On January 16, 1926, the brand-new Shea's theater opened to great fanfare with a screening of "The King on Main Street." The baroque-decorated movie theater, seating 4,000 and incorporating imported Czech crystal chandeliers, was erected at a cost of $3 million [approximately $30 million today].

Five months later, the German silent film 'Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens [a Symphony of Horror]' made its American debut. Nosferatu paved new ground, being one of the first German Expressionist films and the first [albeit unauthorized] screen adaptation of Dracula. It's still pretty fucking creepy.

On Tue 30 Oct at 7:30p, Shea's will once again screen Nosferatu, with a musical accompaniment by the Devil Music Ensemble [admission $15.50]. I am going and so should you. That goes double for the non-(e:peeps) who read this, and triple for the Buffalo n00bz who have never been to Shea's.



Let me know who's in [non-peeps can email me], I'll run down to the box office & pick up tix.

- Z

Last night I thought- why don't we go rent a movie? And while we're at it, why don't we visit the new Mondo? Now I'd never been to Mondo before, so I was totally unprepared for the weirdness they call their New Release rack. I idly picked one up and turned it over, and from across the store the clerk goes 'You have to rent that one. It's totally insane.' And I'm like, ok. I mean, he's the boss, right?

So we get home, mix up some drinks, and pop the movie into the computer. The movie, by the way, is called 'Dünyayı kurtaran adam (The Man Who Saves the World),' otherwise known as 'Turkish Star Wars.'

OK- you know how sometimes you see a student film, or something on public access, or like, 'Evil Dead,' and the movie is so bad that it wraps around to being good again? This movie was like that, only it kept going until it was bad again, and then it kept going until it wrapped around to good again. It's not really a remake of Star Wars like I thought it was going to be - but they did lift all kinds of visual effects and that freaky bar scene. The first like fifteen minutes of the movie was some dude talking about nuclear war while two Turkish space cowboys blew stuff up with badly-transferred Star Wars scenes playing behind them in their tie fighters or something. The Death Star is a shell that earthlings built around earth to protect them from the Wizard. The two dudes crash and it's like Planet of the Apes, only with evil skeletons and mummies and bears and robots. There's also this blond babe who can't speak until they find the golden brain. It fucked my shit up.

Murat: Begin your famous whistle which no women can resist.
Ali: [whistles]
Murat: You whistled wrong.
Ali: Why?
Murat: Skeletons came instead of women.

Eventually we learned that you can defeat the Wizard with your brain, or a spiky golden sword, or the Koran. Maybe you need all of them, but we didn't find out because the DVD froze just as he was melting the sword into a pair of gloves.

(e:dragonlady7) says it's like they saw Star Wars without subtitles and remade it. I think it's like the cinematic equivalent of a dance remix of Star Wars, Planet of the Apes, and Flash Gordon. Either way- if 'Dünyayı kurtaran adam' is representative of a Westernized Middle Eastern culture [and I pray to any gods that will listen that it isn't] we have no hope of ever understanding anything that happens there. Mondo also has Turkish Star Trek, Turkish E.T., and Turkish Wizard of Oz.

- Z