Impressive Overreaching Imagination: The Twisted Films of Charles Pinion

Supersaturated with eyeball kicks and a non-mainstream aesthetic, psychedelic splatterpunk is one way to describe the underground films of low-budget auteur Charles Pinion.

Consensus reality just gives up after a certain point and the nudity, madness, supernatural sacrilege and gore—lots of gore—spills all over the floor, slithers up your legs and eats your brain.

“Pinion’s imagination occasionally overreaches his limited budget, but the results are always impressive,” Shock Cinema’s Steve Pulchalski accurately pointed out in 1997.

He Is Legend: Richard Matheson RIP

Richard Matheson RIP

A great novelist and even better screenwriter has left this dimension to explore a new one, and we are all the lesser for it.

Billy Can’t Be A Hero: A Re-Appreciation of William Friedkin, and the Movies of May 2013

In the last month or so, I’ve not only rescreened William Friedkin’s films Sorcerer (1977) and The French Connection (1971), but also caught his latest movie, Killer Joe (2011), as well as read his recently-published autobiography The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir. 

An iconoclastic autodidact, director Friedkin has always been interested in morally questionable people doing bad things (sometimes with good intentions, sometimes not) and the consequences of their actions.

It has been several years since I last saw any of WF’s work, and for some reason (probably raw, ugly contrarianism), he had fallen out of favor with me. Wow, was I stupid! His flicks are GREAT!!!!

Mars Needs You! “Mercano el Marciano” (“Mercano the Martian”) Invades Brooklyn on June 7, June 9 and June 20—BE THERE!!!

Do you like Martians? Animation? Political satire? Rude humor? Subtitles?

Then have we got a movie for you!

From Argentina, the animated Spanish-language Mercano el Marciano (Mercano the Martian) is the epitome of cult movie: not too many people have seen this, but those that do, love it.

And during the month of June, there will be only one place in the entire U.S. of A. that you could see this rare flick: Brooklyn’s own Spectacle Theater!

This will be the film’s first theatrical (non-festival) screening in the U.S., and like a UFO, who knows when it will return!