Save a village in Mexico with Nitehawk’s Country Brunchin’ screening of country classic, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. The screening features a live pre-show serenade by Tatters and Rags.

Seven gunfighters (Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughnn, James Coburn, Brad Dexter) are hired to protect a small village in Mexico from a group of marauding bandits and their leader. With time running out before the annual raid arrives, the heroic seven must prepare the villagers for battle and help them find the courage to take back their town or die trying. The Magnificent Seven is an Americanized western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai that features spectacular gun battles, epic-sized heroes and an all-star cast.

It creeps, and leaps and glides and slides across the floor… *pop* Beware of THE BLOB!

In his debut role as a leading man, a 28-going-on-40 Steve McQueen stars as a teenager trying to make it on Lover’s Lane with his girlfriend (Aneta Corsaut) when a shooting star ruins everything and unleashes a man eating blob on their small Pennsylvania town. After they witness the alien amoeba attack an old man, the two run to the cops who write them off as teenage pranksters, giving the Blob more than enough time to make its way into town and eat a movie theater full of screaming teenagers. Trapped in a nearby diner, Steve hatches a plan to save the town from the Blob… but will it work?

Part of Nitehawk’s March LARGE AND IN CHARGE screening series.

Go big or go extinct! Prepare yourself for Guillermo Del Toro’s dazzling smash fest PACIFIC RIM.

When a massive earthquake cracks open the seafloor, gigantic monsters called Kaiju come crawling from the depths and lay waste to cities and armies across the globe. On the brink of destruction, humanity joins forces and creates the Jaeger Corps, an international army of massive nuclear-powered robots controlled by two psychically linked pilots to take the fight to the Kaiju. Cocky with their technical marvels, mankind begins treating Kaiju fighting like a global sport – until, suddenly, a new breed of larger, even more dangerous Kaiju, start ripping through Jaegers like wet paper dolls. Teetering on the brink of defeat, the last remaining Jaeger pilots rally for one last strike at the source of the Kaiju: the swirling vortex on the ocean floor.

Pacific Rim is as close to live-action anime you can get — gloriously melodramatic, gigantic in scope and spectacularly designed. Aussie star Charlie Hunnam’s American accent may be pretty terrible, but the film’s diverse cast and global stakes are an early example of Hollywood’s pivot towards international dollars in the 21st century.

Part of Nitehawk’s March LARGE AND IN CHARGE screening series.

The most exciting original motion picture event of all time: KING KONG.

In Dino De Laurentiis’s mega-hyped 1976 Kong remake, a team of mustache twirling oil reps (Led by slimeball extraordinaire Charles Grodin) heads off to an unexplored island in the Indian Ocean on the hunt for a massive wellspring of untapped oil. What they discover goes beyond their imagination: Kong, the King of Skull Island and the Eighth Wonder of the World. Unaccustomed to guests, the natives kidnap Dwan (Jessica Lange), an actress whom the crew rescued from a life raft, and offer her as sacrifice to Kong. While crew photographer & paleontologist Jack (Jeff Bridges) leads a rescue mission, the oil gang, with dollar signs in their eyes, plots to steal away the ape. After all, imagine the dough that a giant ape can rake in on Broadway — what could possibly go wrong?

Part of Nitehawk’s March LARGE AND IN CHARGE screening series.

Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Eli Marienthal, Harry Connick Jr., Vin Diesel, Christopher McDonald, James Gammon

Brad Bird’s classic tale of a child who befriends something scary that the government wants to kill. Taking place at the height of Cold War hostilities, Hogarth, a nine-year-old Mainer hopped up on comic books & cornball sci-fi, investigates a meteor that crashed into a nearby forest. Eager to find an invader from Mars, or at least a space rock, Hogarth discovers a massive iron robot with no memory of its purpose or its origin — naturally, they become fast friends. Trouble arises, though, when a paranoid government agent rides into town determined to find and destroy the Giant.

GODZILLA, MOTHRA AND KING GHIDORAH: GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK! – The ultimate kaiju battle royale set to a live score by BLACK LODGE.

NOTE: This is a live music event creating a new film score for GODZILLA: GMK. The film will be played silent with subtitles.

Godzilla can be surprisingly morally ambiguous for a giant, rampaging hell-monster. Sometimes he’s nice and saves kids from crab monsters and pollution creatures; sometimes he’s more of a neutral force of nature; and then sometimes he’s just an evil spirit of vengeance hellbent on blowing up absolutely everything. This last mode is how we find Big G in the ridiculously titled Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack!

With his eyes clouded white and his mouth locked in a hateful snarl, Godzilla blows through GMK like a typhoon, blasting through the army and three of his most famous opponents with atomic breath that hits like a damn H-bomb. Thin on just about everything but amazing displays of destruction, GMK is all-out monster mayhem front to back.

For this Live Sound Cinema presentation, we’ve invited drone-y metal outfit Black Lodge (a collective of musicians led by guitarist/composer Geoff Gersh) to provide an appropriately loud live-score to one of Godzilla’s best battle royales.

Part of Nitehawk’s March LARGE AND IN CHARGE screening series.

Starring: Shawnee Smith, Kevin Dillon, Donovan Leitch Jr., Jeffrey DeMunn, Candy Clark

When a meteorite crashes outside of a small California town, a gloopy, amorphous creature emerges from the broken space rock and immediately sets itself on anything in its path. Acidic to the touch, this blob grows larger with everything it consumes, and with a small town of unsuspecting dimwits on the menu, the creature gets mighty big, mighty fast. Desperate to save the town, two teenagers discover that the military’s main priority isn’t to destroy the blob, but to capture it by any means necessary.

Part cheeky 50s sci-fi spoof, part bitchin’ 80s gore fest, Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob is one of the best monster movies of the decade – a film that dusts off a seemingly hokey premise from thirty years prior and makes it nice and terrifying for modern times.

Starring: Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel, Odette Annable, Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller

A perfectly decent aughtsy yuppie party gets interrupted when the head of the Statue of Liberty comes crashing into the street – and when some… thing knocks down the Woolworth Building, all Hell breaks loose. Cut off on Manhattan, a small group of friends navigate the chaotic streets of New York as the Army takes on the gigantic creature and smaller parasites fall from its underbelly, attacking everything they see. With a tip that the Army plans to torch the city once the final evacuation chopper takes off – the group races to Central Park to save one of their friends before Manhattan gets bombed into dust.

The brainchild of J.J. Abrams and director Matt Reeves, Cloverfield is a disorienting and intense first-person look at the chaos and panic that rips through a city under threat, a giant monster movie as inspired by the attacks of September 11 as it is by Godzilla or King Kong

Kong is back and ready for action (of the sexy kind)!

A 35mm Presentation. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive

Remember how at the end of the 70’s King Kong, Kong falls off of the top of the World Trade Center after getting lit up by Army helicopters? Turns out he’s okay – just in a coma, and the dude needs a new ticker something quick plus a blood transfusion to boot. Fortunately for Kong, an adventurer happens upon another giant ape deep in the forest – this one a female – which gives Dr. Linda Hamilton the blood that she needs to perform giant monkey open heart surgery. Good news is, the surgery is a success and Kong goes back to his old self; bad news is, our man catches wind of the captured female and raises Hell to get at her.

Spectacularly silly and surprisingly rife with carnage, King Kong Lives is the giant ape love story you didn’t know you needed in your life.

Part of Nitehawk’s March LARGE AND IN CHARGE screening series.

Director Bong Joon-ho’s enviro-horror fable of monsters both gigantic and human.

A 35mm Presentation.

A monster has emerged from the depths of Seoul’s polluted Han River – a giant, twisted fish creature who rampages along the banks of the river, gorging itself on anyone unfortunate enough to get in its way. As the creature retreats into the river, it snatches a young girl, Park Hyun-seo, as her family watches on, helplessly. Devastated, the Park family and the rest of the survivors get rounded up and placed under quarantine by the American military – until a phone call from Hyun-seo reveals that she has survived her encounter with the monster and is in hiding deep in Seoul’s sewers. To save their youngest, the Parks must escape increasingly aggressive U.S. government agents and venture deep into the monster’s territory.

Part of Nitehawk’s March LARGE AND IN CHARGE screening series.