Are we allowed to make jokes about the Holocaust? In this outrageously funny and thought-provoking film, The Last Laugh, filmmaker Ferne Pearlstein puts the question about comedy’s ultimate taboo to legends including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Sarah Silverman, Gilbert Gottfried, Harry Shearer, Alan Zweibel, Jeffrey Ross, Judy Gold, Susie Essman, Larry Charles, and many other critical thinkers, as well as Holocaust survivors themselves. Through these interviews and clips from our favorite standup comedy, TV shows, and movies, The Last Laugh offers fresh insights into the Holocaust, our own psyches, and what else—9/11, AIDS, racism— is or isn’t off-limits in a society that prizes freedom of speech. In the process, The Last Laugh also disproves the idea that there is nothing left to say about the Holocaust, and opens a fresh avenue for approaching this epochal tragedy. Star-studded, provocative and thoroughly entertaining, The Last Laugh dares to ask uncomfortable questions about just how free speech can really be, with unexpected and hilarious results that will leave you both laughing and appreciating the importance of humor even in the face of events that make you want to cry.
Hatched
The Disaster Artist
An aspiring actor in Hollywood meets an enigmatic stranger by the name of Tommy Wiseau and the meeting leads the actor down a path nobody could have predicted; creating the worst movie ever made.
The Florida Project
First New York screening of the new 35mm print!
Starring: Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Rivera, Valeria Cotto
The story of a precocious six year-old and her ragtag group of friends whose summer break is filled with childhood wonder, possibility and a sense of adventure while the adults around them struggle with hard times.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Starring: Peter Weller, Ellen Barkin, John Lithgow, Carl Lumbly, Christopher Lloyd, Lewis Smith, Vincent Schiavelli, Jeff Goldblum
Dr. Buckaroo Banzai is a real renaissance man: a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and even a rock musician. Is there anything he can’t do?! Well, when it comes to saving the world from the band of inter-dimensional aliens the Red Lectroids, he and his crew The Hong Kong Cavaliers are really put to the test. Buckaroo Banzai (aka The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension) is brilliantly adventurous and unique film that spans so many genres and has a rather complicated backstory that involves a secret device called an “oscillation overthruster,” traveling to other dimensions, alien hitchhikers, and a madman scientist. A must see!
The Dunwich Horror
Produced by Roger Corman and based on Lovecraft’s short story of the same name, the psychedelic DUNWICH HORROR visits the fictional Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts where a hidden evil resides.
Dr. Henry Armitage, an expert in the occult, goes to the old Whateley manor in Dunwich looking for Nancy Wagner, a student who went missing the previous night. He and Elizabeth, a friend and classmate of Nancy’s, are turned away by Wilbur, the family’s insidious heir, who has plans for the young girl. But Armitage won’t be deterred. Through conversations with the locals, he soon unearths the Whateleys’ darkest secret — as well as a great evil.
The Haunted Palace
Roger Corman’s THE HAUNTED PALACE was marketed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace” but is actually derived from the plot of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” It stars Vincent Price, as it should.
Condemned warlock Joseph Curwen curses a New England village just before being burned alive. All of them witches! More than a century later, Curwen’s kindly great-great grandson Charles Ward arrives in town and moves into Curwen’s old mansion. Caretaker Simon Orne helps Charles and his wife Ann adjust to their new home but the ancient curse, however, soon takes hold of Joseph, awakening inside him a long-dormant evil passed on through blood.
From Beyond
Starring: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ted Sorel, Ken Foree
Co-presented by Brooklyn Horror Society.
Obsessive scientist Dr. Pretorius (Bride of Frankenstein reference alert) successfully discovers a way to access a parallel universe of pleasure by tapping into the brain’s pineal gland. When he is seemingly killed by forces from this other dimension, his assistant, Dr. Crawford Tillinghast, is accused of the murder. After psychiatrist Katherine McMichaels and detective Bubba Brownlee take the case, the trio risks a return to the other world in order to solve the mystery.
A portion of proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the Heidi Paoli Fund.
Brooklyn Horror Society is a community created to celebrate all things horror. With events ranging from classic movie screenings to horror trivia to screenings for local indie directors, we’ve got something for the diehard gore hounds, the nervous horror-curious, and everyone in between.
The Void
2016’s THE VOID is pure Lovecraftian: grotesque monsters, hospitals, the gateway to hell and the unknown space of the void.
When police officer Carter discovers a blood-soaked man limping down a deserted road, he rushes him to a local hospital with a barebones, night shift staff. As cloaked, cult-like figures surround the building, the patients and staff inside start to turn ravenously insane. Trying to protect the survivors, Carter leads them into the depths of the hospital where they discover a gateway to immense evil.
The Cabin in the Woods
Starring: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins
When five college friends arrive at a remote forest cabin for a little vacation, little do they expect the horrors that await them. One by one, the youths fall victim to backwoods zombies, but there is another factor at play. Two scientists are manipulating the ghoulish goings-on, but even as the body count rises, there is yet more at work than meets the eye.
In the Mouth of Madness
Starring: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, Charlton Heston
When horror novelist Sutter Cane goes missing, insurance investigator John Trent scrutinizes the claim made by his publisher, Jackson Harglow, and endeavors to retrieve a yet-to-be-released manuscript and ascertain the writer’s whereabouts. Accompanied by the novelist’s editor, Linda Styles, and disturbed by nightmares from reading Cane’s other novels, Trent makes an eerie nighttime trek to a supernatural town in New Hampshire.
