Every Sunday night since March 2005, Bad Movie Night has invited patrons of The Dark Room to heckle the best in bad movies, and occasionally as the worst in good movies. (A few of the most mediocre of mediocre movies have crept in there, too.) But on Sunday, February 10, Bad Movie Night walks around to the corner to team up with Oddball Films as they present the best of the worst of the best movies of the 1980s ninja cycle: Ninja III: The Domination (1984)! It's the movie that finally answers all your questions from Enter the Ninja and Return of the Ninja, with the possible exception of “Why… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present another edition of Pop! Goes the Classroom: School Films from the Golden Age of Groovy . A wide range of 1960’s sensibilities trickled down to educational films , with wild and beautiful results. Facts and dates gave way to concepts, color and action. Narration-free documentary shorts, such as Night People’s Day (1971) provided more than just information about hidden workplaces, they gave students room to just see . Can s (1970) could have stood on its own as a craft how-to, but also salutes humble tin’s ubiquity and disposability. Wonders… Read more
Oddball Films presents Oral Exam - You Can't Handle the Tooth, a program of vintage films dedicated to those pearly whites. From silent slapstick to psychedelic instructional shorts to swingin' chimps, you never knew how funny a mouth could be! Sink your teeth into the hilarious Charlie Chaplin classic Laughing Gas (1914), when the tramp takes a stab at being a dentist. Get ready for one swingin' party with The Munchers (1973), a groovy oral hygiene rock opera featuring a mouthy bandstand of claymation teeth. Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp (1971) gets into the oral action, when he discovers a… Read more
Oddball Films presents Oddball - The Musical, an evening of our favorite musical numbers from the 1930's through the 1980's culled from our massive archive of 16mm films. With a mixture of classic Hollywood, educational primers and nostalgic camp favorites, it's a night of song and dance of epic proportions. Schoolhouse Rock brings us the much sampled favorite 3 Is The Magic Number (1973). Football Superstar and needlepoint enthusiast Rosie Grier sings " It's Alright to Cry " from the quintessential hippy-parenting guide Free To Be...You and Me (1974) Busby Berkeley choreographs a dizzying… Read more
Oddball Films presents Off the Canvas - Art in Motion, a lush evening of moving artistry. With a who's who of kinetic art as well as some beautiful pieces of the fluid process of creativity, it's a visually enticing and inspiringly creative program. Films include the mesmerizing documentary Kinetic Art in Paris (1971), a viscerally challenging, kaleidoscopic homage to light, sound and motion featuring some of the world’s foremost kinetic artists. Belgian documentarian Paul Haesaerts attains intimate access to Picasso's artistic process with the help of giant panes of glass in the eye-popping… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 60 - The 5 Year Anniversary Spectacular! for its monthly screening of offbeat films, old gems and newly discovered oddities both entertaining, experimental and eye-opening, all culled from Oddball Films 50,000 film archive. This greatest hits film fest includes The Cat Who Drank an Used Too Much (1987), an Oddball audience favorite about a beer drinking, drug addicted cat, Match Your Mood, a mind-bending advertisement for psychedelic 60's refrigerator covers, Le Monde Du Schizophrene (The World of the Schizophrenic, 1969) A super-surreal, Salvador Dali-… Read more
Oddball Films presents Carnal Cartoons, a program of sexy, sinful short animated films from the 1920's through the 1980's. Cartoons have long offered an option to create any manner of fantastical worlds and exaggerations of our own world. From the pornographic to the educational, this program offers the sometimes surreal and always imaginative animated interpretations of one of the most important aspects of life, Sex. View the original silent pornographic cartoon Buried Treasure (1928) featuring the hyperbolically endowed Eveready Harton. Tex Avery brings us a sexy adaptation of an old fairy-… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present End of the Reel: An Oddball Memoriam 2012. Each year brings a varied roster of newly gone-but-not-forgotten figures and we present a varied and freewheeling look back at a few. Chris Marker’s haunting time travel tale La Jetée (1962) has had a broad influence in many genres in the 50 years since its release and remains gripping. Maurice Sendak’s swinging kitchen metropolis, In the Night Kitchen (1975), is just familiar enough to be the stuff of dreams. Were the Monkees a fake pop band or a real TV show? Who cares? Davy Jones and gang cut up… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Landon Bates bring you Portholes to the Past, an exploration of and tribute to the ancient imagination, centered on (but not limited to) classical Greek mythology. Commencing our tour through antiquity, we’ll soar over the splendid Mayan ruins of Sentinels of Silence (1971), the award-winning documentary narrated by that deity of cinema Orson Welles. We’ll then head to Greece for Galathea: Das Lebende Marmorbild (1935), wherein the myth of Pygmalion—a sculptor who falls in love with his statue after a goddess brings it to life--is rendered through the ever-… Read more
San Francisco Premiere with the Filmmaker, Dan Kapelovitz In Person! Oddball Films welcomes filmmaker Dan Kapelovitz with the San Francisco Premiere of Triple Fisher: The Lethal Lolitas of Long Island, a scathing critique/celebration of early-’90s tabloid culture, twenty years in the making! In 1992, a suburban New York teenager named Amy Fisher captured the national media’s attention when she shot her lover’s wife in the face. This sordid tale of underage sex, aggravated assault, and Joey Buttafuoco managed to spawn not one, not two, but three separate made-for-TV movies — a television first… Read more
Oddball Films presents I Want it All! - Consumer Culture on the Skids, a program of vintage films that fall on both sides of the issue of wealth, consumption, and advertising. With long and short-form commercials, cartoons and capitalist-skewering satire, it's an evening that will make you think differently about pulling out your wallet. Pick the color of you refrigerator to Match Your Mood (1960s), or the color of your shiny new Chevy in The Rainbow is Yours (1950s). Woody Allen and Joanne Worley try to answer that burning question in a segment from the show Hot Dog-How Do They Make Dollar… Read more
Oddball Films brings you Psycho Science from the Moody Institute, a mind-boggling collection of 1950s crackpot science films brought to you by the world’s strangest bible science film producers, The Moody Institute of Science. The Moody Institute of Science, founded under the auspices of the Moody Bible Institute, an evangelical group started by Irwin Moon in San Francisco in 1938, produced a number of religious cult science films that were intended to demonstrate intelligent design through scientific experiments. These were marketed to schools and churches across the United States and their… Read more
Oddball Films brings you The Afterschool Extra Special Cut, a very special evening of the most poignant, touching and hilarious clips from more than a dozen different ABC Afterschool Specials, NBC Special Treats and CBS Schoolbreak Specials from the 1970s and early 1980s. These melodramatic programs graced the afternoon airways from the early-70s through the mid-90s and offered preteens and teens a healthy dose of social conditioning while touching on a variety of touching and hard-hitting subjects, from marijuana use to alcoholic parents, disabled siblings, illiteracy, bullying and so much… Read more
Oddball Films brings you The Hard Times Revue: Depression-Era Diversions, an evening of cartoons, musical numbers and ephemeral oddities from the 1930s. One of the darkest decades of the 20th Century, America in the 1930s faced untold hardships like the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl and cinema supplied a much-needed diversion, but could never quite shake the bleakness of the times. This program of vintage films highlights the struggle of the American people and the fantasies invented to alleviate their hardships. Betty Boop gets hooked on smack in the blackballed cartoon interpretation… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Landon Bates bring you Saul Bass and the Creative Impulse, an intimate look at the work and processes of several seminal American artists, among them Saul Bass, the Titan of Title Sequences. While not unacknowledged, one might contend that Saul Bass, a master of credits, hasn’t been duly credited himself. So, we’ll begin the evening with an unusual, vaguely educational sort of short film, Why Man Creates (1968), directed by Bass. This film, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 1969, is a manically digressive, madcap essay that… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 59: Strange Christmas. Drawing on his archive of over 50,000 16mm film prints Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has complied a program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual Christmas themed films. The program features the early Di$ney animated surrealism of Mickey Plays Santa Claus (1931), a bizarre clip from the schlockmeister of kids scare films Sid Davis's Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen(1951), Grant Munro's Toys (1966), featuring war toys coming to life before kids eyes in a Christmas window display, Big Business (1929) where Laurel and Hardy go… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present Merriment, Mayhem and Moviedom: A Jolly Filmic Folly. It's a festive grab bag of colorful ephemera, cartoons and silent slapstick with just a pinch of the season. The yule mood is more impish than elf-like in Big Business (1929), a Laurel and Hardy classic of Christmas trees and cinematic gold. The spoof is on in Renee Taylor’s borscht-belt send off to Fellini, Two (1970). Stop-motion pioneer Wladyslaw Starewicz’s charmingly buggy The Cameraman’s Revenge turned 100 this year, so it’s time you saw it! Oscar-winning Frank Film (1973) weaves… Read more
Oddball Films brings you Teen Dreams and Puberty Nightmares, a star-studded night of vintage films full of those awkward, horrible, and occasionally musical moments that afflict the youth of any era. Junior High School (1978), a hilariously awkward musicalamity featuring a 16 year-old Paula Abdul and a cast of gangly teens and preteens singing and dancing about the " Itty Bitty Titty Committee", wearing a cup in gym class and having a boy-girl party. It is one part toe-tapper, one part gut-cringer and all magic! Di$ney has the all the answers for the growing girl with the dreamily animated… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Christine Kwon present Home is Where the Heat Is: Peninsula Performances, PII, with a live score by Korean American musician Donghoon Han. Home is a polarizing topic: most of us spend our lives running away from it or trying to return to it, and our work often revolves around the preservation or destruction of what we consider home. Home is Where the Heat Is explores the centuries-old idea of nostalgia, and the longing to return to a better time in light of social, political and technological progress. Program highlights include local home movie footage of… Read more
Oddball Films presents The Best (And Worst) of the Blonde Bombshells , a program celebrating our favorite smoldering, cheeky, entertaining blondes from the Golden Age of Hollywood. With rare, bizarre and hilarious clips, excerpts, musical numbers and burlesque performances, you'll be sure to have more fun with these blondes! The Art of Film: The Love Goddesses (1965) chronicles the rise of the woman as a cinematic sex symbol with clips and commentary about our favorite blondes and some noteworthy brunettes that made the big screen sizzle. There's a double-dose of of the funny and fabulous Mae… Read more
