In honour of the Scala, we asked Jane Giles, the programmer at the Scala from 1988 – 1992, to choose a Scala inspired double bill. The one she came up with will turn your hair white. Many times over. Jane is writing a book on the Scala and counter culture for future publication.
Thundercrack!
Dir Curt McDowell/US 1975/160 mins
Marion Eaton, George Kuchar, Melinda McDowell
The most bizarre, outrageous, offensive and humerous of all the cult movies, Thundercrack is a rambling black and white ‘old dark house on the hill’ yarn that has Marion Eaton in a sick splattered wig greeting her guests, who are stranded Brad and Janet style. Truly polymorphous perverse, the film is guaranteed to bring down the house.
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Hold Me While I’m Naked
Dir George Kuchar/US 1966/17 mins
Donna Kerness, George Kuchar, Stella Kuchar
One of camp’s defining classics, underground filmmaker George Kuchar’s Hold Me While I’m Naked centres on the tribulations of an independent filmmaker, frustrated at every turn as he tries to make a film that pretends to artistic merit. Heavily indebted to Hollywood’s high priest of unrestrained Technicolor melodramas, Douglas Sirk, the saturated colours and treasure-trove of kitsch artefacts in Kuchar’s first 16mm colour production brilliantly jar with the mock-seriousness of its subject matter.
Hold Me While I’m Naked screens from a 16mm print.