harvey weinstein

Dismembering the Twin Cities Alamo

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We do not have an Alamo Drafthouse in New Orleans and, to be honest, I’m totally okay with that.  I appreciate the chain’s consistent enthusiasm for programming retro genre schlock, but there’s just something off-putting about watching any movie while underplayed teenagers scurry like peasants in the dark, delivering little treats & trinkets to the royal customers on our pleather thrones.  Canal Place’s worst era was the brief period when it attempted to mimic the Alamo dine-in experience, which I’m saying as someone who worked in the theater’s kitchen during those long, dark years.  I mean, why pay for a $20 salad when you can simply wait an hour and then literally walk to several of the greatest restaurants in the world?  It was a baffling novelty in our local context.  I was recently invited to an Alamo Drafthouse while vacationing in the Twin Cities, though, and I feel like I got introduced to the chain’s whole deal in the one context where it does make sense.  For one thing, the Twin Cities Alamo is not located in the Twin Cities at all, but rather way out in the strip mall suburbs where there’s nothing better to do or eat within walking distance. In fact, there’s hardly anything within walking distance at all.  “Public transportation” instructions on Google led me to take a train ride from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, then a bus ride from St Paul to the side of a featureless suburban highway, and then a cheap Uber ride for the final stretch to the theater.  That’s hardly equivalent to wedging a combo restaurant-cinema onto the busiest corner of the French Quarter.  Also, I traveled there specifically to attend an all-day horror movie marathon, where mid-film snack & drink deliveries were necessary for my hourly survival.  That overpriced pizza saved my life.

The annual “Dismember the Alamo” event is a Halloween Season tradition where the theater chain programs four-to-five “surprise” horror films, typically selected from the AGFA library.  The program varies theater to theater, so I can only report on what screened this year at the Twin Cities location (which is, again, not located in either of the Twin Cities).  It opened with two movies I’ve already reviewed for this site in Octobers past: Messiah of Evil (which I love) and The Changeling (which I tolerate) – two artistically minded, leisurely paced horrors of relative respectability.  The plan was then to screen two more slower paced, fussily styled horrors Swampflix has already covered in Ringu and Blood & Black Lace, but technical difficulties intervened.  While the staff scrambled to get the second half of the program running, I was happy to have time to chat with a long-distance friend in a venue notorious for not tolerating mid-film chatter of any kind.  Then, when the show got back on the rails, they had thrown out the planned program to instead play two oddball 80s novelties I had personally never seen.  The pacing picked up, the movies got weirder, and the room took on more of a horror nerd party vibe than the horror nerd sleepover feel of the opening half.  I got treated to the full surprise lineup experience of the Dismember the Alamo ritual, to the point where even the marathon’s programmers were surprised by the titles they ended up playing when the DCPs for Ringu & Black Lace refused to cooperate.  The Great Pumpkin smiled warmly upon me that day, which I very much needed after traveling alone in the Minnesota cold.

The third film in this year’s Dismember the Twin Cities Alamo lineup was the 1988 haunted house horror Night of the Demons.  It was perfect Halloween Season programming, regardless of its function as a much-needed energy boost within the marathon.  In the film, the absolute worst dipshit teens to ever disgrace the screen spend Halloween night getting torn to shreds by demons whenever they get too horny to live.  In the audience, the awed seriousness that met The Changeling gave way to chortles & cheers, especially as the Reaganite jocks onscreen received their demonic comeuppance from the monstrously transformed goths they bully in the first act.  That vocal response continued into the opening credits of 1981’s The Burning, which is credited as the brainchild of a young Harvey Weinstein.  Weinstein’s name lingered in the air as the film’s horndog teen boy protagonists pressured their coed summer camp cohorts for sex in nearly every scene, only to be violently interrupted by a disfigured slasher villain named Cropsy.  The Burning proved to be a fascinating bridge between the urban, gloved-killer grime of Italo proto-slashers and the sickly summer camp hedonism of the standard American brand.  I imagine it would’ve inspired multiple bodycount slasher sequels if it were simply retitled Cropsy instead of the much more generic The Burning, since the horrifically disfigured villain on a revenge mission has an interesting enough look & signature weapon (gigantic gardening shears) to justify his own long-running franchise.  He at least deserves it as much as Jason Voorhees, since The Burning is a major improvement on a template established by early entries in the Friday the 13th series.  Likewise, I wonder why Linnea Quigley’s hot-pink harlequin bimbo look from Night of the Demons hasn’t inspired decades of Halloween costumes among the horror savvy.  It might be her at her most iconic, give or take her graveyard punk look from Return of the Living Dead or her chainsaw-bikini combo from the cover of the Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout VHS.

If there are any lessons in horror marathon programming here, it might just be in the attention paid to pacing. I love giallo & J-horror just as much as the next schlock junkie, but I was excited to watch objectively worse movies than Ringu & Black Lace just to make sure I didn’t end up using my pizza as a greasy pillow.  Also, if you have to improvise your lineup on the fly, you might be surprised by the connections that arise from the last-minute entries.  All four movies in this particular lineup were about cursed spaces haunted by the sins of the past — violence that lingers in the landscape where it took place, to the point of supernatural phenomena.  In Messiah of Evil & Night of the Demons, that violence is perpetuated by otherworldly embodiments of pure Evil.  In The Changeling & The Burning, it’s perpetuated in acts of revenge for personal wrongs of the recent past.  All four films are connected by the tropes & traditions of horror as a storytelling medium & communal practice, a connection strengthened by a well-informed, horror savvy audience who stays immersed in that milieu year-round.  More practically, though, what I learned is that the Alamo Drafthouse experience makes total sense in that movie marathon context.  I cannot imagine a more comfortable venue where I could binge four horror movies in a row, save for my living room.  And since I’m unlikely to invite 200 strangers to my house to watch a surprise horror movie lineup, even that caveat is moot.  If there were a New Orleans branch of the Alamo Drafthouse, I’d attend the Dismember the Alamo marathon every year with religious devotion.  I’d just hope that they’d stick it way out in the suburbs of Metairie or St. Bernard so that it’s competing with AMC instead of our humble indie spots like The Prytania, who’ve done a great job restoring Canal Place to its former glory.

-Brandon Ledet 

Forgotten Silver (1995): Peter Jackson’s Silent Film Precursor to The Independent (2000)

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Five years before our December Movie of the Month, 2000’s Jerry Stiller comedy The Independent, went straight to DVD a very similar mockumentary aired on New Zealand television: 1995’s Forgotten Silver. Although Forgotten Silver covers cinema’s early, silent era while The Independent covers its B-movie & drive-in time frame, the two mockumentaries are very similarly minded both in their reverence for the medium they’re spoofing and in their depictions of madmen auteur directors possessed by their passion for filmmaking & troubled by their failure to secure proper funding for their art. While The Independent is a brilliant, must-see comedy for schlock junkies & Roger Corman fanboys, Forgotten Silver covers the same territory for cinephiles & Criterion fetishists.

When it was first introduced to New Zealand audiences, Forgotten Silver was framed as a true-life documentary of “forgotten” (read: fictional) filmmaker Colin McKenzie, who supposedly operated during cinema’s birth at the turn of the century through the tail end of the silent era in the late 20s. Much like how The Independent‘s Morty Fineman accidentally pioneered cinema in his quest to make movies about “tits, ass, and bombs” Colin McKenzie was credited here for accidentally inventing the world’s first tracking shot, color film, feature length film, talkie, close-up, and candid camera comedy, among other firsts. Although this list of feats is beyond preposterous for an unknown filmmaker (and they all end in blunderous fates like smut charges & miscarriages) its deadpan delivery & adherence to a traditional documentary format make it somewhat understandable that some television audiences were initially duped by Forgotten Silver‘s validity as a document of a real-life auteur. It’s got a much more wry, Woody Allen’s Take the Money & Run style of mockumentary humor in contrast to The Independent‘s more over-the-top, Christopher Guest-esque approach to comedy.

It’s difficult to say for sure if Forgotten Silver provided any direct inspiration for The Independent, but there are some undeniable similarities in their DNA. While Forgotten Silver is concerned with restoration of McKenzie’s entire catalog, The Independent follows the discovery & restoration of Fineman’s “lost” anti-herpes PSA The Simplex Complex. Also like The Independent, Forgotten Silver is mostly concerned with the completion of a single feature film, this time profiling the production of Salome, a multi-year production of a Biblical epic featuring 15,000 extras, a city-sized hand-built set, and endless funding issues that similarly plagued Fineman’s Ms. Kevorkian. The film also establishes its legitimacy as a documentary by enlisting several big names in art cinema – producer Harvey Weinstein, critic Leonard Maltin, and actor Sam Neill among them – to provide interview fodder. Peter Jackson, the film’s co-director/creator alongside documentarian Costa Botes, get the most screentime of all, framing the story of how McKenzie’s films were found & restored and what significance they have to the history of cinema at large in his talking head interviews.

The differences between Forgotten Silver & The Independent are just as apparent. Because Colin McKenzie was (fictionally-speaking) long dead before Peter Jackson brought his work to light, Jackson serves as the central voice in Forgotten Silver. Morty Fineman, on the other hand, is Jerry Stiller alive & at his loudest & most demanding, dominating The Independent‘s runtime. The films’ tones are also drastically different. The only time Forgotten Silver approaches The Independent‘s over-the-top ridiculousness is in its depictions of sub-Charlie Chaplin vaudeville routines involving cream pies that McKenzie filmed in order to financially support Salome. For the most part, though, the two films are remarkably simpatico. At heart, they both aim to resurrect long-dead cinema genres in loving spoof form. Forgotten Silver‘s approach is just more subdued & deadpan due to the nature of its turn-of-the-century subject matter. The Independent is a much flashier, more over-the-top comedy, which makes sense given its exploitation cinema homage. Both are great, must-see comedic gems for cinephiles in either camp.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, 2000’s The Independent, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this transcription of Morty Fineman’s fictional filmography, and last week’s recommendation that you also watch the documentary Corman’s World to get the full picture..

-Brandon Ledet