In celebration of local filmmaker Peter Flynn’s new documentary “Film Is Dead. Long Live Film!” (see Day critic Tom Meek’s excellent profile for more information), The Brattle Theatre has prepared a weeklong series called “Long Live Film! The Art of Collecting” celebrating the weird and wonderful world of film collectors: maverick cinephiles who dive into warehouses, estate sales and other dark corners to preserve the bits and bobs of film history the establishment might overlook.
The series is bookended by Quentin Tarantino’s modern American masterpiece “Pulp Fiction,” which screens Thursday and again Tuesday. Tarantino is, of course, one of the most famous film collectors in the world, a bona fide movie obsessive whose own theater, Los Angeles’ New Beverly, exclusively screens 35 mm prints. But “Pulp Fiction” also serves as a sort of mission statement for the series in itself. Tarantino is a well-known cultural magpie, and his 1994 opus is practically grafted together from bits and pieces of the movies he loves: ’60s French New Wave, the gutter-budget film noir of Sam Fuller and Allen Baron, John Woo’s Hong Kong gangster films of the ’80s, and on and on. One can imagine an alternate timeline in which Tarantino fully committed to a career in film preservation – and it likely would have been enough to cement his place in film history – but instead he synthesized his collection into something new and wonderful, and American cinema is better for it.
The series continues with some of the fruits of film collectors’ labor. On Saturday, in honor of the late Mike Vraney, whose legendary mail order VHS imprint Something Weird Video still offers thousands of psychotronic obscurities via DVD, Blu-ray and digital download, The Brattle will screen a brand-new digital restoration of Doris Wishman’s sexploitation epic “Bad Girls Go to Hell.” There’s also a deliciously crunchy private-collection print of Lucio Fulci’s ooey-gooey 1979 classic “Zombie” (original tagline: “We Are Going to Eat You!”) on Friday, and a 3D digital restoration of Phil Tucker’s truly indescribable 1953 “Robot Monster” on Sunday. If you’ve ever wanted to see a film in which the earth is menaced by an evil alien wearing a gorilla suit and a diving helmet, run, do not walk, to this movie.
Some of the most enticing titles of the series, however, are a handful of bespoke programs curated lovingly from private collections, and while details are by necessity being kept under wraps, what we do know is more than tantalizing. Saturday, naturally, kicks off with “Saturday Morning Cartoons,” an assortment of vintage TV episodes, commercials and other kiddie ephemera. Following that is “Rock ’n’ Roll Rarities,” a sort of visual DJ set from a local Boston collector packed with well-known bands from the ’60s onward. Sunday night sees a 35 mm print of a surprise Hong Kong action film – you won’t know the title until it runs through the projector, but if you know anything about the genre you know you’re in for a ride.
Perhaps most rarely, Sunday will also see a program of rarities featuring the legendary master of horror Boris Karloff. Karloff, of course, is best known for playing Frankenstein’s Monster and The Mummy in a number of Universal horror pictures in the 1930s, but his career spanned well into the ’60s, when he found a new home on television; by this time, his presence was as comforting as it was chilling, a sort of spooky uncle to a generation of monster kids. This era of Karloff’s career will likely be the focus of the evening, with preservationist Eric “Dr. Film” Grayson unspooling a number of rare TV appearances on 16 mm. Karloff’s granddaughter, Sara, will be on hand and undoubtedly share some stories about her legendary grandfather.
This will not be her only appearance in the area this weekend; she holds something of a residency at the Somerville Theatre for a miniseries titled “Weekend at Boris’.” On Friday and Saturday, the younger Karloff will introduce a double feature of her grandfather’s lesser-screened films: 1939’s “Son of Frankenstein,” which features his final appearance as the monster (as well as a scene-stealing turn by Bela Lugosi as Ygor), and 1945’s “The Body Snatcher,” with Karloff and Lugosi as a pair of sinister grave robbers. The centerpiece of the series, however, is a brand-new restoration of the 10-part 1929 serial “King of the Kongo,” which features one of Karloff’s first screen appearances. “Kongo” is an artifact of the very earliest days of sound cinema, its soundtrack recorded on a series of 16-inch discs. This short-lived format had disappeared almost entirely by the early 1930s in favor of sound-on-film, which left “Kongo” nearly impossible to screen for nearly 100 years. Since 2019, Grayson has been toiling to restore the serial to a screen-ready state, surely one of the most herculean tasks ever attempted by an independent collector. Thankfully, his efforts have not been in vain, as all 10 episodes will screen in their restored glory on Saturday. Film history may be in danger of vanishing into the streaming-era ether, but as long as Grayson, Flynn and their like persevere, even the most forgotten scraps of film will be remembered and cherished.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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