Wanda is part of the VICE Presents: The Film Foundation Screening Series at Nitehawk Cinema. A small town housewife abandons her family, frequents seedy bars and motels until going on the run with a small-time criminal.
Barbara Loden is the writer, director, and star in her first and only film, Wanda. Set in the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania, despondent housewife Wanda attempts to escape her abusive existence by abandoning her husband and children. Adrift, she drinks excessively in an attempt to drown out her problems and goes home with random men to have a roof over her head, when one day she encounters Norman Dennis in a bar…as he’s robbing it. Setting out on the road with Norman, Wanda doesn’t become a symbol for a new feminist woman but, rather, absorbs herself into a newly destructive life.
Critically loved but rarely seen, Wanda is an emotional road trip film with an improvisational and meditative style. In fact, it was nearly destroyed and lost forever so please join us in a very special presentation celebrating the restoration of important and nearly forgotten classic film.
WANDA (1970, dir. Barbara Loden)
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.
Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive and Marco Joachim.
What is a holiday without a little family dysfunction?
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY tells the dark, hilarious and deeply touching story of the strong-willed women of the Weston family, whose lives have diverged until a family crisis brings them back to the Midwest house they grew up in, and to the dysfunctional woman who raised them. Letts’ play made its Broadway debut in December 2007 after premiering at Chicago’s legendary Steppenwolf Theatre earlier that year. It continued with a successful international run.
This December 12 at Nitehawk Cinema, THE DEUCE serves up a horrific holiday feast with a rare Japanese 35mm print of Tobe Hooper’s EATEN ALIVE and a smorgasbord of ballyhoo on the Lyric Theatre!
Plus: Lyric Theatre history, prizes, surprises, drink special at the after-party, and music by DJ BONES! Hosted and presented by ‘The Deuce Boys’: Jeff, Andy, and Joe!
Willfully weird and wonderfully bizarre – the bayou-tiful EATEN ALIVE (aka Horror Hotel, Starlight Slaughter, Slaughter Hotel, Death Trap, Legend of the Bayou, Brutes and Savages, etc… take your pick) – is a rotting rose that by any other name is still way whacked-out! Claustrophobic and uncomfortable – unsettling and unrelenting – Hooper hops up his hallucinatory horror with garish glee. And the Japanese subtitles on this rare 35mm print only add to its peyote-drenched-dream otherworldliness…
Fresh off the breakout success of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, Hooper took his new-found fame and kinda fortune – with a bigger budget and an “all-star” cast – then served up this slice of sweaty shock-schlock insanity! Instead of going bigger and slicking things up, Hooper drives EATEN ALIVE head-first into a fantasia of fake-ness that veers near to the realm of Avant Guarde Theatre…Or the stuff of never ending nightmares!
We’ve got the original MANIAC in 35mm with director William Lustig in person for a Q&A for One Nite Only!
Frank Zito is a deeply disturbed man, haunted by the traumas of unspeakable childhood abuse. And when these horrific memories begin to scream inside his mind, Frank prowls the seedy streets of New York City to stalk and slaughter innocent young women. Now Frank has begun a relationship with a beautiful photographer, yet his vile compulsions remain. These are the atrocities of a human monster. This is the story of a Maniac.
Starring: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder
Never before have nearly inaudible prank calls been so utterly terrifying. But when they start happening to a sorority house full of its own slew of misfits (a drunk house-mother, a wild Margot Kidder, and our heroine who’s about to have an abortion), it’s only the beginning. Who is Billy and what have they done to the baby? Director Bob Clark leaves these questions open, never giving an answer as to who the killer is and why is he squatting in the girls’ attic. Clearly gleaning from the giallo tradition, Black Christmas has twists and turns, blood and babes, and as we always get with Clark, a good dash of humor. Start your holiday season off right by watching one of the best horror films ever made.
Starring: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce
If we could spend the holidays with one person it would surely be Mr. John Waters. In Female Trouble, Waters tells the tale of the life and times of Dawn Davenport (played by the brilliant Divine). Not getting the cha-cha heels she wants for Christmas sets the course of Dawn’s life in motion: she runs away, gets pregnant while hitchhiking, becomes a fashion model and turns into a mass murderer who meets the electric chair. It doesn’t get any naughtier than this!
Jack Theakson, 35mm film archana archivist and historian presents a retro 35mm film program of forgotten filth for lovers of a degenerate and misbegotten past that your parents and grandparents would like to remain swept under the carpet. These weird and wanton images have been saved from the trash and from digitization and are presented in their original 35mm glory. Also presenting a kid-friendly program, HOLIDAY 35MM FUN SHOW, at brunch!
PROGRAM
HYPNOWHEEL INTRO (5 min) – A mad fiend welcomes you to an evening of terror, accompanied by a Hypno-Wheel.
TRAILERS/SNIPES (30 min) – Including such classics as NUDE IN A WHITE CAR and MY BABY IS BLACK!
COME TO POLAND (10 min) – Tour communist-era Poland in this positively Kubrickian travelogue.
LOVE FOR SALE (8 min) – 1950s Burlesque strippers both on-stage and behind the scenes!
VIOLATED clips (20 min) – Wim Holland produced and starred in this “masterpiece” of sleaze right on the streets of New York. See REAL NYC derelicts, circa 1953 and the real burlesque halls they frequented. This 20 minute condensation has some of the most head-scratching scenes from the film.
INTIMATE INTERVIEWS: BELA LUGOSI (8 min) – The master of horror in a candid interview right after his success in DRACULA.
Jack Theakston, film historian and archivist, has been working with classic movies since he was a teenager. First introduced to 16mm collecting at an early age, Mr. Theakston has since become one of the leading authorities on realism technology history in film, including 3-D, widescreen, stereophonic sound and color. Mr. Theakston has produced a number of special features for classic films on DVD, mounted numerous film festivals in both Los Angeles and New York, and currently manages the Capitol Theatre in Rome, NY, a venue that specializes in running classic films in 35mm.
Part of Nitehawk’s Naughty and Nice December program.
Opening on Friday, October 25! From the creators of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz comes The World’s End, a wildly entertaining thrill ride of outrageous humour and explosive action that will raise a glass to the apocalypse.
20 years after attempting an epic pub crawl, five childhood friends reunite when one of them becomes hellbent on trying the drinking marathon again. They are convinced to stage an encore by mate Gary King, a 40-year-old man trapped at the cigarette end of his teens, who drags his reluctant pals to their hometown and once again attempts to reach the fabled pub – The World’s End. As they attempt to reconcile the past and present, they realize the real struggle is for the future, not just theirs but humankind’s. Reaching The World’s End is the least of their worries.
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS follows a week in the life of a young folk singer as he navigates the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961.
Llewyn Davis is at a crossroads. Guitar in tow, huddled against the unforgiving New York winter, he is struggling to make it as a musician against seemingly insurmountable obstacles – some of them of his own making. Living at the mercy of both friends and strangers, scaring up what work he can find, Llewyn’s misadventures take him from the baskethouses of the Village to an empty Chicago club – on an odyssey to audition for a music mogul – and back again.
Opening on Friday, November 8! A true story of friendship, love and murder, KILL YOUR DARLINGS recounts the pivotal year that changed Allen Ginsberg’s life forever and provided the spark for him to start his creative revolution
For dutiful son Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), Columbia University is Mecca—a portal to art, intellect, culture, and freedom—everything hometown Patterson, New Jersey is not. When Allen is accepted into Columbia, his father, a working-class poet, urges him to leave his emotionally ill mother behind and head to New York to go pursue his own creative dreams. Once there, he meets people who will forever alter his life as a 1944 murder draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs
