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.
