SUNDAY, OCT. 20
The Tacoma Cult Movie Club has been raging on for several years at the Acme Grub Cage. It's a home for misfit lovers of films, good and bad alike. Rev. Colin organizes the event, and it brings around curious drunkards to take in cinematic question marks. These are films that range in genre from b-movie prison erotica to stop-motion creature features to apocalyptic excursions into the mouths of madness.
Of course, the quality of films is bound to vary, but the binding element is always this sense of wild-eyed enthusiasm of "Fuck, let's go make a movie!" Whether or not these movies end up being what they were intended is just lost in the addled wonder of creating.
It's October, so there can be no avoiding the necessity to take in some shitty horror movies. Tacoma Cult Movie Club is naturally the first place to turn when it comes to plumbing the extraordinary depths of forgotten horror relics. This Sunday, the theme of the evening will be "vampires." It doesn't really need to be reiterated how much the culture has devalued vampires as a terrifying commodity. They're a trope that's been reduced to abs with teeth, with a good deal of moping mixed in between.
Rev. Colin will not deliver the shabby vampires of new. Although he can't reveal what films will be screened, he did have a statement to make: "As if Sunday nights don't suck enough, the Tacoma Cult Movie Club will be showing vampire films Sunday night. There are so many good-bad options that I am still figuring out the best route to achieve total viewing euphoria for those who love movies that suck."
On a personal note, please do yourself a favor for Halloween and watch either the simultaneously hilarious and moving Nosferatu meta-biopic Shadow of the Vampire or Werner Herzog's gorgeous Nosferatu the Vampyre.
TACOMA CULT MOVIE CLUB, 7 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 20, Acme Grub Cage, 1310 Tacoma Ave S., Tacoma, no cover, 253.272.1892]
IN THE NOT-TOO-DISTANT-FUTURE
Speaking of Halloween, TheWrap.com reports that of a reunion between Step Brothers duo John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell in a movie called Devil's Night, the release date of which is still uncertain. Naturally, the film is said to take place on Oct. 30, the titular "Devil's Night," where all true mayhem and absurdity run amok before the amateurs come out on the 31st.
Anyone who saw Step Brothers can attest that Reilly and Ferrell have a certain obnoxious chemistry together - Reilly, finally pushing to the fore that hint of comedy that always lurked underneath his performances in movies like Boogie Nights, and Ferrell, persisting in being the goddamn oaf that refuses to do another movie like the great Stranger Than Fiction.
Early descriptions of the plot describe Devil's Night as a movie about two childhood friends who grow apart and then, 15 years later, "put their differences aside and reunite to save their neighborhood from utter destruction," which sounds uncomfortably similar to the recent Edgar Wright joint, The World's End.
Needless to say, there's likely to be a whole lot more improvisational grab-assing between Reilly and Ferrell than there was with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. I'll leave that to you whether that's a plus or a minus.
LINK: Past Nerd Alert columns