The Hell with The Cube

Thursday night saw the arrival of a new entry in our happy family of monthly events, ‘The Hell with Hollywood’, showcasing the trashiest, most tasteless movies around for the black-clad masses. Tonight’s theme appeared to be ‘Nuns ‘n’ shit’, so we kicked off with Visions of Ecstasy, which I think was directed by our host, Nigel the Big Friendly Satanist, or ‘The BFS’, as I shall now call him. In my head, at least. The movie was… well, it had lesbian nuns, a third nun shagging Jesus on the cross, and, as Tom Morgan pointed out, ‘nice lighting’. It is, apparently, the only film still banned in the UK on the grounds of blasphemy. So there you go, that’s the joy of a membership cinema.
During the break, a short interview with Guillermo Del Toro, director of Hellboy etc., was shown – to be honest he was largely talking about mexican horror directors, so it all went a little over my head. Seemed like a nice fella, though.
Once the band of goths, satanists, trash-lovers and my friend Adrian had re-convened, we enjoyed ‘Alucarda’, a batty Mexican horror flick, which rode along on a wave of kitschy fun for just over an hour, with plenty of needless nudity, proto-S&M costumes and hilarious dialogue. Then just as it might have started to wear thin, it actually became a rather slick bit of religious horror, complete with holy water, nuns bursting into flames, and a giant Jesus-on-the-cross on fire in a Fellini-esque chapel set-up.
Even more exciting, we were watching what I later learned was a unique cut of the movie. It seems Nigel was offered the ‘uncut’ version of the film, and took it only to find that he was given the film with the cut scenes seperate! Nigel, being the clever Satanist that he is, cut the thing back together on his computer, bunging in the new scenes as he saw fit, and a fine job he did.
All in all a very successful night with a healthy (though largely very pale) crowd, who will hopefully be back with friends next month for ‘For Your Height Only’ – a James Bond-esque romp where the lead player’s three feet tall. How can you resist?
After the show, Sarah and I argued about favourite cartoon characters, I was asked to play a rendition of a Jandek song using only an office chair, and Tom struggled with some exciting bar-till mathematics.
So endeth my first blog- look forward to many more. Hopefully I’ll soon get the hang of pictures and links and all that malarkey.
Next week I start projectionist training – usefulness will soon follow! Hurrah!

Peace out, mofos,

Liam