Oddball Films presents Learn your Lesson on the School Bus: An Accidental Shockucation, the 31st in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational scare films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month, in honor of Halloween, we're bringing you the gruesome, horrifying and deadly history of the school bus safety film with everything from hand puppets, felt punching bags with faces, ghost romances and little goody-goodies to round out the utter carnage! From Gene Starbecker - the "father of the school bus safety film" - come two of the bloodiest scare films of all time: And Then It Happened (1972) and Death Zones (1975). These over-the-top nightmares feature the rowdiest kids you've ever seen - wielding knives, smoking, popping pills - the most patient of bus drivers and bodies galore! Busses end up in lakes and upside-down, they run over countless children, and leave a body count higher than most horror films! On the lighter side of bus safety, audience favorite Bobbie the plucky Bus Nut (1980) is back spreading her good bus vibes in her favorite yellow "bus nut" T-shirt! Watch out for the schmoadles, punching bag shaped blobs that terrorize the bus driver with their terrible hallucinatory behavior in School Bus Safety: A Schmoadle Nightmare (1975). Get ghostly with bus safety when a new boy befriends a girl on the bus only to realize his new crush is a Ghost Rider (1982). With bonus bus safety cartoons, hand puppets and more surprises in store, it's a great night to buckle up and learn your lesson!
Date: Friday, October 16th, 2015 at 8:00pm
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com
And Then It Happened (Color, 1972)
Produced and directed by Gene Starbecker, the “father of the school bus safety film” this classic cult film features lots of noisy, wisecracking kids and a catastrophe that has permanently scarred (!) anyone who has seen it in school over 30 years ago. Starbecker produced over 970 documentaries and 300 television programs (including the gritty Broderick Crawford cop show “Highway Patrol”). The story concerns two horrific bus accidents and the rowdy behavior of the kids aboard that led to the deadly outcomes. There are knife-fights and dogs, smoking, pill-popping and even mice on the loose! The bus drivers are played by veteran actors Josh Mostel (son of Zero Mostel) and Peggy Pope (9 to 5), still early in their careers.
Death Zones (Color, 1975)
School Bus Safety: A Schmoadle Nightmare (Color, 1975)
Reason number 27 not to take acid when you drive a school bus: you’ll be beset by huge, inflated, paramecium-shaped truants who want to make your life a living hell! See a school bus driver fend off a gaggle of Schmoadles, badly behaved little bastards who don’t know how sit still and can’t ride a bus without getting the cops involved. No one else can see them, but the bus driver knows they’re still there… Another bonkers production from Crocus Films and Art Pierson!
Curator’s Biography
About Oddball Films
Oddball films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our screenings 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.