Popcorn & Candy: Demons & Killers & Porno, Oh My!
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The AFI's Halloween weekend series has long been one of the best options for big screen thrills on the scariest of holidays, and this year is no exception. As usual, they'll be screening F.W. Murnau's creepy silent classic Nosferatu with live musical accompaniment. Those of you who've been talked into watching HBO's True Blood only to find that it's just a mediocre southern gothic soap opera with dull fangs may well want to wash your bloody palates clean with the original vampire movie. There's also Night of the Living Dead, which we technically prefer to watch on Easter (that being the only holiday devoted to the risen dead), but it works for Halloween as well. And for the kids, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, one of those great kids movies that rewards multiple viewings for adults just as much as the little ones.
But the main event, the film you all dragged yourselves out of your coffins to see, would have to be Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski's classic tale of demonic insemination and the strange things that go on behind closed NYC apartment doors. Polanski's film was a game changer for the horror genre, an occult-based tale that was appropriately surreal, yet grounded enough in reality to be genuinely chilling. The imitators it spawned were legion, but few ever even approached the genius of Polanski's vision. The director, entering his Chinatown-era prime and working from a popular novel by Ira Levin, tells the story of a young New York couple who move into a new apartment (The Dakota plays a vital role as the imposing setting) and find their neighbors to be somewhat...odd. John Cassavetes, sometimes charming, sometimes smug, increasingly slimy, appears in one of his most memorable acting roles, and the waifish Mia Farrow, in a star-making performance that draws the audience into her personal hell, steps into the title role as a young wife whose pregnancy turns out to be less than ideal. But the real star is Polanski, drawing on his experimental roots to constantly knock the audience off-balance and infuse every frame with a sense of palpable dread.
View the trailer for Rosemary's Baby.
This weekend at the AFI. See the schedule for showtimes.
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Getting butts into seats for a grindhouse movie is all about your title. Satan's Sadists. Gore Gore Girls. Cannibal Holocaust (which, for the record, is much better than Zombie Holocaust, which is woefully short on both zombies and holocausts). With Midnight Meat Train, Clive Barker has stumbled upon a title that manages to out-grind many of the classics of grindhouse cinema. As such, we're not really expecting it to be all that great, this story of a vegan NYC photographer who stumbles across a serial killer who kills lonely late night subway riders to be used as meat. We are expecting it to be a bloody good time, though, particularly with Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura at the helm. After all, his sci-fi samurai flick Versus has become a modern cult classic, and is one of the most elegantly filmed pieces of semi-trashy ultra-violence to hit a screen this decade. E Street Cinema is screening the movie in its D.C. premiere as the first film in their rebooted and long dormant midnight movie series. And we're kind of glad that the film's brief theatrical release earlier this year bypassed D.C., because this film just screams "Midnight Movie," among whatever else might be screamed onscreen. And we're also glad they chose this for the kickoff because the rest of the films they've announced so far (Pulp Fiction, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, American Psycho, Ghostbusters, Labyrinth, The Big Lebowski), while fun movies, tend to err a little too far on the side of the mainstream for the midnight slot.
View the trailer.
Friday and Saturday nights at midnight at E Street.
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A black and white animated omnibus horror film. Now there's a movie that's likely to have a pretty focused audience, and if this is the sort of thing that appeals to you, you're probably already looking forward to it. Six artists from all over the world were each tasked with devising a dark and disturbing animated short, to be most or all done in stark black and white. The results are packaged together in this animated film that is meant to creep up on you rather than jump out of the shadows. Produced in France and subtitled for those segments that don't rely solely on the visuals to get their point across, this looks like yet another excellent option for nightmare-inducing cinema this weekend.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street.
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Boris Karloff Halloween Double Feature
Films on the Hill, a Capitol Hill film society that specializes in screenings of classic (pre-1960) cinema, is having a busy month. In a span of eight days, they'll be screening five films, this for a society that normally only does about three screenings a month. The final two films of that run come in the form of a Boris Karloff Halloween double feature tomorrow night. First up is The Man They Could Not Hang, a 1939 film with shades of Frankenstein and Re-Animator, in which Karloff plays a mad scientist (what other kind is there in the movies?) who has discovered how to bring the recently deceased back to life. Of course, the authorities don't think much of man mucking around with God's Plan, and they send him to the gallows. Once his assistant uses the Doctor's technique to revive him, his personality takes a dark turn. This is followed by The Devil Commands. Karloff is again the mad scientist, this time not as concerned with raising the dead as with communicating with them. This proves to be just as poor an idea as reanimating them.
Tomorrow night at Films on the Hill. 7 p.m., $5.
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What, you think we're ditching the all-horror format of this week's column by throwing in the latest from Kevin Smith? Think again. There's obviously something very frightening about this film. So scary, in fact, that the Utah-based Megaplex Theaters chain refuses to even show it. So terrifying that the NFL was reticent to accept advertising for the film unless changes were made to the branding. So shocking that even on an anything-goes channel like Comedy Central, they won't even utter or print half of the title in the ads. That's right, while the Saw series' latest disembowlathon racks up big bucks on the broken backs of dozens of creatively bloodied corpses, there's something beyond the pale about using the word "porno" in a movie title, or making a lighthearted comedy about people who aren't complete deviants who decide to try to make some cash in the adult film industry. At this point, I don't really care if Zack and Miri Make a Porno is any good or not; though Smith is at his strongest when he gives his inner perv free reign, and roping in a lot of folks from the Apatow stable bodes well, too. No, seeing Zack and Miri Make a Porno is more a matter of principle now, a middle finger raised to the prurient interests that say that giving head is bad, but lopping one off with a stainless steel blade is just fine.
View the (somewhat NSFW) trailer.
Opens tomorrow at theaters all over the area.