France to claim his reward. But Dom’s drunk and drug-fueled ego decides what he’s lost can’t be replaced. One car accident and a femme fatale later, Dom realizes his priority must be to reconnect with his long-lost daughter Evelyn (Emilia Clarke).
Starring: Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, Richard Bright
An outraged family man (Robert Forster) joins a co-worker’s (Fred Williamson) vigilantes against a New York street gang.
Nitehawk and Blood Sweat and Cheers throw out the first pitch of the PLAY BALL 2 series with BASEketball! Includes $1 beer specials in the downstairs bar after the screening!
Two losers in Milwaukee (Coop and Remer) become professional athletes after inventing a new sport that plays the game of basketball through the rules of baseball. Genius! But with every success story comes the cautionary tale of big business trying to take advantage. Directed by David Zucker from The Naked Gun and written by/starring South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker, you can expect all the best dirty jokes, one-liners, and balls-out humor.
As the first pitch of the BASEketball April baseball brunch series, Play Ball 2, this fun screening event includes drink specials in the after-party and baseball-themed giveaways!
In honor of Harold Ramis, Nitehawk presents one of our favorite films…STRIPES!
Wallowing in dead-end jobs and failed relationships, John Winger (Bill Murray) convinces his pal Russell Ziskey (Harold Ramis) into joining the army…you know, for kicks. And while they find themselves under the nose of impatient Sergeant Hulke and a platoon of misfits, they all band together and start doing pretty well. It’s not until the two friends fall for two pretty MPs, steal a military vehicle, and accidentally wind up in Soviet Territory that things start to get real…funny. Amazingly made with full cooperation with the U.S. Army, for our money, Stripes is one of the best comedies in cinema!
THE DEUCE storms the New Amsterdam for Rene Daalder’s MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH!
Plus: Prizes and surprises, drink special at the after-party, and music by DJ BONES! Hosted and presented by THE DEUCE JOCKEYS: Jeff, Andy, and Joe!
Not what its title implies at all, Massacre at Central High (aka Blackboard Massacre) is neither a slasher spooker nor gory gross-out, but a powerful commentary on post-Vietnam, 1970s American unrest. First time director – and protégée of Russ Meyer – Rene Daalder’s unfairly neglected political allegory is now more relevant than ever.
Derrel Maury’s transfer student David gets in with the ‘in’ crowd, but learns fast that their iron fist threatens the entire student body. Soon David liberates then rallies the school’s underclass – who become an oppressive force themselves, armies of social outcasts – while David plots his revenge fantasy of revolutionary mass murder. Years ahead of the more popular Heathers (on which Central’s influence is more than palpable), Daalder’s debut foreshadows the vigilante angst of Columbine and the early-21st Century’s lost generation of mid-teen marauders.
Starring: Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer, Steven Bauer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia
Written by Oliver Stone, Brian De Palma is at his stylish gangster thriller best in the classic drug cartel film about the high and low times of Tony Montana, Scarface. In the 1980s Montana entered the United States with a flood of Cuban immigrants sent by Fidel Castro to be reunited with relatives. Obsessed with the American Dream and the notion of making it, Montana and his friend Manny slowly work their way up in Miami. Starting with small-time jobs they eventually get in with drug kingpin Frank Lopez but greed and lust prove that all good things can’t last forever. Success may come and go but one thing is for sure, you’ll remember him as… Scarface.
Starring: Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros, Heather Graham, Grace Zabriskie, William S. Burroughs
In his breakthrough film, Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy follows four drug addicted friends as they travel across the Pacific Northwest in 1971 robbing drugstores in order to fuel their habits. When the inevitable tragedy hits the group (overdose), the superstitious Bob (Matt Dillon) makes a real effort to go straight in order to avoid death or jail. But his wife’s (the stunning Kelly Lynch) and an ex-priest’s (drug hero William Burroughs) determination to continue to get high makes the living the clean life difficult. Good luck can’t run on forever and no matter how good of a con artist you are, you always pay the price.
