51. SHAME OF THE JUNGLE (1975)
JANUARY 2018. If your New Year’s resolution is to see lots more trashy, ridiculous, mind-rotting films, the Secret Screening got you off to a good start here. The jokes in this X-rated animated Tarzan parody sex comedy are guaranteed to kill off brain cells and kill ’em good. Imagine the comics section of the old Playboy magazine turned into a feature. The crowd gave this one the very definition of “a smattering of applause” at the end, but the constant penis jokes–about 972 of ’em–got good laughs in my corner of the room.
52. FREEZE BOMB (1978)
FEBRUARY 2018. The Secret Screening was bound to get to Al Adamson eventually. He’s made snappier films than this ridiculous action job about a Kung fu cop versus a sadistic arms dealer over a Mr. Freeze weapon, but star Jim Kelly’s great screen presence, the groovy cosmic funk score and the only scene I know of in film history in which a turtle is used as a potential torture device got a lot of us to order another beer. Like all true grindhouse classics, this one has about 172 other titles. The print we watched was titled Freeze Bomb, but it’s most commonly known these days as Death Dimension.
53. POPCORN (1991)
MARCH 2018. March 5th is the second annual Reel Film Day at the Alamo Drafthouse (3/5, as in movies on 35mm film). A good cause, I say. Last year, I saw Matinee there on a vintage print. This year, at the Secret Screening, they threaded through the projector this bonkers slasher film set at a creature feature festival in a vintage movie palace. When this movie isn’t impaling and electrocuting its cast or parodying William Castle, it deals in movie geek chatter and hangs out in a projection booth and shows off reels of celluloid.
54. THE TERROR OF GODZILLA (1975)
APRIL 2018. Also known as Terror of Mechagodzilla. Also known asメカゴジラの逆襲. Also known as the final film from the original cycle of Godzilla movies. Also known as–whoops!–the second time that the Richardson Alamo somehow received the wrong print. James Wallace intended to show the previous film in the series, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, but once the projector fired up on this chilly April evening, this played instead. Only a real Grinch would care though and not too many real Grinches come to the Secret Screening. Also, weird moments like this will be the fun stories that we tell about this show in the future. In any case, we still got our monsters.
55. STEELE JUSTICE (1986)
MAY 2018. Temperatures hit the 90s this day in Dallas while the Secret Screening was pure 80s. A one-man-army type (Martin Kove, the evil martial arts instructor from The Karate Kid gone good, but not too good) who’s handy with guns, knives and his fists and bad at keeping on his shirt or staying within the law takes on the Vietnamese drug cartel in sunny El Lay. Needless to say, the cartel doesn’t stand a chance. Everyone involved is going down, preferably in an explosion or a hail of bullets while drum machines pound and overproduced anthems roar. This won over the crowd big time. Lots of laughter and applause. Never a dull moment. We all snorted up some pure cinematic cocaine.
56. CONQUEST (1983)
JUNE 2018. Swords, sorcery and surrealism from Italy. A fantasy land warrior, complete with loincloth, long hair and a magic weapon (a laser bow-and-arrow!), treks across dangerous territory to kill an evil topless woman in a metal face mask and not one predictable thing happens along the way. This was a big hit with the room. Pretty much any film in director Lucio Fulci’s blood-soaked body of work would be perfect for the Secret Screening (when it comes to underrated Fulci, I’m a fan of his brutal 1975 spaghetti western Four of the Apocalypse). Hats off to Mr. James Wallace for choosing one of the weirdest ones.
57. GET CRAZY (1983)
JULY 2018. Simply one of the most fun cult rock ‘n’ roll comedies of all-time. The original release was buried in its day due to the treachery of some sleazeballs behind the scenes and the loss of the original negative has stood in the way of a fresh new digital presentation, so every new fan made for this undeserved obscurity counts, and this show made several on a sweaty Texas July night. The crowd stayed straight through the closing credits so we could hear Lou Reed, who is hilarious in this film, send us off with a lovely song. Also, worthy of note is the gorgeous, near-pristine 35mm print. We’re not used to that at the Secret Screening! There was no noticeable discoloration and hardly a scratch on it. It looks like its been sitting in the very back of a temperature-controlled vault for thirty-five years, unseen, untouched, still looking like new. I know that some Blu-rays are sourced from 35mm prints when that’s all there is, so if any moguls out there are reading this (say, Louis B. Mayer or David O. Selznick) and want to do a little good for humanity by rescuing a great semi-forgotten film… contact AGFA. They might have the best print of this on planet Earth.
58. BMX BANDITS (1983)
AUGUST 2018. Brian Trenchard-Smith’s rocket-paced kiddie adventure flick was exactly what a wild pack of Texas film freaks needed in these dog days of summer. It’s pure cinematic soda pop that goes down easy. Big crowd reaction for this one. To get into the film’s sugary spirit, I ordered a root beer and peanut M&M’s. A fine combination, if you ask me.
59. BLOOD FOR DRACULA (1974)
SEPTEMBER 2018. On a night of shockingly mild North Texas weather for this time of year, the shocks kept coming with this outrageous comedy from the heart of the 1970s midnight movie era. Udo Kier’s amazing, alien-like Dracula can only drink the blood of virgins and virgins are getting harder for him to find. This film’s sure sense of camp and its casual rape jokes mark it as something that couldn’t be made today, but on a big screen, before an adventurous audience, and on a film print that’s likely older than most of the crowd, it comes off like a great dirty secret worth spreading.
60. PENITENTIARY II (1982) and PENITENTIARY (1979)
OCTOBER 2018. The fifth anniversary show and the first SOLD OUT Secret Screening. Good times. Nobody got trampled. On this warm and overcast night, about 250 people gathered to get smacked upside the head by a Penitentiary double feature. Works for me. They’re relentlessly offbeat blaxploitation prison/boxing flicks (well, part II is an ex-con story) full of wicked humor, violence and the intensity of a real vision at work. We started with Penitentiary II (yes, II), which got a warm response from the regulars who know it as The Great Lost AGFA Screening (see February 2017). With no known 35mm print of it seeming to have survived thirty-six years on Earth, according to host James Wallace, this was the recent Vinegar Syndrome/AFGA digital restoration. It was crazed, it was fun, we got our kicks, but what next? I’m pretty sure that nobody guessed the FIRST Penitentiary film (on a print that’s holding its colors pretty well). What the hell kind of film series shows a trilogy in reverse order? The AGFA Secret Screening does, bless its crazy heart. And it was good. There was a weird humor and mystery in it. Let’s also mention that Jamaa Fanaka is the first director to be repeated in The Secret Screening and not once, but twice due to this night’s double-shot.
61. THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE (1987)
NOVEMBER 2018. Greasy kid stuff on a mild, pre-Election Day night (also snotty, pukey and flatulent kid stuff). We all left the Alamo Drafthouse a little dumber afterward. This Bad Movie classic murders your brain cells in cold blood. Like a lot of remarkable bad movies though, this one holds up as a weird artifact of its time, when Hollywood squeezed a feature film out of an edgy trading card fad for kids. Almost none of the intended jokes here got a laugh, but many of the oh-so-80s details did. None of the intended gross-outs got much reaction either, but the sexual tension between the 14-year-old protagonist and the older girl earned some audible winces.
62. THE SILENT PARTNER (1978)
DECEMBER 2018. Elliot Gould here is your regular dork, unlucky in love and doting on his fish tank, but he’s got a dangerous side that comes out over the course of this delicious and eccentric Christmastime thriller that brings Hitchcock levels of firepower. Usually after a Secret Screening the Facebook group that’s centered around the show teems with jokes and quotes and the occasional meme about the outrageous thing we just saw. Not so after this film. The group was almost dead silent. Not a creature was stirring. You can’t goof on this one. It’s too good. There are some mild exploitation elements (notably a quick and effective bit of gratuitous gore), but this is more along the lines of an overlooked gem that deserves reconsideration as a classic. The best Secret Screening of 2018.
63. THE BOXER’S OMEN (1983)
JANUARY 2019. An unparalleled attack of slimy, day-glo insanity from Hong Kong. I could tell you about the sorcerer who sends out his own detached flying head to take out our hero, the evil naked lady warrior who’s created by black magic inside of a crocodile carcass and the scene in which the lead vomits up a live eel and I’d only be scratching the surface of what this film offers. This site’s previous favorite out-to-lunch 80s Shaw Brothers movie, Portrait in Crystal, has just been topped, looks like. You can’t take your eyes off this film–until you HAVE to take your eyes off it. Or maybe I’m just extra sensitive to food-related gross-outs. A captivating, titillating, nauseating start to 2019. I’m ready for anything now.
64. WITCHBOARD (1986)
FEBRUARY 2019. If Ouija boards have ever creeped you out in real life, this clumsy horror flick will cure that. You’ll never take one seriously again. I first saw this movie on VHS in 1987 or ’88 and it scared me back then. Now, it’s about as scary as an episode of The Care Bears. The nutrition label on a bag of Doritos is more scary to me than this movie. Still, with a crowd on a vintage 35mm print on a big screen, where you can soak up every drop of its ultra-80s vibe, it’s kinda fun.
65. DR. BLACK, MR. HYDE (1976)
MARCH 2019. With temperatures in the low 30s this night, only one thing could get a cold weather wimp like me out of the house: The Secret Screening. Some vintage blaxploitation goodness warms a body good. Like director William Crain’s other film, Blacula, this is a solid horror story behind the campy title. Actually the weathered, but watchable, old reissue print shown this night bore the far less impressive title Decision for Doom, which sounds like Chapter 10 of a 1940s cliffhanger serial. So, we’ll ignore it and go by the original.
66. BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000)
APRIL 2019. There are a few (just a few) misguided people who think that the Secret Screening is all about BAD movies. They think it’s where you go to chuckle at low-budget effects and giggle over period details from forty years ago. It’s where you go to smirk at movies from 1976 as viewed through a “superior” modern-day lens. Meanwhile, I and plenty of other regulars, take the opposite approach. Of infinitely greater appeal to us is the treatment of these films as strange artifacts from outside the bounds of good taste. Films that are unique, even if by accident, in a business where most things that come out are test-marketed pieces of plastic. We have a taste for the weird and wild and, on that count, most of the films shown at the Secret Secret are anything but bad… EXCEPT for Battlefield Earth. Holy shit! From its relentless abuse of Dutch angles to its confusing action sequences to John Travolta hamming it up like he studied at the Skeletor School of Screen Villiany, this film holds up almost twenty years later as one of Hollywood’s most flummoxing spirals into ineptitude. It’s bad, bad, BAD. And it’s about a solid two hours long. I had my beer, I had my popcorn, I was planted in my seat. I figured I may as well sit back and savor this badness on pristine 35mm (an advantage maybe of a film bombing in theaters in 2000 is that the prints didn’t get much play and still look like new). On that count, this was fun. It also went over well in the room. Or at least most of the crowd stayed to the end, which was kind of a compliment, I guess. This played on April Fool’s Day and I can’t say that it wasn’t fitting.
67. SHAKMA (1990)
MAY 2019. This crowd-pleasing killer monkey movie is the only Secret Screening to be shown twice (it was the selection for way back in July of 2017). James Wallace chose it as a tribute to David Peril, Secret Screening regular, all-around movie maniac and one hell of a nice guy. He passed away in April and this was one of his favorites. I ordered another beer and watched this one win over the room all over again.
68. SURF II (1984)
JUNE 2019. There is NO better way to greet the summer than with a raunchy 80s beach comedy. Me, I’m the kind of jerk who owns Hot Moves on Blu-ray. So, I was down 200% for this supremely loony take on the genre on this warm night (after the hottest day of the year so far; temperatures climbed up to 92 in Dallas). It’s a film that’s happy to go for the gross-out, is enthusiastic about its gratuitous nudity (which is the best kind of nudity) and that piles on the wild and ridiculous jokes. It’s also the best movie to ever give Eddie Deezen top billing in the opening credits. The 35mm print looked great.
69. WHITE LINE FEVER (1975)
JULY 2019. It’s mid-July in Texas and summer is only just beginning to kick our ass. We haven’t yet hit the 100-degree mark, but we’ve gotten close and we know it’s coming. Sounds like a perfect time for some trucker-exploitation to me. Host James Wallace was big on framing this show as a tribute to Jan-Michael Vincent who died earlier this year. By the time James was done introducing it, we were downright rabid to bask in Vincent’s star turn as an honest guy pushed to the edge by corruption in the trucking industry.
70. BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH (1971)
AUGUST 2019. The scope of the Secret Screening broadens this month with its first documentary. I’m all for it. This follows a group of adventurous sea life experts (and, uh, a folk singer) as they travel the coasts of Africa and Australia to get the first film footage of a great white shark. It’s shot fly-on-the-wall style and it puts you right on the boat. You can smell the sea brine. You can also see imagery that Steven Spielberg later ran with for Jaws four years later. It played well for one of the larger crowds I’ve seen turn out for the show.
71. SHAKES THE CLOWN (1991)
SEPTEMBER 2019. Good movies really are made for a crowd and a big screen. I say this because for years I didn’t think that I liked Bobcat Goldthwait’s satire of the stand-up comedy life as related via the metaphor of clowns and mimes. When I watched this movie at home many years ago, I found it grating. I even wrote a brief, but negative review. And it looks Iike I need to rewrite that old piece a’ shit because this movie totally won me over on Secret Screening night. This is a very dark comedy and not every joke got a laugh from the crowd, but that’s to be expected for a film that mixes bleakness and humor like this one does (the Robin Williams scenes were the big moments) . Still, I could feel the room hanging on to its brazen absurdity and ugliness. When it was over, I wasn’t sure if they would applaud, but they did. And so did I. Sincerely. Host James Wallace also pushed Goldthwait’s film World’s Greatest Dad in both his intro and outro and I can’t say that I disagree. What was once an intentionally grating stand-up comedy voice became one of the great black comedy voices in film.
72. ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND (1972) and ALICE IN WONDERLAND: AN X-RATED MUSICAL COMEDY (1976)
OCTOBER 2019. October is the Secret Screening’s anniversary month and that’s come to mean a double-feature. First was a rare “respectable” film in the series, a G-rated Lewis Carroll adaptation with a star-studded British cast and a brilliant technical team who won awards for it. It’s not AT ALL what you expect to see here, but you have to throw out your expectations at the Secret Screening. It was mostly a set-up anyway for the next movie which was the same story all over again, but this time with a lot more boobs and dicks and everything else. As Carroll rolls over in his grave, this low-budget softcore parody offers Alice as a virginal young woman who’s uptight about sex. The residents of Wonderland, where no one has anything to do except hump like rabbits all day, are ready to school her on life’s baser pleasures. What makes it work is that it’s disarmingly funny, freely campy and has a cast who can’t wait to take off their clothes for your entertainment. Yes, it’s a throwback to the October 2017 show of bizarre dueling Pinocchio movies.
73. DEADLY ILLUSION (1987)
NOVEMBER 2019. A deep cut this month from way out in 80s Analog Land. This one never made it past VHS on home video (as of this writing), but it turned out to be a little gem on 35mm for the Secret Screening crowd. Now, the crime story plot blows a gasket about halfway through, but nobody seemed to care. The combination of the charm of Billy Dee Williams as a New York City private detective, the film’s offbeat tone and a couple pint glasses of Velvet Hammer got at least me through it. Lots of laughs for this one. Most of ’em were even intentional. TRIVIA NOTE: After Jamaa Fanaka, the great Larry Cohen is the second director to be repeated at the Secret Screening. Sorta. Cohen got fired in the middle of production so he has co-director credit here alongside William Tannen, but his eccentric stamp is still evident here. Nothing in this movie feels “normal”.
74. BEWARE! THE BLOB (1972)
DECEMBER 2019. Hey, there are only so many good Christmas movies in the AGFA vault. Where do you go when it’s December and you’ve run out of worthy holiday weirdness on 35mm? It’s time to bring in The Blob. Makes sense to me. Local boy, veteran TV star, and one-time director Larry Hagman directs this sequel to the 1958 classic like an actor. He fills the cast with his friends and lets them stretch out on improvised tangents. He sticks with scenes a little longer than he maybe should and is liberal with his close-ups. Somewhere in there is a plot about a killer Blob or something. It’s a film that feels like the people making it are having a party–and the Secret Screening is a party, too. Our weird 2019 Monday night party mingled with this 1972 party and the vibes were good. The room allowed the film to be the comedy that it really is.
75. THE GLOVE (1979)
JANUARY 2020. A very John Saxon Secret Screening. When ex-con Rosey Grier isn’t punching people to death with a stolen steel glove weapon or playing blues guitar, Saxon is the hard-boiled bounty hunter who works to catch him. Saxon is most of the show here, which saves this otherwise clunky movie directed by actor Ross Hagen (star of past Secret Screening highlight Wonder Women). It’s a film that’s a little like the Dallas weather these days. Sorta warm and cold at the same time. You go out and some people are wearing shorts and T-shirts and others are bundled up in coats. We get chilly mornings and nights and then picnic temperatures in the afternoon. In other words, this weather is jerkin’ us around. If you like it cold or warm, you get a little taste of both right now, but it’s never really satisfying. Hagen seems to be directing the weather here, too.
76. SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982)
FEBRUARY 2020. It’s happened. The Secret Screening is now popular enough that it sells out days in advance. Word to the wise: Keep an eye on the schedule and reserve those seats early. Despite the rainy weather, the show was packed for one of this site’s fave slasher flicks. This was also a very rare digital presentation. The 35mm print that they wanted to use has apparently been around the block and has had its day. RIP.
77. WING CHUN (1994)
MARCH 2020. The Secret Screening’s second feminist film in a row, but martial arts-style this time. Michelle Yeoh runs a tofu shop and also happens to be a master of face-kicking, aerial somersaulting and fighting twenty-seven guys at once with only the non-lethal broad side of a sword. She handily protects her village from bandits. Her only weakness: Donnie Yen, her childhood sweetheart who’s now back in her life, but doesn’t recognize her. If the breathless, witty fight choreography (by legend Yuen Woo-ping) somehow didn’t win you over, maybe the breezy humor did. It’s a real charmer. This one leaves you feeling good.
X. PANDEMIC SHUTDOWN
APRIL 2020 – AUGUST 2020. I wish that the above was a movie title instead of reality. On March 16, a mere week after Wing Chun on March 9, all Alamo Drafthouse locations shut down for six months due to the international Coronavirus mess. Meanwhile, in the Alamo Drafthouse Genre Film Weirdos Facebook group, dedicated to North Texas’s Alamo happenings, some people kept up the spirit by putting together their own online, “virtual” screenings.
78. MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (1966)
SEPTEMBER 2020. The return of The Secret Screening! Monday nights are cool again. Well, at least one of them is each month. For this social-distanced and masked comeback show, we got this piece of weirdo movie comfort food. Some people say that the best way to watch Manos is via the famous Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, but this night I learned that no, the best way to see it is on the big screen where its dusty, otherworldly vibes can fill up a dark auditorium and a crowd can react to its vast madness. A few notes: This was the 4K digital restoration, rather than a film print. Cool with me. Whatever works. (We got some outrageous 35mm trailers–for Brain of Blood and Amuck!–before the show for our analog appetites.) Also, this was the first Secret Screening to get TWO shows in one night. One show at the usual 7:00 PM and then another in another room at 7:40 PM for those who maybe couldn’t get into the first show due to the new reduced capacity rules.
79. THEWORLD’S END (2013)
OCTOBER 2020. The end of the Secret Screening? I decided to write a long article about this one.
X. MICROWAVE MASSACRE (1983)
MAY 2021. Okay, fuck all of that shit that I said last October. The Secret Screening will come back this fall when the local Alamo Drafthouse locations reopen again. I can already feel my blood pressure improving from this good news. Before that though came this unofficial Secret Screening on an overcast spring night. It came about when one of the members of the Facebook group, Jeff Frazier, had an idea to rent out a venue and do a DIY Secret Screening. People loved it and James Wallace got involved. Next thing you know, about 80-100 of us are at the great Texas Theatre (properly social distanced in their large auditorium) watching this classic low-budget cannibal comedy. Once the room warmed to its oddball sense of humor, everything was peanut butter and jelly. A fun night.
80. THE AGFA HORROR TRAILER SHOW (2020)
OCTOBER 2021. I keep hearing that movie theaters are dying in these pandemic times, but the nearly sold out return of the Secret Screening (the first one in a year) at the recently reopened Richardson Alamo told a different story. People missed this show and I got the sense that the room wanted a rollercoaster ride to kick things off again–and this bonkers trailer collection worked for me. The amazing trailers of exploitation movies past don’t get nearly enough love. In a way, they’re artifacts every bit as valuable as the features that they promote because they’re pure specimens of a bygone time’s sense of showmanship. Trailers for films such as The Corpse Grinders and Splatter University work hard to sell them as the most bizarre and offensive things ever filmed. Old trailers often make a brazen promise that when you go see, say, The Massage Parlor Murders, you won’t be quite the same person when you walk out. You’ll be a little crazier, maybe even go completely insane depending on your strength of character. They build red hot anticipation. This whole 90-odd minute program is nothing but that sensation again and again at a breakneck pace (with some vintage theater concession ads thrown in for good measure). The only dull trailers we saw all night were the ones that preceded the show that advertised upcoming 2021 releases such as the new Ghostbusters. Why did the rock-’em, sock-’em style of 1960s-80s genre trailers die out? Why did it become unfashionable to sell movies as the most mind-blowing experience of your life? Who asked for THAT?