Black Lodge set to host Cinematic Panic film fest
Bizarre. Strange. Peculiar. Eccentric. Abnormal. Disturbing. Unsavory. Deranged.
“Hey,” responds a certain type of person, “you had me at bizarre.”
Alongside such warnings as “upsetting,” “unusual” and “uncategorizable,” the above adjectives can be found on the Facebook page promoting Cinematic Panic, a five-day film-and-more festival hosted by the reconstituted Black Lodge Video, now rebranded as simply Black Lodge, to emphasize its transformation from Midtown video rental business to Crosstown Concourse arts partner.
Devoted to “the dangerous, the demented and the damaging in film,” the “Panic” is set to begin Wednesday night and end Sunday at the new Black Lodge space at 405 N. Cleveland.
“Space” is an accurate term. Currently, the 8,000-square-foot storefront is essentially and almost literally a shell of its future self: a large empty room (plus working bathrooms) that by early 2019 is scheduled to have been transformed into the new, multi-room Black Lodge, complete with a “main hall” screening venue, a cafe, a library of thousands of DVDs, Blu-rays and videocassettes, and more. (In some ways, it will be the “grindhouse” sidekick to The Doll House, the more lavish “arthouse” theater just north of Black Lodge in Crosstown Concourse proper.)
For the Cinematic Panic event, the space will be operated as a “pop-up cinema,” according to Black Lodge partner Danny Grubbs, who said the official Black Lodge “grand opening” likely will occur around New Year’s Day — more than four years after the Lodge (named for an extradimensional location in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”) left its original location at 831 S. Cooper.
Hosted by local production companies Piano Man Pictures, Best Revenge Films and Pickle TV, in coordination with Black Lodge, the festival also is a competition, with new shorts and features from the Mid-South and around the world vying for prize money that will come from the admission proceeds. (Among the new features: the punningly titled robbers-vs.-ghost story “Polterheist.”)
These competition films will be complemented by multiple examples of “classic” oddball cinema, including some of the 1970s hellfire-and-brimstone religious scare movies produced by Ron Ormond.
In addition, each day will showcase one or two “main features,” each of which Black Lodge founder Matt Martin characterizes as a “landmark” of cinema distress and dysfunction. These include David Cronenberg’s 1983 “Videodrome” (8 p.m. Wednesday); Todd Solondz’s 1998 “Happiness” (9:30 p.m. Thursday); Brian Yuzna’s 1989 “Society” (1:30 a.m. Saturday); Stuart Gordon’s 1985 “From Beyond” (5 p.m. Saturday); Sam Raimi’s 1981 “The Evil Dead” (7:30 p.m. Saturday); and Wes Craven’s “The Last House on the Left” (7:30 p.m. Sunday).
The highlight of the “main features,” however, may be the rarely seen “Meet the Feebles” (9:30 p.m. Friday), a scabrous and scatological 1989 Muppet-esque fantasy from future “Lord of the Rings” Oscar-winner Peter Jackson that makes the recent “Happytime Murders” with Melissa McCarthy look like “Kukla, Fran and Ollie.”
Also, live music will be performed throughout the festival, most notably starting at 9 p.m. Saturday, when the fest becomes a Halloween ball featuring such bands as Shamefinger and Negro Terror.
Admission is $20 for the festival, or $10 per day.