Oddball Films Media
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Oct 2, 2013
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Date: Thursday, October 3rd, 2013 at 8:00PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or programming@oddballfilm.com
Featuring:
Manson Trailer (Color, 1973)
This long form film trailer docu-drama terrifies us with actual footage of mass murderer Charles Manson and his girl gang. Meant for rubbernecking exploitation fans and disguised as an "insight"!
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"Penitentes" were a secretive cult of Catholic religious zealots in New Mexico. During their ceremonies, they whip and lash themselves bloody until they fall into unconsciousness. In the early 1930s, documentary filmmaker Roland C. Price managed to secretly film some of their ceremonies before he was discovered and almost killed; during his escape he was shot several times and lost a finger. Several years afterward, exploitation specialist Harry J. Revier shot some new, and fictional, footage about a filmmaker trying to photograph a Penitente ceremony who gets involved in a love triangle and murder. The new footage included shocking (for the time) scenes of naked women being whipped. He combined this footage with Price's and passed the whole thing off as a documentary.
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Examines the reasons why young people are attracted to religious cults such as Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Includes interviews with a UC Berkeley professor, Dr. Margaret Singer, explaining cults’ recruitment techniques, one teenager who devoted two years to the Moonies, his parents, and the former Moonie who deprogramed him, in order to provide insight into the appeal of, techniques employed by, and psychological and emotional effects on cults. Near end, montage of Moonies protesting outside United States Capitol Building, fact- finding panel by Senator Robert Dole who speaks on religion. - WorldCat
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"I've been here for a week and I never knew you guys were Moonies"
A rare made-for-TV special. A reenactment of real life deprogrammers and ex-Moonies re-create the story of young man's journey through the Unification Church. Chris Carlson stars as himself to reveal how he unexpectedly got sucked into a cult, and it all started in San Francisco! Youth recruiting tactics and high pressure indoctrination are exposed. This film attempts to show how the effects of cult brainwashing can be reversed by simulating the painstaking process of deprogramming. Get a taste for it now with this opening clip...
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Felix the Cat gets into the mind-control racket! He gets duped by a hypnotist, but snags the man's "How to be a Hypnotist" book and declares "Hooray! I have the world in my power!" When he sees a sign for a reward for a lost hippo, he tries to put his mind-control powers to work in order to cash in.
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Documentary about a gathering of the International Unification Church, orchestrated by Sun Myung Moon in New York. With highly rhetorical narration on Sun Myung Moon’s role of leading America back to her true identity, to God and footage of Moon preaching to his faithful while gesticulating and jumping up and down maniacally as he talks, you can witness the thousands of people blisfully under his spell.
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An outrageous excerpt from the first Mondo Cane film that became a cult sensation, documenting strange rituals around the world. The most (in)famous sequence- Cargo Cults- primitive tribes that worshipped airplanes as gods.
Dan Akroyd stars as the blustery preacher of the church of Jack Lord (from Hawaii 5-O) at the "Mainland Temple of the Perfect Wave" in a bit from this underground classic. Conceived by SNL writer Michael O'Donohue as a spoof on 1960's shock documentaries and intended to air on television, it was deemed too over-the-top and offensive by network executives. Eventually released as a short feature film where it became a midnight-movie staple, the origin of this print is a mystery and contains slugs for commercials. Could this be the original program intended for late night TV in 1979?
People's Temple San Francisco Footage (B+W, 1960s)
See ultra-rare news footage of San Francisco-era Jim Jones and the People's Temple shortly after their church had been set fire to. They protest with signs and Jim asserts that they are being persecuted for their fervent beliefs.
A rare piece of San Francisco's historical dark-side! Original news footage of the local capture of Patty Hearst and the surviving members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a group of radical militants that kidnapped the young heiress. Hearst was subjected to mind-control tactics like locking her in a closet for nearly 2 months until she began to side with her captors, even falling in love with one of them. Patty and the SLA robbed a San Francisco bank at gunpoint, and she was later apprehended and convicted (though later presidentially pardoned).
Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric ephemera hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and The Cinefamily and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009.
About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.