The Film Society of Lincoln Center has introduced the addition of a Summer Midnight Movies series to their weekly programming. The series first announced offerings will include such late-night classics as Tobe Hoopers The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Sam Raimis The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II. Also on tap: Lifeforce, Slither, The Entity and more. Head inside for the horror highlights.
Friday, June 8
THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974) 83min
Director: Tobe Hooper
Country: USA
One of the truly defining films of the great American independent horror movie renaissance of the 1970s. Locating the sweet spot between grindhouse and grand guignol, Tobe Hoopers grisly classic is still potent almost 40 years later. Five youngsters on a rural road trip pick upand quickly ditcha demented self-mutilating hitchhiker before stumbling upon his kinfolk, the operators of an abbatoir/meat smokehouse. Death by meathook, sledgehammer, and chainsaw await the unwary kids, until the proverbial final girl (played by Marilyn Burns, one of cinemas greatest screamers) is left to be tormented by her deranged captors in a veritable charnel house.
Friday, June 29
LIFEFORCE (1985) 101min
Director: Tobe Hooper
Country: UK
In this spectacular, deliriously over-the-top, sexed-up, and compulsively watchable adaptation of Colin Wilson’s THE SPACE VAMPIRES, London is overrun by rampaging, energy-sucking zombies after a trio of humanoids in a state of suspended animation are brought to earth after being discovered in the hold of an abandoned European space shuttle. The mysterious beings are taken to London’s Space Research Center for examination, whereupon the gorgeous and totally nude female of the trio (statuesque French actress Mathilda May) revives, reduces a hapless military guard to a desiccated cadaver, and then escapes into the citystill stark nakedin search of prey. Soon all three aliens (one of them played by Mick Jagger’s brother Chris) are wreaking havoc throughout the city, their victims turned into zombies craving the life-force of the living.
Friday, July 6
LOST HIGHWAY (1997) 134min
Director: David Lynch
Countries: USA/France
David Lynchs most cryptic and uncanny excursion into the recesses of the human psyche, LOST HIGHWAY begins as musician Fred (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (sultry brunette Patricia Arquette) receive a series of unnerving videotapes shot inside their home, culminating in one of the couple asleep in bed. After a strange party encounter with a Mystery Man (Robert Blake, in grotesque kabuki makeup), Fred receives a final tape that shows him murdering Renee and winds up on death rowwhere he vanishes from his cell, his place inexplicably taken by Pete (Bathazar Getty). Pete is released from prison and a new story seems to begin in which the young car mechanic begins an affair with Alice (sultry blonde Patricia Arquette), the mistress of combustible gangster Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and finds himself lured into nightmarish intrigue involving theft, murder, and pornography.
Friday, July 13
THE EVIL DEAD (1981) 85min
Director: Sam Raimi
Country: USA
Sam Raimis instant classic, a textbook example of low-budget technical ingenuity and wildly inventive mayhem, is a laughing-screaming rollercoaster ride, balancing slapstick mayhem and over the top gore, once again underlining the kinship between horror and comedy. The recipe: Take six college students, a wood cabin, a forest, a copy of the Necronomicon Book of the Dead, a mysterious audio recording of a black magic incantation, an axe and a chainsaw…and dont forget a sharp pencil. Mix with demonic possession and tree spirits, stand back and watch the fun.
Friday, July 20
EVIL DEAD II (1987) 84min
Director: Sam Raimi
Country: USA
Dead by dawn! In this not-exactly sequel/sort-of remake, Bruce Campbell’s Ash arrives once again at the proverbial cabin in the woods for a vacation with his girlfriend. Discovering papers and artifacts belonging to the cabins former occupant, an archaeologist, they play a tape recording of an incantation from a copy of the Necronomicon Book of the Dead (of H.P. Lovecraft fame), unleashing a demonic force that possesses Ashs girlfriendand, well, lets just say the romantic getaway goes seriously south. When the archaeologists daughter shows up with three companions, they find the semi-deranged Ash, now minus a (demon-possessed) hand, battling the forces of darkness tooth and nail (make that shotgun and chainsaw). Taking the premise of his original film and 10 times the budget (courtesy of Dino De Laurentiis of all people), Sam Raimi lets his imagination run completely wild, topping the earlier film with anarchic and at times deliriously surreal set pieces of outrageous excess, headlong camera work and berserk, punishing Three Stooges-esque violence.
Friday, August 3
Original uncut version!
THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (Quella villa accanto al cimitero) (1981) 87min
Director: Lucio Fulci
Country: Italy
Whatever you do, dont go in the basement. In the conclusion of splatter king Lucio Fulcis unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy–memorably described by London Time Out critic Sheila Johnson as literally a hack-work of almost awesome incoherence–Italys maestro of carefree narrative non sequitur exercises relative restraint to tell an effectively gothic (but gory) tale of a New England house with a history… a history as dark as the basement into which the unwary descend, never to return. The story centers on Bob, a young boy who moves with his parents to a new house formerly occupied by a late colleague of his academic researcher father. Bob notices the face of a little girl at a window in a photograph of the housealthough she is invisible to his parents. When the family arrives and moves in, Bob goes on to have a series of encounters with his mysterious invisible friend, Mae, who warns him that hes in danger. Did we mention theres a mysterious basement? And that people keep going down there to meet gruesome deaths? We did? So whats down there? You dont want to know. Heavily censored for its initial theatrical release, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY is presented here in a rare 35mm print of the original uncut version!
Friday, August 10
SLITHER (2006) 95min
Director: James Gunn
Countries: Canada/USA
In the most sensationally scary-funny creep-out movie since GREMLINS, an army of extraterrestrial slugs are turned loose in the sleepy, deer-hunting hamlet of Wheelsy, South Carolina, and sets about feasting on the local population. A Darwinian if ever there was one, Gunn paints the locals as a bunch of comic grotesquesovergrown frat boys, loose women and disturbingly picture-perfect nuclear familiesthen takes demented glee in turning the hunters into the hunted. SLITHER is a crack social satire that weighs in on the evolution-vs.-creationism debate, cautions against the dangers of groupthink and becomes a hilarious test case for the sacred vows of marriage
Friday, August 24
VAMPIRES KISS (1988) 103min
Director: Robert Bierman
Country: USA
Nicolas Cage delivers a wildly original, career-crowning performance–including the on-camera consumption of a live cockroach–in this pitch-perfect, pitch-black comedy about a Manhattan literary agent who believes hes turning into a vampire. An anarchic companion piece to Scorseses After Hours, courtesy of the same screenwriter (Joseph Minion), Vampires Kiss offers an equally memorable portrait of the Big Apple as phantasmagoric hellhole, with Cages yuppified Peter Loew coming progressively unhinged after a one-night-stand (with seductive temptress Jennifer Beals) ends in a pair of fangs to the neck. Or does it?
Friday, August 31
THE ENTITY (1982) 125min
Director: Sidney J. Furie
Country: USA
Starring Barbara Hershey in a tour de force performance, this notorious, truly harrowing shocker has a deeply disturbing premise: A single mother is repeatedly visited, overpowered and sexually assaulted by an invisible being or force. She seeks help from a sympathetic but skeptical psychiatrist (Ron Silver) and eventually turns to a group of university parapsychologists who attempt to investigate these visitations by scientific means. Supposedly based on a true case, the film was picketed by feminists when originally released.
