
Looks like
hosting the RNC wasn’t such a bright idea after all. If only it had been
replaced in this dying city’s drive for recognition by something more benign
and socially positive. Like the Adult Video News awards. Or a summer encore of
the Cleveland Comic-Con, where the slave-Leia cosplayers would not have been
under such heavy fur parkas.
Or, if it could
be enticed out of Strongsville, the twice-yearly Cinema Wasteland
movie/exploitation/nostalgia convention (but good luck with that; Strongsville
is as much a part of Cinema Wasteland as Las Vegas is the AVN show).
Yes,
President-Elect Trump orders you to attend Cinema Wasteland. “It’s going to be
yuuuuuge!” he says.
In the spirit of
such movie-memorabilia and nostalgia expos as the Monster Bash in Pittsburgh
and DragonCon in Atlanta, Cinema Wasteland is a fan gathering, film marathon,
variety show and memorabilia expo at the Holiday Inn Select of Strongsville,
devoted to what founder Ken Kish describes as the drive-in B-movie golden era,
roughly from the late 1950s to the late 1980s.
Those were the
glory years of horror, fantasy, science-fiction, Roger Corman, spaghetti
westerns, martial-arts, juvenile delinquency melodramas, nudie-cuties, Filipino
actioners, Italian "giallo" thrillers, blaxploitation, rock'n'roll
and psychedelia, post-nuke car chases, summer-camp sex and slapstick,
underground comix-inspired animation and, well, whatever else artists du cinema
could make or release quick, cheap and dirty.
At Cinema Wasteland
longtime connoisseurs of such entertainment turn out to meet and greet the
stars, attend panel discussions, enjoy revivals of the old classics, and buy, sell, trade and enjoy all that's culty
and screwball in the movies. As an added subtraction, local and regional
filmmakers visit peddling their wares, TV horror hosts come from far and wide,
hosting live schtick, and Holiday Inn room parties proliferate after hours.
The central
attraction at this spring’s CW a cast/crew reunion of 1987‘s STREET TRASH, a
lurid splatter picture with a somewhat (by gutter 1980s splatter-film
standards) more imaginative premise than most: a long-hidden cache of
Prohibition-era bootleg liquor surfaces, incredibly toxic, explosive and
corrosive to human anatomy, in a dingy garbage-dump community in modern NYC. Rotgut that
literally rots one’s guts, the vile brew has a dramatic effect on the power
dynamics among skid-row homeless and bullies in the filthy block’s
micro-society. The film was particular favorite of the late, great Ed “Brother
Ed” Wille, of the local band Uncle Scratch’s Gospel Revival and co-owner of the
well-remembered B-Ware Video and Books in Lakewood.
Any truth to the
rumor that STREET TRASH is an uncredited horror remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1970
shantytown drama DODES’KA-DEN? Nobody at the RNC (soon to turn downtown
Cleveland into a sea of fire) could likely answer that question. But at Cinema
Wasteland you’ll be able to meet actual STREET TRASH participants, including
leading lady Jane Arakawa, makeup f/x artist Jennifer Aspinall, actors James
Lorinz and Tony Darrow, scriptwriter Roy Frumkes, and cast member Mike Lackey,
who has turned comic-book creator with a commemorative graphic book based on,
of course, STREET TRASH.
Additional guests
at this Spring 2016 CW include prolific B-film directors Greydon Clark and
William Grefe, actress Linda Miller (from THE GREEN SLIME and other Japanese
sci-fi flicks of the 1960s), scream queen Amy Lynn Best, actor David Naughton,
Cleveland-based rock photographer George Shuba, pro wrestler and Tor Johnson
lookalike George `The Animal’ Steele, horror hosts Janet Decay, A. Ghastlee
Ghoul and Son of Ghoul, and f/x artist Tom Sullivan with his traveling exhibit
largely devoted to his work on the original EVIL DEAD.
Plus expect vendors with plenty of weird fashion/lifestyle accessories and schlock-media souvenirs and relics on sale - books,
soundtracks, posters (vintage and modern), comics, action figures, Blu-rays
and DVDs, laserdiscs, and good old VHS.
And marathon film screenings. Projected cinema
showcased include a Saturday-morning Three Stooges and cartoon festival (MC’d
by Son of Ghoul), the famously banned-for-racism 1933 Little Rascals short KID
FROM BORNEO (probably on loan from the RNC), and the only recently appreciated
REVENGE OF DR. X (1970), alias VENUS FLY TRAP a hysterical late-career Ed Wood
script, shot in Japan, about a NASA scientist (complete with a hunchback
assistant) who, with the memorable assistance of topless girl pearl divers, GMOs a beastly humanoid carnivorous plant. Another Japanese production, the giant-monster
movie KING KONG ESCAPES, evokes giggles today for the name of its Dracula-lookalike
villain, Doctor Who (well, that must have sounded oriental at the time). The new WINNERS TAPE ALL is
a mockumentary tribute to a fictitious (of course, but there are numerous
real-life parallels) set of West Virginia brothers who gained notoriety during
the VHS camcorder era for their no-budget slasher cheapies shot on cassette.
You just can’t
get that kind of thing from Republican conventions, at least not until well
into President Trump’s second term. You know if any of the current candidates
will do a real-life HUNGER GAMES it would be Trump. Except the death matches
would be all celebrities in swimsuits and lingerie.
Cinema Wasteland
takes place at the Holiday Inn Select of Strongsville, at
15471 Royalton Road. Dealer-room hours are Friday from 5 to 10 p.m., Saturday
from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Admission at the
door is $20 on Friday, $25 on Saturday, and $15 on Sunday. or you can buy at
three-day $50 VIP pass. For more info check out the website
www.cinemawasteland.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment
We approve all legitimate comments. However, comments that include links to irrelevant commercial websites and/or websites dealing with illegal or inappropriate content will be marked as spam.
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.