The Last Horror Film
It may be the Academy Awards in Hollywood next Sunday, but here down in the >From Below Microcinema on Thursday it’s the Anti-Oscars. We’ll be screening the cult classic The Last Horror Film (1982) on Thursday, February 27, at 7 pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
The Last Horror Film is a grimy, sleazy slasher with a lot of heart, shot at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival without permits, guerrilla-style, amidst all the pomp and glamor of the award ceremony. It was released decades ago only ever in a partial form, and it wasn’t until a previously lost reel of the full cut of the film was unearthed in a French film archive in 2023 that it was restored to its proper state.
World-class character actor Joe Spinell is given room to run rampant through a hall of mirrors, and boy does he shine. He stars as Vinny, a concerningly damp taxi cab driver with potent mommy issues who fantasizes grandly of becoming a renowned film director. His obsession with scream queen Jana Bates (Caroline Munro) leads him to the Cannes film fest in France where he hopes to complete his magnum opus horror film starring the object of his fascination. Upon his arrival, the bodies of actors and film execs at the festival pile up in gory spectacle.
The Last Horror Film is a metatextual critique of the film industry, a copy of a copy, images of images cut-and-glued together out of snippets from other films, trailers, billboards, and magazine advertisements. Synthesizers and radio reports of the Reagan and Pope John Paul II assassination attempts overlay the misty, neon, decadence of the Cannes crowds at night, asking us to lightly ponder over the blood and nudity questions about the eroticized consumption of violence in film and journalism in a growing, all-consuming multimedia landscape. The film’s long leering sequences looking through the murderer’s Super 8 camera folds into itself the position of the killer, director, and audience members into one crowded, complicated site worthy of Diego Velasquez’s brush.
Through its heavy-breather camerawork, and bonkers fantasy sequences staging Vinny’s delusional battles with the over-idealized version of his director self, The Last Horror Film gives us a stylishly frenetic good time beyond a simple genre entry: an investigation into the Gaze, masculinity, and the humiliating agonies that come with trying to lead a creative life. And, in a final deeply endearing note, Joe Spinell’s tiny actual mom, Filomena Spagnuolo, plays his mother on screen.
First five through the door on Thursday will receive printed PDFs of Laura Mulvey’s classic 1975 essay of Lacanian feminist film criticism, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The next five will receive an assortment of critical responses to her work, and the final five will simply be subjected to the gaze of the others.
Live from the first annual Anti-Oscars,
Stefan, Charlie, and Stark