Once again another great writer/director is taking over the New Bev for two weeks in Los Angeles and this one is the brilliant versatile Joe Dante starting tonight. Joe Dante directed Piranha, Gremlins I & II, The Explorers, Innerspace, The ‘burbs and Matinee. Besides showing two of his movies his first feature Hollywood Boulevard on the 11th and his first movie The Movie Orgy (which has been shortened to over 4 hrs from 7) to close the festival on the 22nd, he showing a lot of classics!!! So go and see them all and did I mention all double features are $7 to see both movies, not $7 each movie.
Here are the movies that he is showing and why he chose some of them at the New Bev (Beverly and La Brea) starting tonight!
April 9 + 10 MONDO CANE and ZULU
April 11 + 12 HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD and TRUCK TURNER
We called it “Day For Nothing” when we made it (shot in ten days around footage from 12 other movies on a bet with Roger Corman). One of the last of New World Pictures’ popular “three girl” drive-in movies where pretty girls doff their duds and chase around non-permitted LA locations. The late great Candice Rialson plays a version of herself as a naive Indiana girl trying to make it in scuzzy 70s Hollywood. Pulled from 42nd Street after two days, it seems to have survived as a cult movie. It’s certainly an accurate record of what it was like to make a New World Picture. Producer Jon Davison, co-director Allan Arkush and stars Mary Woronov and Dick Miller are scheduled to appear.
April 13, 14, 15 THE SADIST and THE PRIVATE FILES OF J EDGAR HOOVER -
Fairway-International was a tiny company specializing in grade-C drive-in movies like WILD GUITAR and EEGAH! But from such unlikely soil springs a chilling surprise! James Landis’ intense 1963 drive-in classic is based on the same true crime story as BADLANDS– the serial killing exploits of Charles Starkweather and his underage girlfriend. Brutally unfolding in Real Time over 94 taut minutes, mad killer Arch Hall Jr. terrorizes our small cast in a junkyard — maybe the best-photographed junkyard ever, courtesy of the great Vilmos Zsigmond, who will appear in person on the 15th.
April 16 + 17 THE SECRET INVASION and TOMB OF LIGEIA
TOMB OF LIGEIA was the last of Corman’s popular series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, but unlike the others it has many beautiful English countryside exteriors and mostly departs from the stylized stage-bound unreality of its forebears. Robert Towne (CHINATOWN) wrote the script in a more romantic vein, thinking Richard Chamberlain would play the lead–but AIP intervened and sure enough, Vincent Price took over.
April 18 + 19 WRONG IS RIGHT and Mystery Movie
April 20 + 21 BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW and HORROR EXPRESS
Piers Haggard’s atmospheric and beautifully photographed (Dick Bush) entry in the burn-the-witches genre benefits from a prolonged sense of dread, literate dialog and an unusually convincing period flavor — sort of a Masterpiece Theater horror film. When hairy patches of “satan’s skin” start cropping up on the bodies of nubile 17th century teenagers, local judge Patrick Wymark intervenes, starting with voluptuous teen temptress Linda Hayden. Less well known than the same studio’s earlier WITCHFINDER GENERAL, but equally effective, with more emphasis on the supernatural. Great score by Marc Wilkinson.
I love train movies. HORROR EXPRESS was made because the producers had access to the train models from NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA. One of my very favorite vehicles (get it?) for Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, this Spanish-made extravaganza (also known as Panic on the Trans-Siberian Express) has it all — good characters, lots of wry humor, a mad monk, a mysterious countess, a prehistoric fossilized monster alien, eyeballs in a jar, Telly Savalas as a bellicose Cossack (it’s 1906) and a surprisingly complex science fiction plot. And I left out the zombies! Seriously, this one of my top favorites of all time.
April 22 THE MOVIE ORGY
This the first, one nite only public showing in many years of my first project. In 1968 when “camp” was king, Jon Davison and I put together a counterculture compendium of 16mm bits and pieces (tv show openings, commercials, parts of features, old serials etc.), physically spliced them in ironic juxtapositions and ran the result at the Philadelphia College of Art interspersed with parts of a Bela Lugosi serial. The reaction was phenomenal. This led to The Movie Orgy, a 7-hour marathon of old movie clips and stuff with a crowd-pleasing anti-war, anti-military, anti-establishment slant that played the Fillmore East and on college campuses all over the country for years — always the one print. We called it a 2001-splice odyssey. We kept adding and subtracting material over time so this, alas, is not the original version– it’s the later cutdown, running a mere 4 hours and 19 minutes! But it’s still a pop time capsule that will bring many a nostalgic chuckle from baby boomers and dazed expressions of WTF?! from anyone else.”
There will also be several guests that will be intro’ing and doing Q&A for their movies along with Joe Dante like Roger Corman and Edgar Wright.
We need to keep these revival houses alive, so it is nice that directors like Joe Dante, Eli Roth, Quintin Tarantino and Edgar Wright are taking over the New Bev to show that they believe that these type of theaters need to stay alive. So come and see one of these double features for $7 (you can’t go to 1 new movie for that price let alone two) at the New Bev or go to your local one. As long as we feed them, they will stay alive!!!
BTW please check out Joe Dante’s in genius website Trailers From Hell where directors do commentary on well trailers from hell…
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But seriously folks 35mm must mean something to people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas because why else would they be rumors that Paramount is releasing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 35mm only!
