Another Hole in the Head Film Festival 2019 Presents a Resurrected 1980s Fright Flick and Cutting-Edge Genre Movies
By: Joseph Perry
San Francisco’s Another Hole in the Head Film Fest has some vintage and retro-feel slices of cinema on tap that should greatly whet the appetites of When It Was Cool movie buffs. The festival celebrates its 16th anniversary this year with a December 1st –15th run at the New People’s Cinema in the city’s Japantown. The festival’s website says to expect “a two week cinematic excursion into the realms of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, [culling] together a diverse collection of films of all varieties and budgetary considerations. From your buddy Keith’s skateboarding footage in an enchanted forest to Burt Reynolds in space, Another Hole in the Head provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema.”
Another Hole in the Head will screen feature films and short films from around the globe, many of which are making their world, U.S., or regional debuts. Following are five of the features that yours truly is looking forward to, with official descriptions from the festival’s website. For more information, including the festival's full schedule and ticket information, visit https://www.ahith.com/.
Housesitter… The Night They Saved Siegfried’s Brain
Filmed entirely in 1987, Housesitter…The Night They Saved Siegfried’s Brain sat unfinished for 30 years. Now, with post sound from Skywalker Sound and final picture from Paramount Pictures color department, it is at last completed.
Combining 1980’s horror and 1950’s sci-fi, it is the story of Andy, an idealist medical student with a serious Elvis obsession, and a determination to perfect his rat-to-rat brain transfer to “help mankind and change the face of modern science.” After his final experiment blows up and fails, Andy loses his chance to travel abroad and study at the prestigious Reinhardt Institute. With his future in doubt, and with no place to live, he heads to the bar feeling dejected and lost.
Little does Andy know that his beloved professor and mentor, Doc Crosby, is actually a mad scientist who has been murdering people and stealing their brains for experiments in his makeshift “black-and-white” laboratory. When Doc discovers that his own brain is so severely damaged that he will be dead in a matter of days without a successful brain transfer, he hatches a scheme to acquire the 13 human brains needed for his “brain pyramid.” Knowing that Andy is homeless and that college kids can’t resist having big parties, Doc invites Andy to housesit while he goes away on “business.”
Now Doc’s trap is set. His house will be full of healthy unsuspecting victims, he will breakout his old lab assistant, Himmel Schwartz, from the insane asylum, and then transfer into his head the brain of the brilliant scientist Dr. Julius Siegfried, which sits waiting on ice in Doc’s lab.
When the party begins, so does the deadly game of cat and mouse. Will Andy save his friends from the scalpel of a madman, or will Doc succeed in saving his own life by completing the first even human brain transference procedure? Directed by Robin Nuyen.
The Man with the Silver Case
Already killing himself with drugs and alcohol, an anonymous American agent, the Man in Gray, accepts a deadly job in this film noir thriller: deliver a suitcase to a shadowy organization. Though handcuffed to his wrist, he remains incurious to its contents even he is running from those who will murder for it. When the company he works for starts tearing itself up, he escapes to a safe house that puts him in contact with a family unprepared for the havoc he brings. While hiding and waiting, he finds himself struggling with a nihilism that demands he destroy everything he encounters because it’s the only way to get a job done. Like Melville and Haneke, The Man With the Silver Case binds style, politics, and genre for a new generation. Shot in native black-and-white, the snowy and rugged Lauterbrunne Valley contrasts against an anonymous man fighting against the wasteful self-destruction he encourages in his life. Directed by Colin Best.
The Tangle
The Tangle is a stylish neo-noir, hard sci-fi feature film. Set in a near future in which the Tangle connects everyone to everything via hard drives in the brain, a group of government agents try to protect humanity from within hidden technology saferooms, rooms the Tangle cannot reach. A murder mystery with the dark, hard-boiled style of a Blade Runner, the rich interweaving of stories of a 12 Monkeys, and the fully imagined technological future of a Minority Report. Written and directed by Christopher Soren Kelly.
Range Runners
A woman thru-hiking an isolated trail runs into trouble when her pack is hijacked by two men hiding out in the woods, desperate and on the run. Now, stranded and left to fend for herself, she has a choice: crawl back to her normal life in defeat, or push forward and take back what was stolen. Directed by Philip S. Plowden.
Easy Does It
Shot with a gritty '70s road movie aesthetic, Easy Does It follows the scrappy anti-heroics of two Mississippi no-hopers on a treasure hunt of epic proportions. In their chase for the American Dream, these not-so-natural-born killers somehow stumble into national notoriety as public enemies number one and two. Geeky dreamboat hostage in tow, this trio of star-crossed friends careen across the American Southwest in a blaze of fireworks, color gels, and animation sequences. An analogue scrapbook of blood-and-paint-soaked folksiness, the film exposes the jacked-up machismo and delusions of grandeur that fuel the aspirational hearts of crooks, cops, and those caught in the middle. Directed by Will Addison.
Joseph Perry is one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast (whenitwascool.com/up-hill-both-ways-podcast/) and Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast (decadesofhorror.com/category/classicera/). He also writes for the film websites Diabolique Magazine (diaboliquemagazine.com), Gruesome Magazine (gruesomemagazine.com), The Scariest Things (scariesthings.com), Ghastly Grinning (ghastlygrinning.com), and Horror Fuel (horrorfuel.com), and film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope (videoscopemag.com) and Drive-In Asylum (etsy.com/shop/GroovyDoom).
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