Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you Sex, Drugs and Di$ney - Educational Shorts from the Magic Kingdom . While obviously more well known for their animated features, Di$ney (as Walt Di$ney Educational Media) has been making educational primers since the 1940s with audacious subject matter like menstruation, venereal diseases, child-molestation, drug abuse and more. This program features high/lowlights of Di$ney's educational side with shocking shorts, some animated, some live-action and all Di$ney. Always the trailblazers, the dreamily animated The Story of Menstruation (1945) is… Read more
Oddball Films is excited to premiere Mall Madness, a feature-length video mash-up of over 100 movie mall scenes. Just when you thought you wouldn't have to see the inside of a mall for months, Company Incorporated brings you an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride full of sex, romance, escalators, shoot-outs, car chases, killer robots, zombies, explosions and (of course) shopping all set in a celluloid mall! Featuring an All-Star cast, including 4 different Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Nicolas Cages, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lopez, 2 Lindsay Lohans, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Jackie Chan, Hulk Hogan,… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson...About Drinking - An Intoxicating Shockucation, the tenth in a series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic shockucational films and TV specials of the collection. This month we're tackling alcohol with drunk dogs, drunk moms, drunk husbands and more! The kids at Jackson Junior High are already experts on alcohol, but can they cure the St. Bernard Patches from his hangover? Find out in the utterly ridiculous Route One (1976). Tony's another junior high student and already a raging alchoholic in the… Read more
Oddball Films is excited to invite you to the World's smallest cinema: I Vitelloni: Cinema Piccolo. Visiting Dutch cinephile Maarten van der Weijden has shipped over his car-sized microcinema and will be sharing it with Oddball audiences before and after the show on Friday night. This little mobile vehicle has been transformed into a small private cinema for one or two persons to screen short films for film and music festivals and cultural events in the Netherlands. The cinema is currently on its pint-sized West Coast tour, on its way to Hollywood. Don't miss the chance to sit in your own… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present A Salute to Cute: When Bunnies Go Wild! a precious night of vintage 16mm films featuring the cutest of the cute. From live-action bunnies to stop-motion mice, we are breaking open the vault on adorable to celebrate all things cute and fuzzy. A burrowing critter reaches for the sky in the shimmering The Mole and the Green Star (1970) from beloved Czech animator Zdenek Miler. Adventures of Bunny Rabbit (1974) is a live-action orgy of twitching noses. Tiny puppet ants warn of the dangers of Poison in the Home (1970s). Courtly singing mice make… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema, a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from Oddball Films’ collection of over 50,000 film prints. This installment of Strange Sinema 71: (Mostly) Strange Silents is a mesmerizing mélange of silent cinema strangeness featuring the earliest stag film ever made On the Beach aka Getting His Goat (1923); Polish director Ladislas Starévich’s Revenge of the Cameraman (1912), a brilliant stop motion animated film with a cast of insects; Laurel and Hardy’s side-splitting Big Business (1929) featuring the twosome traveling door to door… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes filmmaker Kerry Laitala for An Elemental Evening of Psycho-Geography. Animator, photographer, moving image artist and teacher Kerry Laitala has been a local San Francisco filmmaker for 19 years, but her roots are in New England. She recently spent a summer revisiting the region, especially investigating the Franconia Notch area of New Hampshire, where tourists once flocked to view a naturally-occurring stone formation known as the Old Man Of The Mountain, until it toppled ten years ago. Ms. Laitala is now in the process of making an artwork inspired by the "Old Man" and… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Product Pandering - The Wild World of Vintage Promotional Films with the most jaw-dropping, visionary and camptastic promotional films of the archive. From clothes to cars, technology to tunes, these stunning time capsules of antique innovations will make you marvel, laugh and covet the beautiful goods of yesteryear. Rolex brings us a dazzling Technicolor chronology of man's progress to tell time, using stunning microphotography and stop-motion animation in The Story of Time (1951). Turn your kitchen into a swingin' go-go party with Westinghouse'… Read more
Oddball Films presents The Ecstasy of Art, a visually striking and tantalizing program of vintage 16mm films that display the exquisite ability of film to capture and immortalize not only artwork, but the conception, creation and even reception of it as well. Yves Klein utilizes the nude bodies of women as his Human Paintbrushes in this provocative excerpt from Mondo Cane (1962). Delve into the world of multi-media master Robert Rauschenberg in the fascinating portrait USA Artists: Robert Rauschenberg (1966). Ken Rudolph takes us through the history of Art in 8 pulsing minutes in Gallery (… Read more
In the ongoing and infinite search for higher consciousness, Oddball Films and guest curator Scotty Slade invite you to the Bay Area Premiere of: You Are a Rainbow: The Quest for Consciousness . Completed in 1980, this nearly lost in the aether documentary examines the “schools” and individuals involved in and related to the Human Potential Movement . Within this film, we are exposed to a seismic unearthing of behind the scenes footage of healing workshops - the young and loving embracing in cosmic dances at the renown Esalen Institute in Big Sur, at SF Playground where everyone gets to be a… Read more
Oddball Films presents an evening of retro robots and futuristic freaks in Strange Sinema 70: Incredibly Strange Robots . Strange Sinema is Oddball Films' monthly screening of oddities, recent discoveries and unusual rarities culled from their 50,000 16mm film archives. This eye-popping program of futuristic delights premiered to a packed house at the 3rd Annual Robot Film Festival in July at the Bot and Dolly Studios in San Francisco. Incredibly Strange Robots is both a tribute to robots, robotics and mechanized machines and features eclectic and oddball shorts, excerpts from feature docs,… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present You Don’t Know Jack! Kennedy Film Rarities. On the 50th Anniversary of his assassination, now is a time when the world remembers the man, the myth and the mystery of John F. Kennedy. Oddball offers up a vintage retrospective of film rarities from the campaign trail, to memorial tributes. Campaign along with the whole Kennedy clan in The New Frontier (1960) , the precursor to those self-produced candidate bio pics that get cranked out every four years. The familiar images of Dallas are rearranged to searing effect in Bruce Conner’s avant-… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson...About Your Body- Sex, Hygiene and Shockucation, the ninth in a series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic shockucational films and TV specials of the collection. This month, we are taking on the growing body, with a healthy dose of puberty, hygiene and sex education. Lather up with the exceedingly creepy Soapy the Germ Fighter (1951) as he teaches you to wash your hair every two weeks and keep germs out of your body. Learn all you need to know about growing up and your health triangle in the… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present The Reel Housewives of Yesteryear, a program of rare vintage 16mm cartoons, commercials, soundies, promotional films, silent slapstick and other cinematic oddities about the old social mores of a woman's place within the family and society. Generally made by men and often misogynistic and downright offensive, these cinematic slices of life remind us just how far the modern woman has come. One housewife can't contain herself once she discovers RIT fabric dye in the swingin' Color for Joy (1962). In Merrie Melodies - Wild Wife (1954), the legendary… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes New York filmmaker Mark Street and Uzi Sabah for a unique, multi-sensory program of recontextualizing the moving image, including a performance of (Re) Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 (x3). This live performance involves the side by side projection of three narrative films of the same title (made in 1974, 1998 and 2009). During the show, the sound will be mixed from each of the three films so that details are brought to the fore from each of the narratives along with improvisation from Live Musicians. At times the three films converse in a purely visual way: subway shots mirror… Read more
Oddball Films presents Creepy Cartoons - The Dark Side of Animation, a program of strange, dark, and unsettling animation from around the world. Cartoons are generally thought of as light entertainment for children, but the medium allows the viewer to explore dark and surreal worlds and subject matter at a two-dimensional distance. The devilish delights of this program include a pencil-drawn version of a 19th century British folk song Widdecombe Fair (1948) about an ill-fated trip to the fair on an old grey mare for Tom Pierce and a dozen of his closest friends. Comic strip Krazy Kat comes… Read more
Oddball Films presents Vintage Halloween Hullabaloo, a program of vintage 16mm films to get us in the mood for All Hallows Eve with cartoons, ridiculous educational films and made-for-tv terrors. Di$ney teaches us the history, mystery and danger of this ghoulish night with the narrator from the Haunted Mansion and his classic cartoon pals in Di$ney's Haunted Halloween (1984). Trick or Treat (1969) tells the story of four boys and a ‘trick’ on Halloween that leads to serious damage and injury. Halloween Safety (1985) gives us valuable lessons about awesome robot costumes, horrible face makeup… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes filmmaker Selina Lewis Davidson for a screening of the remarkable documentary Hell House (2002). Hell House documents a high-tech fire-and-brimstone sermon that a Dallas Pentecostal church puts on every Halloween to scare kids into coming to services. Trinity Assembly of God church invented Hell Houses in 1990 and every Halloween since, they've pulled out truckloads of lights, enlisted hundreds of actors and built an enormous haunted compound from scratch. Trinity's Hell House looks to be just a souped-up haunted house until one enters. Inside, a tour guide dressed as a… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you Satanic Sinema: The Devil Gets His Due, a program of vintage 16mm netherworld delights with saucy cartoons, lost TV episodes, experimental marvels, satanic smut and more! Kenneth Anger teams up with Anton LeVay for the psychedelic satanic symphony Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969) with music by Mick Jagger. Betty Boop faces off against the horned one in Hell, and brings down the temperature with her icy stare and her seductive dance in the Fleischer Brothers' Red Hot Mamma (1934). Sid Caesar stars as the lord of the underworld trying to… Read more
