Fest

Part 3 of 3

Beginning tomorrow (Friday, March 7), I’ll be blogging live from Boston (Brighton, actually), providing updates roughly every two hours from the 22^nd Annual 24 Hour Film Fest.  The posts will consist of short reviews of the 12 movies that will be shown, most -- probably all -- of which most of you have never seen.  If you’ve read the past two blog posts you know that have a particular passion for unusual and interesting films, and I have only seen two of the ones being shown this weekend.

Fest, as we stalwarts like to refer to it, happens in the apartment of my friend Mike.  It’s curated by Mike and another friend, Lynn, and they’ve been doing it for 22 years now.  How they manage to keep coming up with so many obscure, strange, bizarre and wonderful films I will never know, but thank god they do.

I’ve attended at least 17 Fests, maybe more.  I can’t remember if I was at the first one, and I know I missed several in the mid-90s due to such inconveniences as illness and having kids.  Other than Lynn and Mike, there are only a handful of folks who have attended more Fests than I, so I consider myself one of the long-standing veterans with more than a little perspective on this unusual annual ritual.

Fest’s goal, it seems to me (from my perspective, without having consulted the organizers) has always been to find the most interesting, strange, unusual but most of all entertaining films possible and show them to a room full of people jacked up on junk food (the snack table is venerated almost to the point of idol worship).  There’s no way I would ever be able to see many of the films shown at Fest any other way; I’d never even hear about them.  Lynn’s specialty is Asian and other foreign cinema; it was through Fest that I first saw a Jackie Chan movie and was exposed to all the wonder that Honk Kong and Korean cinema had to offer.  Not to mention some wacky and bizarre Japanese films, way outside the mainstream.

Mike finds the horror, science fiction and other genre chestnuts, sometimes reaching back as far as the silent era or sometimes as recent as a few months ago. Some choice examples include “The Penalty,” a 1920 Lon Chaney movie; “Slither,” “Giant Claw” and “Midnight Meat Train.”  And who could forget “Sonny Boy?”  Nobody who’s seen it, that’s for sure.

We’ve also watched “Bride of Frankenstein,” “Bedlam” “Evil Dead 2” (and 1), “American Movie” and “Descent,” mainstream and near-mainstream films that have that certain Fest-ness to them.   

There’s a rhythm to Fest.  It ramps up from the 6 p.m. starting time, and is usually best-attended after the dinner break through the late-night to early-morning hours.  If you get through the 2 to 6 a.m. part OK, you’re doing great.  Morning usually brings a second wind.  Only the most stout of heart can brave the afternoon into the home stretch.  The miasma of snacks helps, as does lots of caffeine.  Enduring that many movies and junk food creates an atmosphere of camaraderie among Fest-goers which is hard to understand; just ask Mike’s wife.

I won’t be able to vouch for my posts at certain times.  Coherence may be sacrificed.  But those may also be the most entertaining.  Coupled with the roster of films slated to spool out through the 24-hour period, we may be talking some breakthrough moments here.  No spoilers; you’re going to have to wait to find out what the films are as they play.

And maybe we’ll post a photo or two of the snack table, just to make you jealous.

Watch for the first post Friday evening around 8 p.m.  And please, forgive the typos.

Opera Man

Part 2 of 3

When you live in a resort town, you get to meet lots of different people. And when you work for a newspaper in a resort town, you get to interview many of them.  Back in 1993 my friend Otis introduced me to Joe, an opera composer who was staying in town with his wife and daughter for the summer – maybe longer.  Opera composer?  How many of those do you get to meet, let alone interview?

What brought us together, however, wasn’t opera (I am not a big fan, sorry) or my need for a constant stream of interesting people to interview, but movies.  Bad movies.  Incredibly bad movies.

Joe, it turned out, was a connoisseur.    In comparison, Otis and I were rank amateurs.  Joe had even acted in a bad low-budget genre film made by a friend of his.  He invited Otis and I over to the cottage where he was staying one evening to sample some of the films in his collection.  That was the first time I saw a Russ Meyer movie (“Vixen”).  We watched a number of other films that night – “Mesa of Lost Women” is one I remember – but most of the details are lost to the haze of memory. 

It wasn’t just Joe’s videotape collection that was impressive.  His philosophy about these mostly abysmal movies struck me was entirely pragmatic.  You can’t really learn anything about filmmaking, he said, from watching good or even average movies.  To learn about making films, you had to be able to see how not to make films.  To appreciate great filmmaking, you had to appreciate the movies where mistakes were made, where the filmmakers just weren’t competent. 

That winter, I got the chance to truly appreciate great filmmaking.  Joe and his family went to St. Thomas and he left his movie collection behind.  With me.  Several boxes of videotapes, more than 100, each with containing two or three films.  I nearly OD’d on incredibly strange cinema that winter.

Now I could see many of those films I’d only heard about before, films by Ray Dennis Steckler, Ted V. Mikels (though I soon realized that I’d seen “Corpse Grinders” before, at a drive-in during high school, but I hadn’t made the connection at the time) and Doris Wishman (definitely a boob theme going on).  I became schooled in early nudie-cuties, early gore (Herschell Gordon Lewis), and other strange genre films.  Later filmmakers were also represented, the likes of Larry Cohen and Frank Henenlotter. 

But the Opera Man Collection, as it was dubbed, also contained quality movies – “Rashoman,” “Beauty and the Beast,”  “8 ½.” And lots of operas. But it was the not-so-good-quality films that attracted me, and pulling a few off the list I just dug out of my files, I watched  “She Demons,” “The Sadist,” “Horror of the Blood Monster,” “The Worm Eaters,” “Child Bride of the Ozarks,” “Teenage Frankenstein,” “Free, White, 21,” “Wild World of Batwoman” and “Avenging Disco Godfather.”

Most of these were second, even third or fourth generation copies, so the quality of the tapes ranged from OK to barely watchable.  But I didn’t care.  At the time, these were hard to find – available mostly from specialty video outlets at relatively high prices.  Now, most of these movies are easy to find. Many are available on Netflix or other online services and on cheap DVDs.  Some are still specialty products; Russ Meyers’ films are all owned by his estate and only available through them.  But at least they are available.

These films, together with my previous viewing experience and appreciation for enthusiastic though less than stellar filmmaking, created the groundwork for how my tastes have development.  In this, however, there is also one other major influence.

Next: Fest

The Dawn Of Video

Or How I Came To Appreciate Bad, Even Awful Films As Art, Of A Sort

Part 1 of 3

It’s all sort of cloudy now, those days before commercially available video and the Internet brought the entire world of film right to our television and computers screens: being at the mercy of broadcast TV schedules, searching TV guide for the obscure old films that ran at odd hours of the day and night.  For those of us who didn’t have access to anything other than mainstream movie theaters, many of the films we read about in books or saw in Famous Monsters of Filmland might just as well as have been showing on one of those distant stars we gazed up at on summer nights while we were waiting for the news to end and Creature Feature to come on so we could thrill to “20 Million Miles to Earth” or “Dracula’s Daughter.”

I’d long sought out the most obscure horror, science fiction and fantasy films, first on TV and then, when possible, driving to nearby theaters (I remember after my older brother got his license going to see “Night of the Living Dead” for the first time at some ramshackle fourth-run theater somewhere in rural Connecticut).  That was what appealed to me; I saw my share of mainstream films, but I was most intrigued by the unusual and obscure. And  video opened me up to new wonders. Obscure films I’d never known existed, movies long-whispered about, legends of cinema unlike anything I had dreamed of.  It was back in the days when electronic shops began to rent videos and the machines to play them on.  First there were the independent, quirky new releases like “Liquid Sky” and “Repo Man.”  Then, as separate video rental shops opened and I bought my first videotape player – an expensive model with “HiFi” sound – I plumbed the shelves for even more obscure titles.

That’s how I learned to love what many might call “bad” movies.  Usually low-budget, independent genre titles, but sometimes big-budget studio films, too.  They stretched over the history of cinema; many had been buried and forgotten until videotape made it possible to disseminate them widely.  There was something about these movies that caught my attention, riveted me to the screen like my head was nailed to the floor…a train wreck in all its splendid awfulness.

Ed Wood made several of the best-known films, but a good bad film could also be made by mainstream directors like John Landis (“Schlock”), Peter Jackson (“Bad Taste”) and John Boorman (“Zardoz”).  It was through these films that I came to appreciate how cleverness, creativity, ingenuity and sheer energy could be as exhilarating and entertaining – often more so – than a huge spectacle with state-of-the-art special effects, big stars and a big budget, or even just an average film that lacked the spark that working with next to nothing could coax out of a director, writer and actor, even if there was no heat and precious little light.

Friends were instrumental in pointing me toward more and more unusual filmic fair, particular the annual 24-Hour Film Fest organized by friends in Boston.  That’s how I discovered Asian cinema, Jackie Chan and learned to love Bruce Campbell, Jeffrey Combs and many more.  But I get ahead of myself; the Fest figures in part three of this essay, as will be my subject for a planned marathon 24-hour blog experience March 7-8.

Before marriage and kids, I watched a lot of videos.  I was lucky to have a fairly good independent video store nearby, with an owner who knew my predilection for obscure, unusual and interesting films.  But it was through my friends Otis, who as bartender at a popular local bar came into contact with all sorts of characters, that I advanced to the next level in my film education.

That’s when the Rosetta Stone of incredibly strange films fell into my hands.

Next: Opera Man