Django Nudo and the Smut Peddler are thrilled with the reception to the Mike Vraney Memorial Month, with a wealth of new films from Lisa Petrucci - the first Theme Month when we did TWO films each day - and an influx of new members. (There will be more news from Something Weird Video soon.) 'Roughies' such as "Unholy Matrimony" (1966) were definitely a favourite of Mike's.
We discuss why we don't have any 'subscribers', but only MEMBERS, how we do the Jewish Mother guilt trip to get them to stay and why Cultpix is amazing value at $4.92 if you sign up for a whole year, while some people pay $6.66 to just watch one film.
The theme week is the Scopitone, an amazing machine, described as "If a Wurlitzer Jukebox and an old tube television had a love child, it would look like the Scopitone," by Between the Liner Notes (BTLN). It was the tall and grown up version of the jukebox, placed in cocktail bars, where people were prepared to pay a quarter to see a precursor to the music video. The $3,500 machine ($26,000 in today's money) was expensive, but often paid for itself in as little as three months. There was mobster, Kennery and Debie Reynolds connections, all of which we discuss. If you want to dig deeper, look out for Stevenson’s essay, “The Jukebox that Ate the Cocktail Lounge”, in his book "Land of a Thousand Balconies: Discoveries and Confessions of a B-Movie Archaeologist", and while we are on the subject of Jack...
Cultpix is having a bunch of IRL events in the next month, including:
Scandinavian Sin at the Offscreen Film Festival at Cinema Nova 7th March in Brussels, with Jack Stevenson and Christina Lindberg;
Nordic Horror Fest at Husets Biograf in Copenhagen, 17th February;
We will be at the Berlin Film Festival, so drop us a line if you want to meet up and have a beer.
February's theme is Filthy 50th, in which we celebrate the adult films that were released in 1974, right in the middle of the so-called "golden age of American pornography" or 'porno chic'. We kick off with a porn film by Roberta Findlay called "Angel on Fire" (1974), aka "Angel 9", called "The first erotically explicit film ever made by a woman". At least 20 of the films are new to Cultpix.
Also in February, we will have a take-down of Ingmar Bergman (with his black sheep daughter Anna Bergman), some cool and culty films from the Estonian Film Institute (Nazis!! In a lunatic asylum!) and a Spotlight on Echelon Studios.
We finish with the intro music to "Libahunt / Werewolf" (1968) from Estonia, directed by Leida Laius. "Tiina, the daughter of a woman burned as a witch, grows up on a farm with the orphan girl Mari and Margus, the son of the Tammaru family. Margus loves the hotblooded, energetic Tiina, but his parents want him to marry Mari. Mari thinks Tiina has bewitched Margus, and spreads a rumor that her stepsister is a werewolf."