In scheduling Basement Fest I try to follow a classic (i.e., out of date) B-Fest format. So midnight-ish is the “Plan 9” slot. Then the next slot is what I call the brain melter slot. Because it’s a good slot for surrealistic and/or nonsensical movies because it’s late and the movies have been running for a while and many of your mental processes are worn down.
About a week before the Fest I stumbled across on Amazon a picture I’d never heard of, The Second Coming of Suzanne. I watched like five minutes and it was exactly what I wanted. It was weirdly, pointlessly ‘arty’ in it’s editing, etc. The film uses several Leonard Cohen songs, and stars the blank Jared Martin, a blanker Sondra Locke, a young Richard Dreyfus and old school film / TV star Gene Barry, who happened to be the director’s father. Barry was very bloated and Iooked quite ill, but I guess he got over it because he lived for a good long time after this. The film wore it’s less than convincing depth on its sleeve, and the sacrilegious ending was so patently predictable that it elicited yawns instead of outrage. A good choice.
To make up for Dondi and Suzanee, I played one of my dozens and dozens of very nice Shaw Brothers movies from all the sets I’ve bought the last several years. This was was the mostly light-hearted Dirty Ho, and it was pretty great.
Finally, we ended the pre-breakfast shift with my friend Jeff W’s choice of Al Adamson’s Brain of Blood. Compared to some of my films it wasn’t that bad, although calling it good would be a stretch. It was cheap and poorly stitched together–I mean, it’s an Al Adamson film–and poorly acted. The monster make-up…well, take a look. He looks like the handsome brother of the Thing in the Closet. (I really like how the appliance is gaping off near the mouth, though.) The film also sported the inevitable ’70s ending. Even so, it was entertaining.
