Trash Cinema at the Texas Theatre

         Tuesday Night Trash is a laidback, film-geek venue, exclusively at the Texas Theatre in Dallas. The super-cool, tongue-and-cheek screenings puts the Midnight Movies back in the circuit. Sometimes, the theatre managers get lucky enough to snag a 16mm or 35mm print, but often, it’s a DVD projection. It really doesn’t matter. Catching these retro-schlock films on the big screen is a great pleasure.

            My first experience at Tuesday Night Trash was a screening of The Naked Kiss (1964). Personally, I wouldn’t lowball Samuel Fuller’s masterpiece as “trash,” but it’s definitely out-of-the-norm. After that first presentation, I was hooked. There are so many underbelly cult films I haven’t experienced, and the Texas Theatre has certainly enlightened my repertoire.

            Tuesday Night Trash generally consists of a hip, geek crowd, and some of the films are total cheese-cinema, but you know what, sometimes, you’ll find a diamond in the rough. The venue is about going out with your friends, laugh at the campy atrocities, and find a permanent social outing for Tuesday night.

            This week the Texas Theatre presented a 80s horror-bomb, The Basement (1989), which was a lost Super 8 film that finally got the chance to be somewhat re-mastered. The film is a horror-anthology; a zero-budget rip-off of George A. Romero’s Creepshow (1982). Four characters venture inside the basement of an abandoned house, and are encountered by a grim-reaper-like monster, who tells them about these horrific acts they’ll commit in the future. The four stories in The Basement are obviously influenced by famous indie-horror filmmakers of the 70s and 80s, which include George A. Romero (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead)  Lucio Fulci (Zombie, The Beyond), and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2).

           The majority of the Super 8 exposure is extremely dark; I felt as though I had to constantly scan from screen-left to screen-right to comprehend any of the action. In addition, the actors look like they belong in an 80’s porno, and the dubbing was so bad it’s almost funny. The director of The Basement pulls an Ed-Wood (the notorious, cross-dressing, sci-fi director of the 50s)—he uses found-footage of an erupting volcano to represent Hell on Earth.

            The point of these kinds of campy, backyard films isn’t to point-out the faults of the story, continuity, and lighting. I try to see how a filmmaker makes something out of nothing. For instance, I try to figure out what kinds of props, locations, and effects the filmmakers had at their disposal. In the case of The Basement, I presumed that they shot in a friend’s backyard for the pool-monster sequence, found locations where they didn’t have to get a permit, and got lucky enough to work with an inventive and humorous special make-up effects artist. Perhaps these inferences aren’t entirely accurate, but at least you can see what I gain from indulging in schlock-horror films from the 80s. Rounding out my point, these guys picked-up a Super 8 camera and said, “Let’s make a movie!” What did you do today?