DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most haunted, beastly movies coming to town in the following week.
—
Vampire BrideNudes! Guns! Ghosts! The Sensational Cinema of Shintoho
The psychotronic spirit comes to The Mall with a film series dedicated to a short-lived Japanese studio that specialized in cheap exploitation movies. Curated by film critic Mark Schilling, the series begins Sunday afternoon when the Freer screens a trio of B-movies. Ghost Story of Yatsuya (1959) uses lurid colors in its adaptation of a 19th century kabuki play about a cruel samurai and his abused wife. The titular feline of Ghost Cat of Otama Pond lures a young couple who gets lost in the mountains. Vampire Bride has a backstory as lurid as any melodrama. Shintoho studio boss Mitsugu Okura was furious that actress Junko Ikeuchi had married against his wishes. In an act of revenge that could have come out of one of his movies, he cast her against the girl-next-door persona she had established to play a dancer who survives a great fall only to become a disfigured beast. Note: the films in this series will be screened on Blu-Ray.
View a clip from Ghost Cat of Otama Pond.
Ghost Story of Yatsuya screens at 1:00 pm . Ghost Cat of Otama Pond screens at 2:30 pm. Vampire Bride screens at 4:00 pm. Sunday, December 9 at the Freer. Free.
—
George Brent and Barbara Stanwyck in The Purchase PricePre-code Barbara Stanwyck
The AFI’s tribute to character actor Lyle Talbot continues with a double bill featuring the great Barbara Stanwyck as the most glamorous of tough dames. In The Purchase Price (1932), Stanwyck plays a nightclub singer who ditches Manhattan to take the place of a North Dakota mail-order bride for George Brent. You can bet she doesn’t peel his shrimp. Talbot plays Stanwyck’s mobster ex. Ladies They Talk About (1933) is a women in prison film with Stanwyck as a bank robber who takes the fall in San Quentin for accomplice Talbot. Co-star Lillian Roth began her career on Broadway at six years old, and had had an active movie career in the pre-code era. But the death of her fiancé sent her career on a long hiatus, and it was more than forty years before she would again appear in a feature film, the Brooke Shields horror movie Alice, Sweet Alice.
View the trailer for Ladies They Talk About.
Sunday, December 9 and Monday, December 10 at the AFI.
—
As if the ruin porn that seems to defines Detroit isn’t discouraging enough, the much beleaguered metropolis also has more fires than any other U.S. city. Documentary filmmakers Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez follow a group of Detroit firefighters deep into battle with flame and lack of funding — their salaries start at $30,000 a year with no raises for a decade.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at AMC Georgetown.
—
Twenty Cigarettes (James Benning, 2011, HD, 99 minutes). Image courtesy of James BenningAmerican Originals Now: James Benning
This weekend the National Gallery showcases the work of an avant-garde filmmaker who embraces digital technology. The program is presented in conjunction with the exhibit The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years. Twenty Cigarettes uses the duration of a lit cigarette, over an entire pack, as a framing device for a series of video portraits. Forty-seven shots of American highways make up small roads. Two Cabins looks at the artist’s reconstruction of two iconic self-made Americans: Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski.
Saturday, December 8 and Sunday, December 9 at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
—
(Zenga Bros)Skateboarder Danny Way came from a broken home in Southern California, but he dreams and skates hard. His ambition: to jump the Great Wall of China on his skateboard.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
—
Also opening this week: Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde in the heist-gone-wrong thriller Deadfall; and Gerard Butler stars as a down on a fallen soccer star in Playing for Keeps. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
