VIVA LA MUERTE
Dir. Fernando Arrabal
Tunisia, 1972
35mm 90min.
French with English subtitles
CineMuerte is proud to present a new 35mm print of Panic Theatre alumnus Fernando Arrabal's infamous staple of political surrealism. "When General Millan Astray, founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, returned to Spain at the start of the Civil War, he had only one arm, one leg, assorted fingers and a brain that recognized the enemy. "Down with intelligence !" he cried in a famous confrontation with the philosopher Unamuno, at the University of Salamanca, " Long Live Death !" 'Viva la Muerte' became the battle cry of the Franco forces. A terrible chorus in the ears of children who saw their land and families ripped apart. The film, almost as bloody and revolting as war and betrayal, is the testament of one of those children. In a bleak land inured to poverty and despair, Fando encounters cruelty everywhere. The schoolboys cut up insects, the bigger boys beat him for being the son of a Red, his sexually attractive Aunt Klara begs him to flagellate her, his grand-mother taunts him for his fear of the dark...The squeamish walked out when it was shown at the film festival in 1971. But for those of us who have never directly felt the brutality of war, the obscenity of Arrabal's images was a revelation of nightmares we have been spared." (Judy Stone, SF Chronicle)

"Viva la Muerte is a paroxysm of anguish, a scream for liberty and probably one of the most ferocious, violent films ever made. Reminiscent of Bunuel and Kozinsky, it mingles, in hallucinatory images, the realities and nightmares or a 12 year-old boy growing into manhood at the moment of Franco's victory. Every few minutes it veers from uncertain realism into the boy's imagination, beset by monstrous tortures, violence, death, and a primitive sadism that engulfs the spectator precisely because it does not impose upon, but merely activates his own atavistic, subconscious fears and desires." (Amos Vogel)
"The enemy in Viva la Muerte seems not so much the Fascist state or its police, as the women who fear it and collaborate with it: the mother, an aunt, a grandmother, all in black, like ministers of death, and yet in mourning for the suffering caused by their own ministry. The mourning is genuine, as is the cruelty, and it is Arrabal's great distinction not to undercut the one by the other, but rather to hold each in balance so that no contradictory impulse is lost
on us." (Roger Greenspun)

ALIVE
Dir. Ryuhei Kitamura
Japan, 2002
35mm 119 min.
Japanese with English subtitles
Ryuhei Kitamura's atmospheric follow-up to the award-winning Versus is a powerhouse fantasy film driven by existential angst. With an industrial oppressiveness that recalls Terry Gilliam's darker moments or the dystopian interior landscapes of Dark City or City of Lost Children (with a touch of Tarkovsky's Solaris), Tenshu Yashiro (Hideo Sakaki of Versus) is the stoic protagonist typical of Japanese genre films, condemned to die for avenging the rape of his girlfriend Misako. Haunted by guilt over her subsequent suicide, Tenshu has little to live for, and accepts his fate with quiet resignation. But when the execution fails, he is offered a choice between life with an uncertain future or death. Somewhat instinctively, he chooses life. Locked in a large sealed room with another inmate, Tenshu soon realizes that the two execution-survivors are part of a sinister behavioral experiment that crosses over into the supernatural. What follows is a hallucinatory battle of wills through which Tenshu is forced to face his own propensity for violence, and the special effects and fight choreography soon take on the surreal manga quality that betrays the film's textual source. Based on the manga by Tsutomu Takahashi (who also created the popular Jirashin), Alive is a visual tour-de-force not subject to the budgetary limitations of Kitamura's previous films.
--Kier-La Janisse

Preced by THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN (10 min. 35mm), Ulo Pikkov's surreal animated ode to alienation and the violence of the wild west.

TATTOO
Dir. Robert Schwendtke
Germany, 2001
35mm 108 min.
German with English subtitles
"Robert Schwendtke's suspenseful murder mystery slithers from the trendy German rave scene into decidedly more ominous territory. Tattoo combines mesmerising and unflinching imagery with all-too-human characters to tell the gripping story of Marc, who graduates from the police academy hoping to secure a cushy desk job. Instead, he is forced to join the homicide squad where his new partner uses him as a passport into the underground youth culture in order to stalk a serial killer." (SF's Berlin and Beyond Film Festival)
With saturated colors and a gritty urban landscape, Schwendtke's film stylistically recalls David Fincher's Se7en, but the comparison ends there. The German techno scene operates only as an entry point to a distinctly perverse culture that traps its participants in an inescapable mess of death and suicide. Unlike many serial killer films, Tattoo's denoument is entirely believable, and Schwentdke's means of getting there is equally clever and brutal.
-- Kier-La Janisse

KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS
Dir. Bud Cardos USA, 1977 35mm 97 min.
Al Adamson alumnus Bud Cardos directs this balls-out spider-invasion pic that thrills, chills and creeps up your seat! Starring William Shatner, Woody Strode and five thousand live tarantulas, Cardos' film shows what happens when pesticides destroy the spider smorgasbord and they're forced to see human flesh as viable grub. Suave ladies' man William Shatner lands in Verde, Arizona, only to discover that the town is being hastily overrun with angry arachnids. In between trysts with various country chicks, Shat finds himself elected official tarantula-torcher, but all the tricks that worked on the Romulans seem rather ineffectual here and the spiders pour in like an unstoppable army. They're under the bed, in the cupboards, coming out of the drainpipes, they're EVERYWHERE! This movie is so scary, you may faint (ask Kelly, the guy handing out the ballots at the door). -- Kier-La Janisse Preceded by The NY Filmwurld's SPIDER DOO-DOO (6 min. mixed media), an aural/visual sampling circa 1987 that comments on the B-horror film's relationship between highbrow and lowbrow art.

CASTLE OF PURITY
Dir. Arturo Ripstein
Mexico, 1972
35mm 110 min.
Spanish with English subtitles
Sid and Nancy director Alex Cox once said that if any director could rightly make a claim to Bunuel's throne it would be Arturo Ripstein. Bunuel himself was originally slated to direct Castle of Purity, which turned out to be Ripstein's breakthrough film on the international circuit. Based on the true story of a man who kept his family locked up in their Mexico City home for 18 years to protect them from the corruption of the outside world, Ripstein's film is a frightening addition to the cinematic canon that includes Kurosawa's I Live in Fear, Paulus Manker's The Moor's Head and Doug Buck's Home.

Gabriel (Claudio Brook) lives in an old house where he produces a rat poison with the help of his wife Beatriz and his three children, Utopía, Porvenir and Voluntad. While imposing strict discipline on the family, which includes not allowing them to leave the house or to eat meat, Gabriel comes and goes freely, eating what he pleases, hiring prostitutes and making sexual advances on unsuspecting women. His children try in vain to bring attention to their predicament, dropping a letter into the street where it is rained on and trampled upon. But when Gabriel is reported for producing rat poison without a license, it could mean either their freedom or their eternal imprisonment. Ripstein is one of Mexico's most celebrated directors (perhaps best known here for Deep Crimson, his remake of Leonard Kastle's Honeymoon Killers) and in his hands "the tabloid story provides a microcosm of Mexican society whose isolation and insularity seem almost normal."
--Kier-La Janisse

SOFT FOR DIGGING
Dir. J.T. Petty USA, 2002 16mm
74 min.
J.T. Petty's debut feature is a restrained and superbly constructed minimalist horror film that manages to hold audiences rapt with attention despite its almost total lack of dialogue. A reclusive old man who lives in the woods wakes up one morning and goes about his daily routine -- a trip to the outhouse, a cup of tea, the fetching of the paper -- but when his cat unexpectedly darts off into the woods, the man's familiar milieu suddenly takes on a dark new significance as he witnesses the murder of a small child only minutes from his home. Haunted by images of the child, of the murder, and of her murderer -- and by the suspicion that the murderer has seen him -- the old man is determined to find her killer, although though the police seem certain that a murder has not even occurred. One might notice that American horror of late seems to be exorcising a previous repression concerning child abuse and murder, which may be coming from an influx of foreign genre pictures -- Imanol Uribe's Plenilunio and Jaume Balaguero's The Nameless for example -- that don't shy away from such sensitive subject matter. Soft for Digging utilizes this trend to create a truly horrific and genuinely scary film about one man's disillusionment when a lifetime of experience and notions of a universal morality have failed to prepare him for the utmost in inhumanity. Like Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven, Soft for Digging signifies a quiet revolution; it doesn't rely on flashy editing, saturated cinematography or conventional emotional cues to elicit a response; instead it almost recalls silent films and Victorian epic novels with its use of expository intertitles to distinguish chapters in the narrative ("Chapter One: In which we are introduced to Virgil Manoven; his very bad cat runs off."). With its economic and concise packaging of information, and consequent legion of possible readings, Soft for Digging is truly an inspiring example of independent cinema. --Kier-La Janisse

Preceded by ERDU (6 min, DV). Jennifer Wechsler mixes grainy B&W cinematography with plasticine puppety to show a young girl's confrontation with the dark promise of the forest.