Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present The Kiss of Death - A Menage a Murder, a program of 16mm films about the dark side of love and the romantic side of death in honor of Friday the 13th. It's a chilling and thrilling night of obsession, infidelity, and homicide all lovingly culled from the archive and starring Alfred Hitchcock, Dean Stockwell, Orson Welles, Peter Cushing and Susannah York with adaptations of works by Patricia Highsmith, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe and Honore de Balzac. Dean Stockwell stars in an epically creepy episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour - Annabel (… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you Stop-Motion Explosion!, a program of mind-blowing stop-motion animation from the 1930s to the 1980’s. In a world saturated with CGI, Oddball Films opens the vaults to celebrate when historical, fantastical and anthropomorphic creatures were hand-sculpted and manipulated into “life.” This program features stop-motion heavy-hitters Ray Harryhausen, George Pal, Art Clokey, Norman McLaren, Ivo Caprino and Will Vinton with new finds and a few all-time favorites. Everybody's favorite green clay-boy gets into trouble while baking in In the Dough (1957… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson... 2 Year Anniversary: Shockucation's Greatest Hits, the 25th in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. After 24 months of digging out the best and worst the archive has to offer, we are celebrating our 2 Year Anniversary with a sampler of all our favorite lessons thus far including sex, drugs, and the creepiest of creepy puppets. Get rappin' about fast food and vegetables in the gut-busting craptacular Fast… Read more
Oddball Films presents Fantasmes Français with an almost entirely newly-unearthed slate of marvelous and award-winning French shorts from the likes of Pierre Etaix, Claude Berri, Jean Mitry, Robert Enrico, and Jean L'Hôte. This multi-genred program features everything from farce to experimental to animation with chilling, heart-warming, hilarious and animated shorts dug out of our 40,000 16mm film archive. The hilarious Pierre Etaix wrote, directed and stars in the delightful vampire tale Insomnie (1963). Robert Enrico's Chickamauga (1962) is a brilliant, dark and surreal retelling of Ambrose… Read more
Oddball Film s presents Strange Sinema 85 , a once monthly evening of newly discovered and avant-garde rarities from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints , Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 85th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 85: Dada and Post-Modern Surrealism (The Land of the Melting Watches) features an eye-popping exploration of Dada and Surrealism including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s stunning Anemic Cinema (1926), a visual cacophony of hypnotic puns; L’Etoile des… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes veteran filmmaker and visionary musician David Michalak and his sound score based experimental music group Reel Change to our Cinema Soiree, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights and films. During this program, Sonic Cinema, David will be discussing, composing, collaborating and creating soundscores for his films, showing film clips, and offering unique technical and creative insights into the process. He will also curate a collection of his original films including Life is a Serious Business,… Read more
Oddball Films presents Amour Macabre, a night of murderous romantic melodramas as Friday the 13th and Valentines Eve coincide with two all-star powerhouse episodes of 60s mystery TV as well as ill-fated ephemeral films. Ida Lupino directs a witchy episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller - La Strega (1962), starring a then-unknown Ursula Andress who must shake her witchy past to fall in love with a handsome stranger. This tragic romance features palpable chemistry between Andress and Alejandro Rey, Jeanette Nolan's scene-stealing performance as one of the most authentically creepy witches ever… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Christina Yglesias present Yesterday's Tomorrow: A Night of Past Futures . The program features an eclectic mix of future prediction films brought to you from the 20th century. There will be humans living on other planets, environmental destruction, the predecessor to OkCupid, personal computers that kill, automatic kitchens, cyborgs, time travel, and more! Whether laughable or eerily spot-on, these future visions will have you thinking about the past, the present, the future, and everything in between. First up, IT beat cops investigate of string of personal… Read more
Oddball Films presents Dangerous Dames and Brutal Beauties, a 16mm program of witches, temptresses, murderesses, vampires, brawling convicts, derby dolls and more fearsome femmes. Ida Lupino directs a witchy episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller - La Strega (1962), starring a then-unknown Ursula Andress who must shake her witchy past to fall in love with a handsome stranger. This tragic romance features palpable chemistry between Andress and Alejandro Rey, Jeanette Nolan's scene-stealing performance as one of the most authentically creepy witches ever with her coven of interpretive dancing… Read more
Oddball Films presents Oddball's Vintage Valentine - Love, Sex and VD, a night of 16mm mental hygiene shorts, VD scare films and sensuous ephemera to get your Valentines weekend off to a strange and sexy start. Dating Do's and Don'ts (1949) will teach you how to pick the right girl for your teen carnival and how to have the squeaky-clean time of your teenaged life. And girls can learn how not to be sluts, but still treat a boy to a real nice time in Are You Popular? (1947). One soldier is all ready for his furlough, until he meets the wrong dame and ends up with the clap in the newly… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Masters of Animation - Tex Avery , a celebration of one of the funniest, most irreverent animators of the 20th century; the man who created such iconic cartoons characters as Bugs Bunny (and coined " What's Up Doc?"), Daffy Duck, Droopy and many more. Fred "Tex" Avery's iconoclastic style transformed the adorable and fuzzy characters of Di$ney studios into comedians, half-wits and lunatics; often breaking the fourth-wall and confronting the audience with the artifice of the cartoon they are watching. This program features all your favorite… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn your Lesson... about the Atomic Bomb - A Radioactive Shockucation, the 24th in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month, we're heading back to the Cold War and the preparedness films made by The Department of Civil Defense through fear of nuclear annihilation. Watch out for that giant skull over San Francisco in the bombastic foreboding animated warning One World or None (1946). A mad scientist wants to take… Read more
Oddball Films presents Optical Delusions, a night of mind-bending optical experimentation featuring the photographic tricks of Weegee, psychedelic science shorts, Op-Art and the viscerally kaleidoscopic imagery of Donald Fox, Peter Foldes and Pat O'Neill. Legendary photographer Weegee teaches you how to manipulate images with a camera to create three-legged women and two-headed poodles in Camera Magic (1955). Donald Fox's optically printed Omega (1970) foretells the end of the world through a series of stunning images dissolving into ethereally apocalyptic visions. Discover the eye-popping… Read more
Oddball Films present What the F(ilm)?! 10: The Cine-insanity is Back... with a Vengeance! , an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive 16mm collection. This time around, we've got lady wrestlers, superhero dating services, Brando spoofs, sneaky squeaky squirrels, forest orchestras and much much more! Zip along with Captain Mom (1972) as he woos the domineering super-heroine of his dreams in a wacky short from pixilation duo Len Janson and Chuck Menville. Take a crazy trip to SF's own Chinatown in the local Coppola spoof, Porklips Now (1980). Fall in… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator John Schmidt present Relics and Remnants: The Cinema of What’s Left, an evening exploration of ruin, decay, and loss. The program begins with Bay Area filmmaker and journalist Jon Else’s You Don’t Die Here (1972), an impressionistic documentary portrait of a small, eccentric community eking out an existence in the unforgiving light of California’s Death Valley. Across the world, Eugene Boyko records a real-life Wages of Fear in his 1968 short Juggernaut (1969), which follows a group of engineers as they attempt to transport a 70-ton nuclear reactor core across… Read more
Oddball Film s presents Strange Sinema 84 , a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints , Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 84th (and 7-year anniversary!) program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 84: Holographic is an anthology of carefully crafted experimental films emphasizing dimensionality, spirituality, high technology and art of the 60s. We begin with Holography: Memories in Light (1985), a fascinating look at the invention,… Read more
Bacall To Arms (Color, 1946) Directed by an un-credited Bob Clampett, this Merrie Melodies release features some great Hollywood star caricature- and a nasty final blackface gag (which hit the cutting room floor in modern times). Dough for the Do-Do (Robert Clampett, Color, 1949) D'oh! The gang remade 1938’s Porky in Wackyland, this time in full color to make those Dali references really pop! Everyone’s favorite pig travels to the “Dark Continent” to snag a rare (and nutso!) bird to claim a 4 sextillion dollar reward! Will the melty watches, 3-head Moe, Larry and Curly Monster and the other… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes Animation Historian, Author and Professor Karl Cohen for our Cinema Soiree Series , a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Forbidden Animation spans sixty years of animated works banned because of their sexual innuendo, political points-of-view and racial undertones. From pre-code cartoons and works banned by the Hays office (1934-1968) to those more contemporary works found too offensive within the industry itself; this collection, curated and presented by animation historian and the author of… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson...about your Parents: Not your Mother's Shockucation, the 23rd in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month, we're dealing with our parents; drunk parents, deaf parents, nagging parents, divorcing parents and all the special, touching, aggravating, and melodramatic moments that they instill. Rosanna Arquette stars as a teen girl ashamed of her deaf parents in the ABC Afterschool Special Mom and Dad… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter presents Broad Strokes: Pioneering Women in Animation, celebrating the legacy of some of the innovative women to bring pictures to life. This beautiful program features a variety of silhouette, stop-motion, sand, cut-out and cell-animation with work by Lotte Reiniger, Evelyn Lambart, Hermína Týrlová , Eva Szasz, Caroline Leaf, Faith Hubley, Mary Blair and more! While the animation world (and the film world in general) is overwhelmingly a man's game, these women defied the odds and brought us some of the most imaginative, lush and artistic films in… Read more
