Cinema Slop!

Question: what are you doing tonight? It’s Tuesday, it’s going to rain, the Twins are going to lose, there’s nothing on cable or at the theaters, and you don’t have tickets or money to go to the big shows in town, whatever they may be. Or perhaps you do. Doesn’t matter, because the best thing in the city tonight is Joel Stitzel’s Cinema Slop Extravaganza, featuring The Wicker Man. Descend dark stairs into The Dinkytowner, grab yourself a decent beer and perhaps some grub, and settle in to watch, first, one of Carl Sagan’s trippy Cosmos episodes–perhaps the best thing I’ve ever seen on the tube. In addition, there will be a screening of Cornell Wilde’s No Blade of Grass, which I’ve never seen nor heard of. However, according to David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, Wilde’s films are “childish” and “primitive”, “like watching the first films ever made”. Hmmm…

But the highlight is clearly The Wicker Man a wigged-out British flick from the early 70s, where the unfortunate inspector Edward Woodward ventures onto a weird little island to investigate a rumor that a young girl has disappeared. There, he discovers a whole island of pagan worshippers, conservative-looking Scots who screw in the open, most notably a buck-naked Britt Eklund, who does this weird fertility dance which involves gyrating and pounding on walls. The film isn’t so much sexy as it is creepy, it’s compelling and hugely entertaining. Especially with a hamburger and a beer in tow.

The shindig begins at 8:00, with Cosmos and the features start around 9 in the pm.