Événement

The Phantom Creeps! With Bela Lugosi and His Giant Robot, on Real 16mm Film!!

Date: Saturday, October 8th
Time: 7pm
Admission: $8
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn NY

The movie serial of olden days was a weekly attraction with the harrowing cliffhanger as its raison d'être. Hanging from cliffs, jumping from airplanes careening towards the earth, jumping out of cars driving madly off cliffs, struggling to free oneself while tied to the log inching toward the buzzsaw, water rising in the hidden cavern, the killer robot grabbing onto its intended victim, the futuristic death ray pistol firing off a bolt of X-ray energy, the cable fraying and snapping and the elevator to the undersea lair plunging downward, the spies foolheartedly deciding to open the box of deadly radium. . . but to find out how our hero escapes from the fiery death pit of doom youd have to lay out another ten-cents (no small investment) for next weeks Saturday matinee.

As the movie serial began to wane, these strips of celluloid suspense were repurposed by assembling condensed features from the weekly chapters, the serial's former arc of tension and release now replaced by a frenetic cliffhanger pileup more reminiscent of driving along a washboard road. At one moment we're in a car chase, at another moment the spies have trapped their foe, and in yet another, the pilot swoons and the airplane nosedives towards the ground, each caper seeming to exist as a disconnected moment in a plot that follows neither rhyme nor reason in its shambling movement from thrill to thrill. The jarring leaps of discontinuity give the serial feature cut an editorial reasoning that follows an otherworldly dream-logic, the realm of the dream in which one scenario is abruptly replaced with another, the characters and locations melt away and others take their place through the stagecraft of the subconscious. In this respect the condensed featured bears unintentional resemblance to Joseph Cornell's sublime avant-garde assemblage film cut together from a Hollywood B-movie, Rose Hobart.

Such is the madcap pleasure of the feature cut of the movie serial, as we may experience with The Phantom Creeps featuring Bela Lugosi as the diabolical mad scientist Dr Zorka, his treacherous henchman Monk, and one of the true marvels of silver screen automatons: the menacing, scowling, giant bulbous-headed and nameless killer robot!!