Shay Wescott wants to clear something up: You don’t have to be a weirdo to get down with Friday Night Weird. The co-founder and programmer behind the longrunning weekly underground cinema series at the Dairy Arts Center says even the most high-falutin culturistas among us will find something to love during this offbeat showcase of all things strange.
After all, hasn’t film always been about shocking the system?
“From some of the earliest examples, cinema has always been a violent and provocative medium,” she says. “I just recently had the privilege of watching The Great Train Robbery at the Denver Silent Film Festival, famously ending with a gun pointing directly in the audience’s face.”
Even if you’re not a B-movie obsessive or horror aficionado, Wescott hopes cinephiles of all stripes will push themselves out of their comfort zone for this month’s offbeat offerings. From a biopic about surrealist painter Salvador Dalí to a creature comedy about pint-sized party goblins, here’s all the weirdness coming to the Boedecker Theater in November.
Peeping Tom
Friday, Nov. 1
Michael Powell, 1960, UK, 1:41, NR
When Boulder Weekly film critic Michael J. Casey wrote about Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom earlier this year, he said of the English director’s controversial 1960 masterpiece: “It cost him a lot, but it gave us so much.”
What it cost was his reputation, as the critical response to the disturbing proto-slasher flick slammed the brakes on the filmmaker’s sterling career. The celebrated auteur’s hard left turn into voyeurism and violence repulsed the press and the public, leaving him an industry pariah despite an undisputed legacy of excellence. But nearly 65 years later, Peeping Tom stands as a heralded hallmark of cinema.
“It is an intoxicating, lush, highly influential masterpiece of film,” Wescott says. “More cinematically and thematically sophisticated than Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, released the same year.
“There is nothing I can say about this film that has not already been said by the likes of Martin Scorsese or the infamous theorist Laura Mulvey, who coined the term ‘the male gaze,’” she continues. “I highly suggest checking out some of those commentaries before or after the film.”
The Paragon
Friday, Nov. 8
Michael Duignan, 2023, New Zealand, 1:25, NR
A hit-and-run victim seeks revenge with the help of a psychic in this multiverse fantasy-comedy from Kiwi director Michael Duignan. Made with a measly $15,000 budget — for comparison, Wescott points to the eye-popping $350 million price tag of Disney/Marvel’s Dr. Strange — this campy and psychedelic romp does a lot with a little.
“It’s Flash Gordon meets The Princess Bride through the distinctly earnest comedy of New Zealand,” she says. “The Paragon’s stylism is mainly an exercise in pastiche, but what’s refreshing is the sincerity of its truly independent, scrappy filmmaking.”
Frankie Freako
Friday, Nov. 15
Steven Kostanski, 2024, Canada, 1:25, NR
Who doesn’t love a good creature feature? From Gremlins to Ghoulies, little freaks and goblins raising hell in the buttoned-up world of the normies is a proud tradition that found its purest form in the low-brow cinema of the 1980s.
Canadian filmmaker Steven Kostanski takes a page from this well-worn playbook in Frankie Freako, an off-the-wall throwback comedy following the tribulations of a straightlaced yuppie (Conor Sweeney) whose call to a late-night hotline unleashes a pint-sized party monster and his legion of impish goons.
“Jim Henson’s character in Saturday Night has a great line about there being a place for ‘high-stakes puppetry’ — just remove the stakes, and you have Frankie Freako,” Wescott says. “If I were to try to intellectualize a film like this, I could say it takes postmodern metatextuality to new heights. But all I really mean is that this is a movie unabashedly in love with ’80s trash cinema.”
Daaaaaalí!
Friday, Nov. 22
Quentin Dupieux, 2023, France, 1:17, NR
When the pandemic reared its ugly head in the spring of 2020, Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin was the first FNW screening to get the ax. Nearly half a decade later, Wescott says the “bonkers” work of the “French filmmaker and madman” holds a special place in the hearts of the film geeks behind the weekly underground cinema showcase.
Now the prolific director returns with an unorthodox homage to surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. Telling the story of an unrealized documentary project about its iconoclastic namesake, Daaaaaali! is a fittingly absurd portrait of the Spanish artist that turns biography on its head to dazzling effect.
“With The Dairy’s award-winning visual arts galleries, artist biopics are a pretty straightforward way to celebrate our building’s multi-disciplinary nature,” Wescott says. “So something like Daaaaaalí! doesn’t immediately ring weird, until you learn that there are actually six different actors playing Dalí (one for each ‘A’ in the title) completely non sequentially, sometimes changing mid scene, with plenty of additionally confounding, non linear storytelling devices thrown in for good measure.
“This is an iconoclastic biopic for audiences who hate biopics — and I think Dalí would have loved it.”
Heavy Trip + Heavier Trip (Double Feature)
Friday, Nov. 29 | Saturday, Nov. 30
Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren, 2018 / 2024, Finland, 1:32 / 1:36, NR
Turo lives a quiet life in his small Finnish village, but the volume cranks up when he steps behind the mic as the lead singer of garage metal band Impaled Rektum. First-time directors Jukka Vidgren and Juuso Laatio tell the story of the extreme outfit’s unlikely odyssey to a dream gig in Norway with 2018’s Heavy Trip and the fallout from their bloody misadventures in this year’s sequel Heavier Trip.
Recalling the fun and ferocity of heavy-metal satires like Metalocalypse and This Is Spinal Tap, this high-octane film pairing turns it up to 11 — described by Wescott as “loveable buddy comedies with a slightly more macabre sense of humor and lots of bodily fluids.”
That may be familiar terrain for the weekly weird showcase, but the one-two punch of this double feature is something new.
“Somehow, amid the franchise driven landscape of genre cinema, FNW remains mercifully sequel free. I briefly considered trying to capitalize on Terrifier 3 — but without 1 and 2, it feels kind of hollow,” she says. “However, the ethos for all of our programming is community driven, so who am I to deny the genuinely kindhearted Nordic death-metal community their sequel?”
Frankie Freako screens Nov. 15 as part of the Dairy Arts Center’s Friday Night Weird showcase. Courtesy: Raven Banner Entertainment