Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Dedicated to Charles “Tex” Watson, this movie proves that if you thought John Waters was a fluke after Pink Flamingos — not that he hadn’t been already making movies for years — he would return with a movie perhaps even more vicious, strange, upsetting to some and hilarious to others.

Dawn Davenport (Divine) flips out on Christmas when she doesn’t get the cha-cha heels she’s been hinted at for months. She meets a man named Earl (also Divine), who drags her to the city dump and quickly fertilizes her egg on a garbage strewn mattress. She gives birth to Taffy (Mink Stole), a daughter she never wanted, one she often beats into oblivion when she isn’t working as an exotic dancer or committing crimes with her friends Concetta (Cookie Mueller) and Chicklette (Susan Welch).

At the Lipstick Beauty Salon, Dawn meets and marries Gater Nelson (Michael Potter). His Aunt Ida (Edith Massey) wants him to be gay and is upset that he’s now married to Dawn. Meanwhile, the salon’s owners, Donald (David Lochary) and Donna Dasher (Mary Vivian Pearce) have convinced her to become their artistic experiment. Crime and beauty are the same, they say, so they get her to not only keep being a criminal, but to take photos of her crimes.

Dawn and Gater break up, enraging Ida, who throws acid in Dawn’s face. The Dashers convince her to not get surgery and instead to inject makeup like heroin. They also kidnap Ida and place her in a big bird cage, allowing Dawn to chop off her hand. Meanwhile, her daughter tracks down her real father and ends up killing him, causing her to convert to being a Hare Krishna, which enrages Dawn so much that she strangles her just before going on stage to jump on a trampoline and fire a gun into the audience. That’s really Divine jumping like that, which found her training at the YMCA to get it perfect.

All the fame has gone to her head and the rich Dashers quickly sell her out. She’s electrocuted, but not before giving this speech: “I’d like to thank all the wonderful people that made this great moment in my life come true. Ha ha ha ha ha! My daughter Taffy, who died in order to further my career. My friends Chicklette and Concetta, who should be here with me today. All the fans who died so fashionably and gallantly at my nightclub act. And especially all those wonderful people who were kind enough to read about me in the newspapers and watch me on the television news shows. Without all of you, my career could never have gotten this far. It was you that I burn for, and it is you that I will die for. Please remember, I love every fucking one of you.”

This pales in comparison to my favorite speech in the movie, as Dawn screams on stage ” You’re looking at crime personified and don’t you forget it! I framed Leslie Bacon! I called the heroin hot line on Abby Hoffman! I bought the gun that Bremmer used to shoot Wallace! I had an affair with Juan Corona! I blew Richard Speck! And I’m so fuckin’ beautiful I can’t stand it myself!”

Originally called Rotten Mind, Rotten Face, this got its name from when Waters and Stole visited Mueller in the hospital. Asking what was wrong — she had pelvic inflammatory disease — she answered, “Just a little female trouble, hon.”

Red Reed said, “Where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn’t there a law or something?”

Always and forever, fuck Rex Reed. That line ended up on the poster and the DVD box.

Directed by Bette Gordon and written by Kathy Acker, Variety is the story of Christine (Sandy McLeod), a woman in the city looking for work and ending up in the ticket booth of the Variety, a job that her boyfriend Mark (Will Patton) hates. None of the men that she encounters turn her on, even though a co-worker named Jose (Luis Guzmán) tries. Then she meets Louie (Richard M. Davidson), an older wealthy man who takes her to a baseball game before disappearing. She becomes obsessed with him and her sexuality is awakened by this man and a series of prank phone calls (Spalding Gray is the voice).

According to Downtown Express, “The film is a sort of Who’s Who of downtown street cred: music by John Lurie, cinematography by frequent Jarmusch collaborator Tom de Cillo, script by former sex worker and Pushcart Prize-winning feminist novelist Kathy Acker, and roles played by Spalding Gray, Luis Guzmán, Mark Boone Junior and photographer Nan Goldin, who also took production stills.” Despite that, the theater isn’t really in Times Square. It’s the Variety Photoplays, which was located on Third Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets in the East Village, the same theater as Taxi Driver where Jodie Foster jumps into the cab to escape her pimp.

As a feminist filmmaker, Gordon got criticism and praise for making a film about pornography. Yet I loved Christine’s character, someone fascinated and also upset by the sex that she spends so much of her time around, but it’s not real sex, it’s created for the male gaze. However, it inspires her, even as she reads her sexually frank writing to a boyfriend who doesn’t seem to care, is surrounded by men who just see her as the law of the invisible sex object and the strange man who keeps ghosting her. This movie has stuck with me since I watched it and I wonder, did Louie come back to meet her in that alley?

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

The first movie in Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy — followed by Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi — this combines Ron Fricke’s cinematography and Philip Glass’s score to create a feeling of zen or restlessness, depending on how it is viewed. There are no words as Reggio said, “…it’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.” Instead, the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi is all we know, which means “life out of balance.”

Reggio and Fricke met when the director was working on a media campaign for the Institute for Regional Education and the American Civil Liberties Union. These ads were about how technology controls the world and invades our privacy. The TV spots were so popular people called stations to see when they would air again; it was also successful in that it got ritalin eliminated as a behavior controlling drug in New Mexico schools. Afterward, with just $40,000 left in his budget, Fricke told Reggio that they should make a film.

Shot with a mix of styles and media — 16mm, 35mm made with a 16 mm zoom lens shot on to 35 mm film with a zoom extender, time lapse photography, captured stills in New York’s Time Square with chemicals changing up the results, the New York traffic and congestion time lapse work of cinematographer Hilary Harris and even images added of the Great Gallery at Horseshoe Canyon by Francis Ford Coppola, who became a champion of the movie —  Koyaanisqatsi is about giving you an experience. The director has even said that what the movie is about is up to you. It ends with these three prophecies:

• “If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.”
• “Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.”
• “A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel, where she falls for the owner, Kichizo Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji), an affair that starts simply with non-stop sex and continues to become an obsession, as she doesn’t want to share him even with his wife. Soon, their love games include strangling one another during sex and her holding a knife to his manhood, saying that she’s going to take it with her. Well, that’s exactly what happens, as she accidentally kills him while they make love and takes his member with her, walking with it inside her before she’s arrested.

Directed and written by Nagisa Ōshima, who also made Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, this is a rare mainstream film that doesn’t shy from unsimulated sex, made in a culture that even hides the mere glance at female genitals. It was made in France, while in Japan, it was fogged and blurred so that it could appear in theaters.

Eiko Matsuda had worked in sexploitation films but was never treated as harshly by the public as she was when this film was made, finally moving to France and ending her acting career. Society remains unfair, as her male partner in the movie, Tatsuya Fuji, regained his career after two years.

This was based on a true story and Sada Abe did not fade from the world after serving five years of her six-year sentence even though she asked for the death penalty. The police record of her interrogation and confession became a best-selling book. Over the next few years, the public perception of her moved from a pervert to someone who murdered for love. She acted in a traveling show and worked in a bar in downtown Tokyo for twenty years before appearing in Teruo Ishii’s documentary History of Bizarre Crimes by Women in the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa Eras. When  Oshima tried to find her before making this movie, he learned that she was in a nunnery, yet most reports claim that she disappeared.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Partly adapted from the 1952 non-fiction book The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley, which was turned into the play The Devils by John Whiting, United Artists had already given up on this movie after seeing how controversial Ken Russell’s screenplay was. Warner Brothers then took over but its rough sexual and violent nature, not to mention how it presented religion, led to major issues. It’s since been banned in several countries and was heavily edited for release in many countries, with several places never seeing its original uncut version.

Two scenes were cut and have rarely been shown, one where nude nuns sexually use a statue of Christ while Father Mignon watches and masturbates, as well as another that showed Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) masturbating with the charred femur of Grandier (Oliver Reed) after he is set ablaze for his crimes.

As for Rusell, he said, “I was a devout Catholic and very secure in my faith. I knew I wasn’t making a pornographic film… although I am not a political creature, I always viewed The Devils as my one political film. To me, it was about brainwashing.”

Behind the very human — and at times occult and otherworldly — moments of the film, the dramatic narrative behind The Devils is Cardinal Richelieu working to influence Louis XIII and get him to stop the Protestants from rising up. However, Louis forbids Richelieufrom destroying the town of Loudun, having made a promise to its Governor to keep the town intact.

Whiole Loudun’s Governor has died, the town is now controlled by Urbain Grandier (Reed), who may be a popular man of God, but is also a man who has secretly married a woman. Meanwhile, Sister Jeanne des Anges, the deformed abbess of the local Ursuline convent who is sexually obsessed with Grandier, grows upset that the man she is in love with has not taken her.

The cardinal gets what he wants by accusing Grandier of witchcraft, bringing in Father Pierre Barre, a professional witch-hunter whose exorcisms are even more salacious than the crimes he has been sent to investigate. He unleashes a sexual firestorm amongst the nuns and a mockery of a trial that somehow finds Grandier convincing Barre that he is innocent. Yet it is too late. Despite his innocence, the town is destroyed.

How metal is this film? Ministry sampled it for their song “Golden Dawn” and other artists such as Belphegor and Skinny Puppy have also used dialogue from this movie.

Santa (Pierse Stevens) has had it, so he’s blowing off steam by telling a young boy by the name of Peter (Jude Forsey) four holiday horror stories. Perhaps, just maybe, he’s also a killer. Actually, he’s totally a killer, a former mall Santa who has had enough.

In the first, Toby and Chloe’s Christmas Nightmare,” three killers dressed as an elf, Santa and a snowman — named like a Tarantino gang with pseudonyms like Mr. Red (Tony Fadil), Mr. Green (Sonny Denham) and Mr. White (Jeff Kristian) — pull off a home invasion and murder an entire house before adopting a girl named Chloe (Eloise Henwood) and teacher her how to be a killer.

“The Ventriloquist Who Stole Christmas” has Henry (Mark Beauchamp) and his snowman dummy Mr. White getting over life’s hardships through being a serial killer, just like his father. I mean, you fail an audition, you get beat up and your wife Jade (Bibi Lucille) leaves you, you have to start murdering.

“Merry Krampus” has, you guessed it Krampus coming to Louise (Lucy Pinder) and her son Luke (Rafi Wilder) being visited by Krampus after he blames himself for her latest boyfriend leaving.

“The 12 Kills of Christmas” is about Father McShane (Jeff Kristian), who has dementia, but can barely remember all of his sins like molesting the boys in the choir. As his daughter Maria (Olivia Hespe) takes care of him, a ghost of the past makes sure that he does.

Directed and written by James Crow, this is over two hours long and has no reason to be that way. It feels like the Mr. White segment was going to be a full-length film, as it’s 50-minutes long, but it ended up being part of this. I wish that it all flowed together better, but if you’re looking for something mean spirited and cruel this holiday season, you’ll probably enjoy this and you’re not concerned with being on the nice list.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Nathan Juran came to America from Romania. His brother became quality control master Joseph M. Juran. As for Nathan, he went from art directing The Razor’s Edge to directing movies like 20 Million Miles to Earth, Jack the Giant Killer, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and this movie, which was written by Mark Hanna.

Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) has some problems. Her husband Harry (William Hudson) is sleeping with every woman in town but her. She has mental health issues that have been going on for some time. And she likes to throw drinking and driving on top of that cocktail. One night, driving drunk from an angry evening at a bar, she runs into a flying saucer whose pilot gets out and grabs her.

Somehow, she gets away and no one believes her. After all, she just got out of a mental institution and in 1958 — well, 2024 as well — no one believes women. As for her husband, he’s just with her because she’s worth $50 million and is more interested in Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers, Playboy Playmate of the Month July 1959; her centerfold was shot by Russ Meyer). Nancy begs him to search for the UFO with her and as they drive through the desert — she has agreed to be hospitalized again — they find the alien. Harry runs and Nancy wakes up irradiated in her pool house.

Honey convinces Harry to shoot up his wife and kill her off. He walks into her room and only finds a giant hand as his wife starts to grow in size and anger. Dr. Isaac Cushing (Roy Gordon) and Dr. Heinrich Von Loeb (Otto Waldis) try to keep her sedated and the butler (Ken Terrell) finds the UFO, which is being powered by Nancy’s diamond necklace, which has the largest diamond in the world on it. Yes, the richest woman in the world who has the largest piece of jewelry is trapped in a loveless desert marriage that is fought out in dive bars.

Nancy heads back to the bar and tears the roof off, killing Honey before grabbing her husband. As she walks through bullets, one lawman fires at the power lines and kills her, but at least her husband dies too.

They almost made a sequel to this and Dimension Pictures was going to have Paul Morrissey remake it, then Jim Wynorski said he would with Sybil Danning. Christopher Guest then remade it with Daryl Hannah as an HBO movie. Now, Tim Burton and Gillian Flynn have said that they are making a new one, so we’ll see.

Roger Corman designed the poster for this movie. Nothing in the art happens in the movie, but who cares? It’s the most perfect idea of what we want to see.