The Nickel | Independent Cinema in Clerkenwell, London

The Nickel is an adult-oriented space. The films, preshow materials and space itself may contain violent, sexual and potentially offensive imagery unsuitable for under-18s or those of a sensitive disposition.

Please note we are unable to offer refunds or exchanges on tickets. No late admissions from 15 minutes after showtime.

IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES

(1976, Japan/France, Nagisa Oshima)

In 1930s Tokyo, former geisha Sada Abe begins an affair with Kichizo, the married proprietor of the inn where she works. Withdrawing from the world into rented rooms, the pair surrender themselves to an increasingly intense cycle of sex, jealousy and experimentation. Their mutual obsession gradually consumes every other part of their lives, carrying them towards an infamous and violent conclusion.

Based on the true story of Sada Abe, Nagisa Oshima’s IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES became an international sensation through its unprecedented combination of arthouse filmmaking and unsimulated sex. Produced as a French-Japanese collaboration to escape Japan’s censorship laws, the film was seized, banned and cut in numerous countries, while Oshima faced an obscenity trial at home. Fifty years later, it remains one of cinema’s most beautiful, confrontational and genuinely erotic studies of desire taken to its absolute limit.

FRANKENHOOKER

(1990, USA, Frank Henenlotter)

When a freak lawnmower accident reduces his fiancée Elizabeth to a collection of salvageable parts, amateur scientist Jeffrey Franken refuses to let death end their engagement. His plan is simple: find the perfect replacement body, assemble it piece by piece and bring Elizabeth back with a bolt of homemade electricity. Unfortunately, his search takes him into Times Square’s sex trade, and the resurrected woman who emerges has inherited more than one set of memories.

Frank Henenlotter’s delirious reworking of Frankenstein is a neon-pink mixture of gross-out horror, gutter comedy and unexpectedly tender romance. Patty Mullen’s electrically twitching performance is one of cult cinema’s great comic creations, while the film’s exploding bodies and handmade effects push bad taste into gleeful cartoon abstraction. Beneath the sleaze lies a warped warning about possession, reconstruction and the male urge to build the perfect woman.

THE CODE + DIRECTOR EUGENE KOTLYARENKO Q&A

(2024, USA, Eugene Kotlyarenko)

Celine and Jay have a problem: they can’t have sex, they can’t trust each other and neither of them can stop filming. When Celine begins making a documentary about love under lockdown, Jay becomes convinced that the whole thing is an elaborate trap designed to get him cancelled. He responds by rigging their desert hideaway with hidden cameras, beginning a surveillance arms race in which every confession, argument and attempted seduction becomes potential evidence.

Eugene Kotlyarenko, director of SPREE and WOBBLE PALACE, constructs a deranged romantic comedy from iPhones, webcams, spy cameras, pornography, reality television and more than 70 recording devices. Dasha Nekrasova and Peter Vack are perfectly matched as two terminally online narcissists trying to revive their relationship through mutually assured documentation.

With director Eugene Kotlyarenko on stage for a live interrogation.

ONE, TWO, THREE

(1961, USA, Billy Wilder)

C. R. MacNamara, a Coca-Cola executive stationed in West Berlin, is charged with looking after his boss’s visiting daughter. When she secretly marries a fervent young East German communist, Mac launches a frantic scheme to turn her new husband into an acceptable capitalist son-in-law before her parents arrive.

Billy Wilder’s breathless Cold War farce stars James Cagney at full speed, firing off rapid dialogue, political satire and escalating comic chaos against a divided Berlin.

THE UNKNOWN (ON 16MM + LIVE SCORE BY FISCAL HARM)

(1927, USA, Tod Browning)

On the lam, criminal Alonzo hides in the circus as The Armless Wonder, a performer who uses his feet to hurl knives. Alonzo keeps the arms he really has concealed to hide his identity. Meanwhile, ringmaster’s daughter Nanon has a phobia of being touched by men, but is romantically pursued by not only Alonzo but the strongman Malabar. Alonzo’s desperation to remain with Nanon will only end in tragedy.

Lon Chaney delivers a striking silent performance defined by physical transformation and expressive intensity, anchoring a dark melodrama that blends crime, romance, and early psychological horror. The circus setting becomes a space of illusion and concealment, where identity is constantly performed and nothing is quite what it seems.

The film will be shown on an original 16mm print with live score by Fiscal Harm.

Runtime: 60 mins

Certificate: 18

Sunday 18/10

Bar 4:05pm

Film 4:30pm

16mm

Book here

THE DOLL

(1962, Sweden, Arne Mattsson)

“A study of erotic delusion”

Lonesome night watchman Lundgren works the graveyard shift at a Stockholm shopping mall and in desperation steals a mannequin to bring home to keep him company. One night the mannequin comes alive, fulfilling his darkest fantasy but also questioning his grasp on reality. As the chorus of nosy neighbours starts suspecting something untoward in his dingy attic flat, Lundgren’s life begins to unravel.

Arne Mattsson’s sprawling resumes spans over 60 films including a proto-giallo detective series, breezy folk comedies and pulpy-thrillers, but in his mid-career flurry of films he directed Vaxdockan aka The Doll: a darkly poetic arthouse-creeper. British censors were swift to ban it due to “indecency” giving it the infamous “BANNED IN ENGLAND” tagline, but it’s lurid marketing obscured what is a beautifully realised psycho-fairytale about urban alienation and agalmatophilia. With strange and intense performances by Per Oscarsson and (Bergman actress turned “Swedish Sin” icon) Gio Petré, this is undoubtedly the crown jewel of Mattsson’s oeuvre.

Programmed and introduced by Harry Thorfinn-George

THE HEROIC TRIO

(1993, Hong Kong, Johnnie To)

Babies are vanishing into an underground empire. A masked vigilante, a mercenary and an invisible assassin are drawn into the same fight—and towards the histories that connect them. The city’s future depends on an alliance none of them planned.

Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung make an unbeatable triangle in Johnnie To’s exhilarating genre collision. Ching Siu-tung’s action sends bodies and blades flying through a world of Gothic monsters, superhero masks and motorcycle stunts. Hong Kong cinema’s imagination running gloriously beyond the speed limit.

SHOGUN ASSASSIN

(1980, Japan/USA, Kenji Misumi and Robert Houston)

After his wife is murdered by agents of a paranoid shogun, former executioner Ogami Ittō takes to the road with his young son Daigoro, pushing him through feudal Japan in a baby cart fitted with an alarming arsenal of hidden weapons. Pursued by ninja assassins and three fearsome Masters of Death, father and son carve a path through ambushes, betrayals and spectacular fountains of blood.

Created for American grindhouse audiences by re-editing and dubbing the first two Lone Wolf and Cub films, SHOGUN ASSASSIN transforms Kenji Misumi’s samurai epics into a lean, hallucinatory barrage of flashing blades, severed limbs and pulsing synthesiser music. Initially notorious in Britain for its extreme violence, the film became a midnight-movie classic whose influence can be felt everywhere from Wu-Tang Clan’s Liquid Swords to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

BELLE DE JOUR

(1967, France, Italy, Luis Buñuel)

A young, wealthy housewife living in Paris is unable to consummate her marriage with her husband and becomes consumed by elaborate sexual fantasies. After learning about a discreet brothel where clients’ identities are protected, she begins working there during the afternoons under an assumed name while maintaining her conventional domestic life.

As her double life continues, the boundaries between fantasy and reality become increasingly unstable, and her relationships outside the brothel begin to intersect with her secret work in unexpected ways. The narrative maintains ambiguity over what is real versus imagined, sustaining a tone of psychological uncertainty throughout.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE

(1977, France, Spain, Luis Buñuel)

A wealthy middle-aged man becomes infatuated with a young woman he meets during a train journey, initiating a turbulent and frustrating pursuit of her affection. Despite repeated encounters, she continually eludes his attempts at intimacy, appearing in shifting contexts that complicate his understanding of who she is and what she wants.

Luis Buñuel structures the narrative around repetition and contradiction, with the same events retold from different perspectives, emphasizing instability in perception and desire. The film’s fragmented storytelling and surreal interruptions create a constant tension between romantic obsession and psychological uncertainty.

SHAKEDOWN

(1988, USA, James Glickenhaus)

Public defender Roland Dalton is assigned to represent a drug dealer accused of killing an undercover police officer. Convinced that the shooting was self-defence, Dalton turns to renegade narcotics cop Richie Marks for help and uncovers a network of corrupt officers protecting a lucrative drug operation. Their investigation pulls both men into an escalating war fought across the streets, courtrooms and rooftops of New York.

Peter Weller and Sam Elliott tear through James Glickenhaus’s gloriously excessive action thriller, a film that combines hardboiled conspiracy plotting with some of the most outrageous practical stunt work of the 1980s. From a department-store shootout to a climax involving a passenger jet, SHAKEDOWN continually finds new ways to outdo itself while preserving the grit and momentum of a classic urban crime movie.

THE MAD BOMBER (ON 16MM)

(1972, USA, Bert I. Gordon)

William Dorn, a disturbed Los Angeles man whose life has been destroyed by personal tragedy, begins planting and detonating bombs around the city against people and places he blames for society’s problems. When one of his attacks is witnessed by a serial rapist, police detective Geronimo Minelli is forced to track down both the bomber and the dangerous criminal who may hold the key to identifying him.

A grimy piece of early-1970s exploitation cinema, Bert I. Gordon’s crime thriller mixes police procedural, psychological study, and urban nightmare. Chuck Connors gives the film its unsettling centre as a man consumed by rage and paranoia, while the collision between the bomber, the detective, and the rapist creates a bleak portrait of violence and social decay.

TOKYO DRIFTER

(1966, Japan, Seijun Suzuki)

Tetsu wants to leave the yakuza behind. Loyalty keeps dragging him back. Sent away from Tokyo, he becomes a wandering target in a gangster story that seems to shed another piece of realism with every mile.

Seijun Suzuki turns a studio assignment into pure pop-art invention: snowbound pursuits, neon nightclubs, startling colour and a final space almost abstract enough to swallow the actors. Tetsuya Watari’s cool presence and recurring theme song hold the delirium together. A crime film that dances away from the rules while still carrying a gun.

ANATOMY OF HELL

(2004, France, Catherine Breillat)

A woman invites a man she meets at a nightclub to spend several days with her in a remote seaside house, offering him money to observe her in private moments of intimacy and vulnerability. What begins as an unusual arrangement becomes an increasingly confrontational exchange about desire, disgust, power, and the limits of looking.

Anatomy of Hell is a deliberately austere and confrontational dialogue between two bodies and two perspectives, stripping away narrative comfort in favour of philosophical provocation. The film’s static framing and clinical tone push its themes of sex, shame, and perception into uncomfortable territory, forcing attention onto gaze and reaction rather than conventional plot.

CHAMPAGNE AND BULLETS

(1993, USA, John De Hart & James Paradise)

Former police officer Rick Bode is forced from the department after refusing to participate in the schemes of corrupt judge Norman. Reunited with his old partner Huck, Rick sets out to expose a criminal network involving blackmail, murder and a satanic cult. Along the way he finds time for romance, martial arts, country music, spiritual contemplation and the irresistible dance sensation known as the Shimmy Slide.

Written, produced by and starring John De Hart, CHAMPAGNE AND BULLETS is an extraordinary vanity-project action epic whose ambition is matched only by its profound eccentricity. Its awkward dialogue, sudden tonal shifts and complete sincerity have made it a cult phenomenon, especially in its alternate incarnation as GETEVEN. Far more than a conventional bad-movie curiosity, this is personal cinema in its purest and most bewildering form.

MYSTERY EROTIC HORROR

Mystery Erotic Horror presents undisclosed deep cuts from cinema’s most feverish and forbidden corners - where desire collides with religious mania, occult ritual, sadism and bloodshed. Expect perverse passions, sacrilegious imagery, decadent excess and exquisitely bad decisions, as sex and death become dangerously intertwined. Come blind, surrender to the mystery and discover a film you may never otherwise have thought to see. These screenings are strictly for adult audiences and may contain explicit sexual content, violence and other potentially offensive material. Do not attend if you are of a sensitive disposition. Adults only.

THE BABY

(1973, USA, Ted Post)

Set in Los Angeles, The Baby follows Ann Gentry, a social worker assigned to investigate the unusual Wadsworth household. Living there is a fully grown man known only as “Baby,” who is treated by his domineering mother and manipulative sisters as if he were still an infant. He is kept in a crib, dressed in diapers, and discouraged from developing beyond a childlike state. As Ann spends more time with the family, she becomes increasingly disturbed by the strange dynamics and psychological control that keep Baby trapped in permanent infancy.

Blending psychological horror with dark melodrama, The Baby explores themes of power, dependency, and manipulation within a deeply dysfunctional family. As Ann attempts to intervene and free Baby from his abusive environment, hidden motives and unsettling secrets begin to surface. The story builds toward a shocking twist that forces the audience to reconsider the characters and their intentions, leaving the boundaries between victim and perpetrator disturbingly unclear.

BLACK DEVIL DOLL FROM HELL (ON VHS)

(1984, USA, Chester Novell Turner)

A lonely and pious woman finds herself drawn to a mysterious antique doll whose malevolent influence quickly escalates from unsettling pranks to violent, supernatural terror. As the doll’s control tightens, her life spirals into chaos, and those around her fall victim to its relentless, demonic will.

A shot on video masterpiece from former church organist, Chester N. Turner, Black Devil Doll from Hell revels in low-budget excess and devilish theatrics. The film leans into grotesque violence, uncanny puppetry, and unrepentant exploitation, creating a nightmarish energy that is as absurd as it is frightening.

BLOODY MUSCLE BODY BUILDER IN HELL

(1995, Japan, Shinichi Fukazawa)

Set in a dingy Tokyo apartment, a self-absorbed bodybuilder sets out to film a showcase of his sculpted physique with the help of his ex-girlfriend and a cameraman, only to discover that the room is haunted by a furious spirit determined to drag them into chaos.

A frenzied splatter comedy forged in pure DIY ambition, Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell channels the scrappy inventiveness of cult cabin-in-the-woods horror while leaning hard into slapstick absurdity. Shot on gritty video and exploding with handmade practical effects, it transforms one claustrophobic location into a whirlwind of possession, rubbery monstrosities, and delirious blood soaked spectacle.

REFLECTIONS OF EVIL

(2002, USA, Damon Packard)

A rage-filled street vendor wanders through a warped Los Angeles, stumbling into encounters that twist the city into a feverish labyrinth of paranoia, failed dreams, and collapsing timelines. Haunted by the ghost of his sister and tormented by forces both mundane and uncanny, he barrels through the chaos in a spiral of frustration that borders on apocalyptic.

A ferocious blend of abrasive satire and surreal nightmare, Reflections of Evil channels cultural decay into an overwhelming sensory assault. The film becomes a darkly comic and disorienting vision of obsession, alienation, and a world fraying at every edge.

THE WICKER MAN

(1973, UK, Robin Hardy)

When a devout Christian police sergeant travels to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, he encounters a close-knit community whose pagan beliefs and seasonal rituals stand in stark contrast to his own. As his investigation deepens, every answer seems only to raise more disturbing questions, leading him towards a revelation he could never have anticipated.

Directed by Robin Hardy from a screenplay by Anthony Shaffer, The Wicker Man overturns the conventions of the traditional horror film, replacing monsters and haunted houses with folklore, religious conflict and mounting psychological unease. Christopher Lee considered Lord Summerisle to be his finest performance, while Paul Giovanni's extraordinary folk-inspired soundtrack became inseparable from the film's haunting atmosphere. Initially released in a heavily truncated version, it has since been restored and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest British horror films ever made.

EYES OF FIRE

(1983, USA, Avery Crounse)

A group of settlers in 18th-century Appalachia flee their village after a mysterious tragedy, only to confront the forest itself, haunted, malevolent, and alive with supernatural forces. As fear and superstition deepen, their bonds fracture, and the wilderness becomes both a physical and psychological nightmare.

A slow, atmospheric blend of folk horror and period drama, Eyes of Fire transforms the untamed landscape into a character itself, exploring human fragility, guilt, and the unseen terrors lurking in nature and the mind.

PHENOMENA

(1985, Italy, Dario Argento)

A young American girl enrolled at a Swiss boarding school begins experiencing strange psychic connections with insects after a series of brutal murders targeting students in the area. As she uses her abilities to investigate, she becomes increasingly entangled in a mystery involving a serial killer and the surrounding forest.

The film blends giallo horror with supernatural elements, combining elaborate set pieces, dream logic, and graphic violence. Its structure moves between investigative mystery and surreal fantasy, creating a disorienting atmosphere where psychic perception and physical danger constantly overlap.

A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN

(1971, Italy/France/Spain, Lucio Fulci)

Carol Hammond, the daughter of a prominent politician, is tormented by increasingly vivid dreams involving her glamorous, free-spirited neighbour Julia Durer. When Julia is found brutally murdered, the line between Carol's nightmares and reality begins to dissolve, drawing her into a labyrinth of murder, hallucination and psychological manipulation where nothing can be trusted.

Directed by Lucio Fulci before his celebrated cycle of gore films, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is one of the masterpieces of the Italian giallo. Combining surreal dream imagery, elaborate murder set pieces and psychedelic visual design, the film reflects the influence of the sexual revolution while pushing the boundaries of censorship with its graphic violence and eroticism. Featuring a mesmerising score by Ennio Morricone and standout performances from Florinda Bolkan, Stanley Baker and Anita Strindberg, it remains one of Fulci's most elegant and accomplished works.

FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN 3D

(1973, Italy/France, Paul Morrissey)

Presented by The Evolution of Horror: Baron Frankenstein pursues a grotesque scientific mission to construct a perfect master race, harvesting bodies and limbs from the peasantry to assemble his ideal creations. As his experiments descend into obsession, sexual pathology, and farce, the boundaries between aristocratic authority and abject violence collapse. Excessive, confrontational, and deliberately artificial, Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein reframes the horror myth as a corrosive satire of power, reproduction, and class, presenting a diseased vision of Europe where ideology and flesh are equally disposable.

DRILLER KILLER

(1979, USA, Abel Ferrara)

The rent is due, the painting will not come together and the band next door will not stop. For a downtown artist hanging on by his fingernails, New York’s constant noise starts sounding like a command.

Abel Ferrara stars in his own grimy portrait of creative collapse, where punk rehearsal rooms and cramped apartments matter as much as the notorious violence. This is horror made out of unpaid bills, sleepless nights and a city coming apart. A raw document of late-seventies downtown life with a power tool at its centre.

HIRUKO THE GOBLIN

(1991, Japan, Shinya Tsukamoto)

When a teacher disappears beneath a rural school, his archaeologist colleague Hieda arrives to investigate a recently uncovered burial mound. He joins forces with the missing man’s teenage son, Masao, whose classmates are being transformed into grotesque spider-legged heads. Together they must descend into the ancient chambers below the school and prevent a gateway to the world of demons from opening completely.

Following the industrial nightmare of Tetsuo, Shinya Tsukamoto turned to folk horror and creature comedy for this wildly kinetic adaptation of Daijiro Morohoshi’s manga. HIRUKO THE GOBLIN combines handmade effects, frantic camerawork and school-holiday adventure with images of genuine nightmare intensity. Playful, disgusting and constantly inventive, it reveals a more colourful but no less unruly side of Tsukamoto’s cinema.

Introduced by James Balmont - film critic and writer.

VIOLENCE VOYAGER

(2018, Japan, Ujicha)

American schoolboy Bobby and his friend Akkun take a shortcut through the mountains and discover a mysterious amusement park called Violence Voyager. Armed with water pistols, they enter what appears to be an innocent adventure game, but soon find children trapped inside a cruel experiment involving chemical weapons, grotesque mutations and an army of mechanical monsters.

Created using Ujicha’s distinctive gekimation technique, in which hand-painted cardboard figures are manipulated before the camera, VIOLENCE VOYAGER transforms childhood adventure into a tactile, psychedelic nightmare. The deliberately limited movement makes every eruption of blood and bodily transformation feel disturbingly physical. Funny, imaginative and increasingly horrifying, the film occupies a unique space between picture-book innocence, underground animation and extreme body horror.

Introduced by James Balmont - film critic and writer.

SPIDER BABY

(1967, USA, Jack Hill)

A decrepit mansion houses the Merrye family, whose surviving children suffer from a bizarre, degenerative disease that makes them increasingly violent, cunning, and feral. As outsiders arrive, the family’s twisted games and macabre antics escalate, revealing their darkly comic, horrifying nature and the strange, grotesque world they inhabit.

Spider Baby blends black comedy, gothic horror, and campy thrills into a deliriously twisted fable. With its eccentric characters, claustrophobic setting, and outrageous yet eerie atmosphere, the film has become a cult classic of macabre American cinema.

BABY BLOOD

(1990, France, Alain Robak)

A parasitic creature escapes from the body of an exotic animal and takes refuge inside Yanka, a performer in a travelling circus. Now carrying an unnatural pregnancy, she hears the creature speaking to her and is compelled to satisfy its endless demand for human blood. As Yanka cuts a violent path across France, the relationship between mother and unborn monster becomes increasingly intimate and difficult to escape.

Alain Robak’s splattery French body-horror comedy combines the biological nightmare of early Cronenberg with the unruly energy of European exploitation cinema. Emmanuelle Escourrou gives a fearless physical performance, shifting between terror, fury and reluctant maternal attachment as the carnage mounts. Grotesque, funny and unexpectedly sympathetic towards its heroine, BABY BLOOD has grown into a fiercely loved cult discovery.

ERASERHEAD (ON 16MM)

(1977, USA, David Lynch)

Henry Spencer has a room, a girlfriend and a newborn baby. None of them offers much comfort. Outside, machinery groans; inside, the infant cries and a woman in the radiator promises that everything will be fine.

David Lynch’s handmade first feature turns the terrors of parenthood, sex and responsibility into an entirely private industrial universe. Stark monochrome images and Alan Splet’s enveloping sound make the nightmare physical. Horrifying, oddly tender and very funny in places you may not expect, ERASERHEAD remains an experience that resists explanation and rewards surrender.

Introduced by Dominic Hicks and presented on 16mm with a reel intermission and programme notes.

Runtime: 89 mins

Certificate: 15

Thursday 29/10

Bar 6:00pm

Film 6:30pm

16mm

Sold Out

TETSUO THE IRON MAN

(1989, Japan, Shinya Tsukamoto)

A man is mysteriously transformed into a grotesque hybrid of flesh and metal after a bizarre encounter with a scrap‑metal–obsessed stranger. As his body slowly fuses with machinery, he becomes increasingly violent and unrecognizable, spiraling into a nightmarish cycle of rage, obsession, and mechanical mutation.

Shinya Tsukamoto’s debut is a visceral, industrial horror experience, drenched in stark black-and-white visuals, rapid editing, and metallic sound design. The film’s relentless energy and body‑horror imagery create a feverish, almost hypnotic assault on the senses, establishing it as a landmark of Japanese cyberpunk cinema.

MS. 45 PLUS ✝✝✝ BASEMENT NUNSPLOITATION COSTUME PARTY ✝✝✝

(1981, USA, Abel Ferrara)

A timid, mute seamstress is attacked and raped twice in one day. Traumatized by the assaults, she kills her second attacker, takes his handgun, and begins roaming the streets of New York after dark, randomly shooting men with a .45 caliber pistol.

Set against the grime of early 1980s Manhattan, the film gradually shifts from exploitation thriller to a bleak portrait of trauma, alienation, and urban violence. Its uncompromising tone and Zoë Lund's remarkable central performance have made it one of the defining films of the rape-revenge cycle.

Come dressed as a nun or priest and join our basement party till late!

Runtime: 80 mins

Certificate: 18

Friday 30/10

Bar 6:00pm

Film 6:30pm

Digital

Book here

THE NICKEL’S PSYCHOTRONIC HALLOWEEN MYSTERY MOVIE MASH - WEEKEND PASS

Two days, eight mystery horror movies from around the world.

Across Halloween and the following day, The Nickel presents four deep-cut psychotronic horror films per day: forgotten exploitation, regional nightmares, video-era mutations, disreputable sleaze and eye-popping oddities that have slipped through the cracks of horror history.

Every title remains secret until showtime. Come for one day or sacrifice yourself to the entire weekend.

Films will screen at 2:00pm, 4:15pm, 6:30pm and 9pm on both Saturday 31st October and Sunday 1st November.

Costumes highly encouraged.

Artwork by Jordan McLaughlin

Certificate: 18

Saturday 31/10

Bar 2:00pm

Film 2:30pm

Digital

Sold Out

THE NICKEL’S PSYCHOTRONIC HALLOWEEN MYSTERY MOVIE MASH - DAY ONE 31/10

DAY ONE ONLY - 31/11

Presenting four deep-cut psychotronic horror films: forgotten exploitation, regional nightmares, video-era mutations, disreputable sleaze and eye-popping oddities that have slipped through the cracks of horror history.

Every title remains secret until showtime. Come for one day or sacrifice yourself to the entire weekend.

Films will screen at 2:00pm, 4:15pm, 6:30pm and 9pm on Saturday 31st October. Weekend passes and day tickets for Sunday the 1st November also available.

Costumes highly encouraged.

Artwork by Jordan McLaughlin

Certificate: 18

Saturday 31/10

Bar 2pm

Film 2:30pm

Digital

Book here

THE NICKEL’S PSYCHOTRONIC HALLOWEEN MYSTERY MOVIE MASH - DAY TWO 1/11

DAY TWO ONLY – 1/11

Four secret horror films. One long Sunday on the wrong side of respectability. Our Halloween Mystery Movie Mash digs up regional nightmares, exploitation oddities and video-era mutations that deserve a roomful of unsuspecting witnesses.

Every title stays hidden until showtime. Expect the unruly invention and disreputable shocks of films that slipped through horror history’s cracks. Come for the day, or make a weekend of it.

Films screen at 2:00pm, 4:15pm, 6:30pm and 9pm on Sunday 1 November. Weekend passes and Saturday 31 October day tickets are also available.

Costumes highly encouraged.

Artwork by Jordan McLaughlin

Certificate: 18

Sunday 1/11

Bar 2pm

Film 2:30pm

Digital

Book here

DOWN TERRACE + BEN WHEATLEY Q&A + FREE SIGNED FANZINE

(2009, United Kingdom, Ben Wheatley)

F&TT&N 5 Launch screening! We celebrate the launch of Ben Wheatley's latest fanzine - film & television Thoughts & notes 5 - the Low Budget issue: with a special screening and Q&A with ben of his debut feature DOWN TERRACE - made for less than £10K in 2009 Ben's latest fanzine unpacks some of the thoughts, processes and mistakes in making the film. It also features an interview with Charlotte regan about making her debut feature Scrapper. Every ticket to this event comes with a copy of the fanzine. Be the first to get one - only at The Nickel.

In Down Terrace, father and son Bill and Karl return from prison to their Brighton home convinced that somebody inside their small criminal operation betrayed them. As suspicion closes around the family kitchen, domestic sniping, old resentments and sudden violence make every cup of tea feel like an interrogation.

Ben Wheatley’s debut turns the British gangster film inside out, replacing swagger with cramped rooms, black comedy and the queasy intimacy of a family destroying itself. Shot with collaborators who would become central to his career, it is a remarkably assured statement of the mordant humour and eruptive menace to come.

Ben Wheatley joins us on stage to discuss the film, and all ticketholders will receive a highly limited edition autographed fanzine.

Runtime: 93 mins

Certificate: 15

Monday 2/11

Bar 5:30pm

Film 6:00pm

Digital

Book here

MARDI GRAS MASSACRE

(1978, United States, Jack Weis)

While New Orleans parties, a ritual killer turns its nightlife into his hunting ground. Detectives follow a trail of sacrifices through bars, bedrooms and the clammy underside of the carnival.

Jack Weis’s notorious regional splatter film mixes a police procedural with disco-era sleaze and the primitive shock tactics of BLOOD FEAST. Its rough surfaces are part of the experience: a drive-in nightmare with no studio polish to soften the impact. A deeply disreputable entry in the history of the British video-nasty panic.

DATE WITH A KIDNAPPER

(1976, United States, Frederick R. Friedel)

An abduction on the backroads becomes a strange, uneasy battle of wills. As a young woman and her captor travel through the rural South, the expected rules of the hostage thriller begin to slip.

Frederick R. Friedel’s regional independent filmmaking gives the danger an unusually intimate texture: dusty locations, awkward silences and people who never quite fit the roles the plot has assigned them. Also known as KIDNAPPED COED, this is a rough-edged drive-in discovery whose unsettling unpredictability is its strongest weapon.

SEX WORLD

(1977, United States, Anthony Spinelli)

An exclusive resort promises to make its guests’ fantasies real. Arriving strangers bring desires they can name and anxieties they cannot; the encounters soon reveal a gap between getting what you want and understanding why you want it.

Anthony Spinelli borrows the polished surfaces and speculative premise of seventies science fiction for an unusually ambitious adult ensemble film. Interlocking stories, sleek production design and an electronic score give its experiments in intimacy a distinctive atmosphere. A key example of porno chic treating fantasy as both an attraction and a problem.

This film contains hardcore unsimulated sex scenes.

CAMP - A SHORT FILM SHOWCASE

THE NICKEL teams up with cyberfemme studio EVERYONE IS A GIRL for a showcase of short films centred on the theme of CAMP, accompanied with readings.

The Nickel Cinema’s regular roster of B-movies, softcores, and underrated gems has begun to shed some buttery spotlight on underrepresented cinematic traditions. At EIAG, we make collaborative projects about the feminine, the seductive, the virtual, and the covert. For this CAMP showcase, we are joining forces to present films from our community that are not afraid to play, deceive, and perform. Join us for a night of London’s most sparkliest, performative, abject, delicious, and scandalicious emerging cinema.

Programme of films to be announced.

LIVE WIRE

(1992, United States, Christian Duguay)

Washington’s politicians are exploding without warning. Bomb-disposal expert Danny O’Neill has to find the weapon before the next victim discovers they are carrying it inside them. His collapsing marriage is about to become part of the investigation.

Pierce Brosnan brings immaculate pre-Bond composure to a thriller with absolutely no intention of behaving sensibly. Liquid explosives, political conspiracy and domestic melodrama race towards the same detonation. Christian Duguay keeps the set pieces moving and the premise gloriously overheated: early-nineties action with an unusually volatile ingredient.

RICOCHET

(1991, USA, Russell Mulcahy)

One arrest makes Nick Styles a television hero. Years later, the man he put away comes back with a plan to destroy everything the cameras helped him build: career, family, reputation and trust in his own mind.

Denzel Washington and John Lithgow turn Russell Mulcahy’s revenge thriller into a ferocious contest between charisma and obsession. Lithgow’s villain does not just want his enemy dead; he wants control of the story everyone tells about him. Fast, lurid and wildly excessive, RICOCHET pushes studio action towards a full-blown media nightmare.

GODS OF TIMES SQUARE

(1999, USA, Richard Sandler)

Before the corporate billboards swallowed the skyline, Times Square had other voices: street preachers, prophets, conspiracy theorists and people who believed the end was close. Richard Sandler turns his camera towards the pavement and lets them speak.

Filmed across years of transformation, this extraordinary documentary listens to a neighbourhood arguing about God while the ground changes beneath it. Comic, unsettling, tender and apocalyptic by turns, it preserves personalities no redevelopment plan could accommodate. A city symphony made from competing sermons and the stubborn human need to be heard.

WHO KILLED CAPTAIN ALEX?

(2010, Uganda, Nabwana Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey)

Captain Alex is dead, the army wants answers and the Tiger Mafia is taking the fight into the skies above Kampala. Revenge arrives by gunfight, kung fu and helicopter, while Video Joker Emmie supplies a running commentary no conventional action film could survive.

Nabwana I.G.G. and the Wakaliwood team turn scant resources into outrageous invention. The effects are homemade, the commitment is total and the pleasure of making movies is everywhere on screen. An action sensation whose real superpower is the unstoppable creative energy of a community.

MYSTERY MOVIE

Take a seat without knowing what is coming. Our mystery screenings explore the bold, disreputable and gloriously unclassifiable world of psychotronic cinema: discoveries that make you wonder how they were made, who they were made for, and why nobody showed you sooner.

The title stays secret until showtime. Curiosity is essential; good taste is negotiable.

Strictly for adult audiences. Films may contain offensive and upsetting content. Do not attend if you are of a sensitive disposition.

HARD BOILED

(1992, Hong Kong, John Woo)

A teahouse erupts. A warehouse becomes a battlefield. Then a hospital turns into an action sequence that seems determined to test the limits of cinema itself. Inspector Tequila and an undercover cop are on the same side—if they can survive long enough to prove it.

Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung give John Woo’s gunplay epic its bruised romantic core. The choreography is astonishing, but the real charge comes from loyalty, compromised identities and bodies moving through physical space at impossible speed. Hong Kong action at the height of its invention.

WAKE IN FRIGHT

(1971, Australia, Ted Kotcheff)

One night in the Yabba should be enough. But a lost bet strands a schoolteacher in an outback town where hospitality means another drink, another dare and another reason he cannot leave.

Ted Kotcheff turns sunshine and friendliness into instruments of terror. Gary Bond’s careful composure is stripped away by a community whose rituals of masculinity are both welcoming and merciless, with Donald Pleasence an unforgettable guide into the abyss. A sun-blasted nightmare of drinking, belonging and the violence that can hide inside the invitation to be one of the boys.

BIJOU

(1972, United States, Wakefield Poole)

A construction worker pockets an invitation and follows it through an unmarked door. Beyond it lies Bijou: a mysterious theatre where watching becomes participation and the ordinary city opens into a maze of private fantasy.

Wakefield Poole uses colour, music and dreamlike cutting to push adult filmmaking towards the avant-garde. Dialogue falls away, theatrical spaces dissolve and desire becomes a way of seeing. A landmark of independent queer cinema whose restless visual imagination reaches far beyond the boundaries of its genre.

This film contains hardcore unsimulated sex scenes.

Tentacles

Something enormous is stirring beneath the California surf. As swimmers and sailors vanish, a reporter and a marine expert uncover a threat with eight arms, an appetite for tourists and no respect for the summer season.

John Huston, Shelley Winters and Henry Fonda lend improbable Hollywood grandeur to this gloriously wayward Italian creature feature. Ovidio G. Assonitis answers JAWS with a giant octopus, sunlit coastal menace and Stelvio Cipriani’s irresistible score: aquatic exploitation with a cast far too distinguished to stay safely on shore.

Presented in collaboration with CAM Sugar, with a vinyl market in our basement bar between films from 1.30pm

THE RED QUEEN KILLS SEVEN TIMES

(1972, Italy, West Germany, Emilio P. Miraglia)

A family curse says the Red Queen returns every hundred years to take seven lives. When a crimson-cloaked killer begins stalking the people around a fashion-house heiress, old rivalries and a disputed inheritance make the legend horribly useful.

Barbara Bouchet and Marina Malfatti lead Emilio P. Miraglia’s sumptuous collision of Gothic mystery and couture-world giallo. Bruno Nicolai’s score slips beneath images of castles, cameras and lethal elegance. Every gorgeous surface conceals another motive in a whodunit dressed to kill.

Presented in collaboration with CAM Sugar, with a vinyl market in our basement bar between films from 1.30pm

HITCH HIKE

(1977, Italy, Pasquale Festa Campanile)

Their marriage is already a war zone. Picking up a stranger gives it an armed third party. A bitter couple’s journey across the American West becomes a savage contest over stolen money, control and who will get out alive.

Franco Nero, Corinne Cléry and David Hess form a combustible triangle in Pasquale Festa Campanile’s sun-baked road thriller. Ennio Morricone’s score gives the landscape a seductive pulse while the cramped caravan becomes increasingly poisonous. An exploitation film whose most uncomfortable idea is that the stranger may not be the only monster aboard.

Presented in collaboration with CAM Sugar, with a vinyl market in our basement bar between films from 1.30pm

CRIMES OF PASSION (16MM)

(1984, United States, Ken Russell)

Fashion designer by day, China Blue by night: Joanna Crane has built two lives to keep desire at a manageable distance. A private investigator and a deranged preacher are about to tear down the partition.

Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins go gloriously for broke in Ken Russell’s neon psychosexual fever dream. Pop-art colour, outrageous religious imagery and Rick Wakeman’s electronic score turn an erotic thriller into a furious comedy of repression and hypocrisy. Lurid, funny and unexpectedly vulnerable, it makes respectable behaviour look like the strangest fetish of all.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.

BLUE MONDAY - MYSTERY XXX CINEMA

Blue Monday presents undisclosed selections from the deepest recesses of horny cult cinema - encapsulating everything from erotic thrillers, carnal noir, golden age porno and transgressive sleaze from both the underground and the mainstream.

This screening will feature adult-themed content, including sexually explicit and risqué material. Please consider yourself forewarned that these films may (and probably will) contain offensive and upsetting content. Do not attend if you are of a sensitive disposition.

Adults only.

52 PICK-UP (16MM)

(1986, United States, John Frankenheimer)

Three blackmailers think a married businessman is an easy payday. Harry Mitchell has other ideas. As their demands turn murderous, he starts learning what frightens each of them—and how to turn one predator against another.

Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret give this filthy Los Angeles thriller its battered heart. John Frankenheimer brings muscular precision to Elmore Leonard’s world of sleaze, crooked bargains and professional criminals making very amateur mistakes, with John Glover a wonderfully poisonous adversary.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.

Presented by Julien Allen.

Runtime: 110 mins

Certificate: 18

Tuesday 10/11

Bar 6:00pm

Film 6:30pm

16mm

Book here

ANOTHER WOMAN (16MM)

(1988, USA, Woody Allen)

A rented room, a ventilation grille, a stranger’s therapy session: Marion’s carefully ordered life begins to unravel through something she was never meant to hear. Listening to another woman’s unhappiness, the philosophy professor starts recognising the silences and compromises in her own.

Gena Rowlands makes this reckoning quietly shattering, finding tiny fractures beneath Marion’s formidable composure. Woody Allen’s intimate chamber drama, with Mia Farrow, Ian Holm and Gene Hackman, turns overheard words and unreliable memories into a devastating question: what if the life you have explained so well is the one you have failed to understand?

Presented by Agnė Qami of discreet.cine.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.

Runtime: 83 mins

Certificate: PG

Wednesday 11/11

Bar 6:00pm

Film 6:30pm

16mm

Book here

NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT

(1970, France, Liechtenstein, Jesús Franco)

A dancer wakes from dreams of murder convinced that she may have committed the crimes herself. Inside a remote villa, reassurance only makes things stranger: every lover, doctor and memory seems to have another purpose.

Diana Lorys gives Jesús Franco’s elusive thriller a fragile centre as the story drifts between gaslighting, desire and nightmare. Mirrors, bedrooms and unstable recollections take the place of firm ground. Its pleasure lies in that disorientation: an intimate psychological mystery that keeps changing shape just when you think you have found a way through.

Presented by Cosmik Debris.

FEMALE VAMPIRE

(1973, France, Belgium, Jesús Franco)

Countess Irina Karlstein moves through an island landscape with a hunger she cannot escape. Those drawn to her become victims; the poet who recognises her loneliness offers the possibility of something more dangerous than feeding: intimacy.

Lina Romay gives Jesús Franco’s vampire reverie its strange mixture of command and vulnerability. Drifting camera movements, misty locations and Daniel White’s score suspend the story between erotic fantasy and a melancholy dream. A film less interested in the mechanics of vampirism than in the terrible solitude of wanting what you cannot keep.

Presented by Cosmik Debris.

FOR Y'UR HEIGHT ONLY

(1981, Philippines, Eddie Nicart)

Agent 00 has a kidnapped scientist to rescue, an evil mastermind to stop and a gadget for almost every occasion. The odds are absurd. Weng Weng treats them as an invitation.

Eddie Nicart’s Filipino spy adventure gives its star a full arsenal of rooftop escapes, martial-arts encounters and Bond-style ingenuity. What makes it irresistible is the commitment: the film plays its impossible mission with an infectious mixture of swagger and invention. A scrappy international cult favourite powered by a performer who makes every entrance his own.

AFTER HOURS

(1985, United States, Martin Scorsese)

One flirtation, one taxi ride, one lost banknote: office worker Paul Hackett’s night in SoHo is already going badly. Getting home proves harder than surviving the artists, burglars, bartenders and furious strangers who keep dragging him further downtown.

Martin Scorsese turns New York into a beautifully rigged practical joke, with Griffin Dunne its increasingly desperate punchline. Michael Ballhaus’s prowling camera and Thelma Schoonmaker’s razor-sharp cutting make every coincidence feel like a conspiracy. A black comedy with the pulse of a thriller and the logic of your worst anxiety dream.

The ultimate bad luck movie for Friday 13th.

Runtime: 97 mins

Certificate: 15

Friday 13/11

Bar 6:00pm

Film 6:30pm

Digital

Book here

TIMES SQUARE

(1980, USA, Allan Moyle)

Two teenagers escape a psychiatric hospital and turn the streets of New York into their stage. As the Sleez Sisters, Pamela and Nicky invent a noisy new identity that parents, police and respectable society cannot comfortably contain.

Trini Alvarado and Robin Johnson give Allan Moyle’s cult film its bruised, rebellious heart. A tremendous punk and new-wave soundtrack propels a vision of friendship as self-invention, against a Midtown that has since disappeared. Ragged, romantic and fiercely attached to its outsiders, TIMES SQUARE is a love song to girls making themselves heard.

STAY

(2026, Ireland, Tracey Moberly)

STAY tells the story of an artist (The Artist) sentenced to do time in The Curfew Tower, with only a handheld puppet of Elvis (Puppet Elvis) as company. While doing time, The Artist is expected to write the second-best song he has ever written. And this song is for the Ghost of Elvis and is to be performed at The 25 Comeback Special. In reality The Artist is just trying to escape the gathering storm clouds of his inevitable midlife crisis. That, and the reality of being a bad father. The only dialogue in the film is an internal one between The Artist and Puppet Elvis.

STAY is probably the bleakest film you could ever watch. It contains no sex or violence, no kissing or killing, not even any fucking or fighting, or any of those other things some might want to vicariously experience via the medium of film. STAY is a film without HOPE.

The screening at The Nickel is to be the only screening in UK in 2026. Tracey Moberly, Tony Wright & Puppet Elvis will be there for a post screening interrogation. The former Bill Drummond will be there to chair the interrogation. He will also be there to stamp people’s wrists as they enter the building.

WARNING: It is expected that everyone attending this screening will bring their own handheld puppet to watch the film with them – No Puppet, No Entry. Also... Puppet Elvis will be the judge of the post Interrogation Puppet Contest.

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS

(1970, Czechoslovakia, Jaromil Jireš)

A pair of enchanted earrings offers Valerie protection as her village fills with vampires, corrupt holy men and relatives who will not stay in the same shape. Growing up here means discovering that familiar faces can become the strangest masks.

Jaromil Jireš makes a fairy tale from the collision of innocence, fear and awakening. Jan Curík’s luminous images and Luboš Fišer’s haunting score give the Czech New Wave fantasy the vividness of a half-remembered dream. Beautiful and deeply uncanny, it draws folk horror out of sunlight as readily as shadow.

Presented by Softcore Cinema Club.

MYSTERY DOJO: SURPRISE KUNG FU MATINEES

Enter the 36 Chambers of Grindhouse Cinema, with these Sunday mystery martial-arts matinees that harken back to the glory days of 42nd Street.

Expect deep-cut chopsocky plucked from the 70s and 80s screening on both digital and VHS - with bone-crushing bashers from the genre that mixed Chinese folklore and fantasy, spaghetti westerns, melodrama, Japanese samurai films and American genre cinema into an electrifying combo that inspired both the future of action films - and hip hop.

These Kung Fu flicks became an international sensation in the 1970s, particularly at the Grindhouse cinemas that proliferated in impoverished inner-cities. Here were movies in which working-class heroes stood up to oppression, speaking loud and clear to the marginalised underclasses around the world.

Bring the ruckus!

DONT LOOK BACK + BOB DYLAN CONCERT FOOTAGE

(1967, United States, D. A. Pennebaker)

Dylan on stage is only half the story. In hotel rooms, backstage corridors and combative interviews during his 1965 British tour, he is inventing—and resisting—the public figure everyone wants him to become.

D. A. Pennebaker’s camera catches the wit, the cruelty, the boredom and the sudden electricity without a narrator telling us what to think. From the cue cards of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to performances alive with concentration, this landmark music documentary puts you in the room at the moment a musician becomes an enigma.

Presented with a programme of Bob Dylan concert footage.

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID + BOB DYLAN CONCERT FOOTAGE

(1973, United States, Sam Peckinpah)

Pat Garrett takes a badge and a job: kill the friend who represents the life he has left behind. Billy the Kid keeps moving, even as the West is being bought, fenced and brought to heel around him.

James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson give Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac western its weathered soul. Bob Dylan drifts through as Alias and supplies songs that seem to mourn the landscape itself. Less a chase than a long farewell, this is a film about friendship becoming history—and the terrible price of choosing the winning side.

Presented with a programme of Bob Dylan concert footage.

TOKYO DRIFTER

(1966, Japan, Seijun Suzuki)

SEX AND FURY

(1973, Japan, Norifumi Suzuki)

Ocho Inoshika has the men who killed her father in her sights. A pickpocket, gambler and swordswoman moving through Meiji-era Tokyo, she finds her revenge tangled with yakuza interests, corrupt politicians and a British spy.

Reiko Ike commands Norifumi Suzuki’s pinky-violence landmark with an extraordinary combination of stillness and explosive force. Christina Lindberg adds another volatile presence to its political intrigue and pop-art spectacle. Snow, tattoos, blades and delirious colour turn a revenge story into a film whose visual audacity refuses to stay within any single genre.

LA PRISONNIÉRE

(1968, France, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

A gallery owner’s private photographs draw a young woman into a world where looking is never innocent. Fascination becomes an experiment in control, and the distance between observer and captive grows dangerously small.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s final film trades the monochrome menace of DIABOLIQUE for optical art, saturated colour and fractured reflections. The images are seductive precisely because they are traps. A feverish study of voyeurism and obsession from a master of suspense discovering new ways to make the act of seeing feel unstable.

THE TELEPHONE BOOK

(1971, USA, Nelson Lyon)

Alice receives an obscene phone call so extraordinary that she falls in love with the caller. Finding him means crossing a New York populated by voyeurs, fantasists and people with rather specialised ideas about communication.

Nelson Lyon’s lost countercultural comedy makes sexploitation collide with pop art, media satire and underground filmmaking. Stark monochrome photography and a restless parade of eccentrics turn the romantic quest into something wonderfully unstable. Dirty jokes become questions about loneliness and images, with the city itself answering back in the wrong voice.

WANDA

(1970, United States, Barbara Loden)

Wanda gives up custody of her children and drifts through Pennsylvania’s coal country with no plan that will survive the day. A petty criminal offers her a place beside him, but belonging comes with another set of orders.

Barbara Loden wrote, directed and stars in this extraordinary independent film, finding immense emotional force in pauses, uncertain gestures and shabby rooms. The camera grants attention to a woman other stories would hurry past. Unsentimental and profoundly humane, WANDA asks what freedom can mean when almost every available choice belongs to somebody else.

FREEWAY: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY

(1999, USA, Matthew Bright)

White Girl and Cyclona break out of detention and head for Mexico, trusting a promise of sanctuary that sounds suspiciously like another trap. Their trail of bad decisions turns into a filthy, violent rewrite of HANSEL AND GRETEL.

Natasha Lyonne and María Celedonio make an explosive double act in Matthew Bright’s grotesque fugitive fairy tale, with Vincent Gallo waiting at the far end of the road. Beneath its gleefully offensive surfaces is a world that keeps turning vulnerable people into predators. An abrasive midnight movie with a very crooked grin.

THE HAUNTED MOUSTACHE + Q&A

(2025, United Kingdom, Stewart Armstrong)

After inheriting a century-old moustache from an eccentric great-aunt, David Bramwell follows the trail of its former owner through séances, spiritualist churches, Brighton basement clubs and an increasingly strange occult odyssey.

Blending filmed monologue, memoir and psychedelic folklore, this funny and affecting modern fireside tale won a Special Mention Audience Award at CINECITY 2025. The screening is followed by an on-stage Q&A.

EROTIC WITCHCRAFT

(1972, France, Bepi Fontana, Mario Mercier)

Raised by a magician, a young man inherits a duty stranger than any ordinary family legacy: guarding La Goulve, the Daughter of the Golem. When occult power meets his desires, the boundary between the everyday and the supernatural begins to give way.

Mario Mercier and Bepi Fontana’s elusive French fantasy is a discovery from the wilder edges of seventies occult cinema. Sorcery, desire and the Golem legend make an unusual combination, promising a detour from familiar vampire and witchcraft stories into a much less mapped corner of the fantastic.

SISTERS

(1972, USA, Brian DePalma)

A reporter sees a murder through a window. By the time the police arrive, the evidence has vanished. Her investigation leads towards a model, a possessive ex-husband and a medical history nobody wants brought into the light.

Brian De Palma turns the pleasures of watching into a nasty liability. Split screens, fractured viewpoints and Bernard Herrmann’s agitated score make certainty increasingly impossible, while Margot Kidder gives the mystery its unnerving human face. A wickedly inventive early De Palma thriller, with Hitchcockian machinery leading somewhere much stranger.

MYSTERY MOVIE

DEADBEAT AT DAWN

(1988, USA, Jim Van Bebber)

Goose wants out of gang life. The street has other plans. When his attempt to leave ends in devastating violence, he is pulled back into a world where loyalty is temporary and revenge is the only reliable currency.

Jim Van Bebber writes, directs and hurls himself into this handmade Dayton action nightmare. Rooftops, graveyards and derelict buildings become an arena for bone-rattling stunts and feral physical commitment. Shot with the resourcefulness of punk cinema and the ambition of a martial-arts epic, it feels dangerous in ways polished action rarely does.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE

(1974, USA, Joseph Sargent)

Four armed men take a New York subway carriage and demand a ransom. Transit lieutenant Garber has an hour, a radio and a city bureaucracy that is almost as difficult to negotiate with as the hijackers.

Walter Matthau’s magnificent weary wit faces Robert Shaw’s icy precision in Joseph Sargent’s impeccably paced thriller. David Shire’s muscular score and the city’s abrasive humour keep the tension moving above and below ground. A hostage film in which procedure, personality and one very clever escape plan are equally lethal.

MORGIANA

(1972, Czechoslovakia, Juraj Herz)

Two sisters inherit a fortune. One inherits a murderous jealousy. A slow poison and an increasingly unreliable conscience turn their ornate household into a trap from which even the family cat seems unable to look away.

Iva Janžurová plays both women in Juraj Herz’s intoxicating Gothic fairy tale. Distorting lenses, lavish costumes and colour that seems to seep into the characters’ minds make beauty itself feel dangerous. A poisoned jewel of Czech cinema, where sibling rivalry becomes a hallucination and every sumptuous room conceals another reason to be afraid.

DILDO HEAVEN

(2002, United States, Doris Wishman)

Three roommates are tired of disappointing men and dead-end routines. Their pursuit of pleasure becomes a cheerfully unruly chain of fantasies, misunderstandings and encounters, all filtered through Doris Wishman’s gloriously peculiar comic imagination.

A late-career return from one of American exploitation cinema’s great independents, DILDO HEAVEN makes eccentric framing, mismatched voices and homemade ingenuity part of its language. Nothing moves quite as expected. Beneath the disreputable title is the unmistakable rhythm of an artist who spent a career finding her own way around the rules.

FINAL FLESH

(2009, USA, Ike Sanders)

A family awaits the end of the world. Four fetish-video companies are separately commissioned to film parts of the same absurd script. They must follow the words; almost everything else is up to them.

The resulting collision is unlike anything a conventional production could plan: mismatched rooms, matter-of-fact performances and apocalyptic non sequiturs delivered with total commitment. Written by Vernon Chatman, FINAL FLESH turns commissioned fantasy into a bizarre experiment in authorship. A Dada family sitcom transmitted from a civilisation that has received all the wrong instructions.

THE HEROIC TRIO

(1993, Hong Kong, Johnnie To)

INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION

(1970, Italy, Elio Petri)

A police chief murders his mistress and leaves evidence pointing directly at himself. He is testing a theory: that an institution built to enforce the law will refuse to recognise the guilt of the man who embodies it.

Gian Maria Volonté is magnificent—swaggering, childish, terrifying—in Elio Petri’s acid political satire. Ennio Morricone’s sly, lurching score helps make authority look both ridiculous and deadly. A murder investigation turned inside out, where the suspense lies in how far power can go before anyone dares to name what is in front of them.

COP (VHS)

(1988, USA, James B. Harris)

Lloyd Hopkins sees connections nobody else can see. The trouble is that the LAPD detective also sees rules as somebody else’s problem. Hunting a killer, he pushes his methods, marriage and already threadbare ethics towards breaking point.

James Woods brings terrifying conviction to James B. Harris’s stripped-down adaptation of James Ellroy’s BLOOD ON THE MOON. The case matters, but so does the unsettling pleasure Hopkins takes in being right. A cold, abrasive Los Angeles thriller in which detective brilliance and institutional brutality become dangerously difficult to separate.

Presented on VHS.

ERASERHEAD (ON 16MM)

(1977, USA, David Lynch)

DIABOLIQUE (16MM)

(1955, France, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

A cruel headmaster has made enemies of both his wife and his mistress. Together they devise the perfect murder. Then the body disappears—and the most frightening question becomes whether their victim is really dead.

Henri-Georges Clouzot turns damp corridors, a neglected swimming pool and two extraordinary performances into an almost unbearable machine of suspicion. Simone Signoret’s steel meets Véra Clouzot’s mounting terror in a thriller that understands how guilt makes every ordinary sound threatening. Go in knowing as little as possible; leave the secrets in the cinema.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

(1974, United States, Mexico, Sam Peckinpah)

A bounty, a dead man and one last chance to get out. Warren Oates’s down-at-heel piano player Bennie takes to the Mexican roads with his lover Elita, chasing a payday that becomes a filthy, heartbreaking personal crusade.

Sam Peckinpah strips the adventure film of glamour and finds something rawer: bruised tenderness, bitter comedy and a man arguing with a severed head. Oates is magnificent, his battered face carrying every bad bargain. Sun-blasted, disreputable and stubbornly alive, this is Peckinpah at his most defiantly personal.

Runtime: 112 mins

Certificate: 18

Tuesday 24/11

Bar 6:00pm

Film 6:30pm

Digital

Book here

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

(1964, France, West Germany, Jacques Demy)

They are young, in love and certain they will wait for each other. Then Guy is sent to Algeria, Geneviève discovers she is pregnant, and the future begins asking questions their romance cannot answer.

Every line is sung, every colour seems to carry a feeling, and Michel Legrand’s music makes ordinary heartbreak soar. Jacques Demy and Catherine Deneuve create a world of ravishing surfaces without protecting their characters from money, time or compromise. A musical of overwhelming beauty whose greatest surprise is how clear-eyed it is about love.

WHO ARE YOU, POLLY MAGGOO?

(1966, France, William Klein)

A television crew wants to discover the real Polly Maggoo. The fashion industry wants an image. Admirers want a fantasy. Somewhere inside the competing demands is a young American model who keeps slipping out of the frame.

Photographer William Klein turns his insider’s eye on the absurd theatre of fashion and celebrity. Metallic couture, mock-documentary interviews and surreal interruptions make a wickedly funny pop-art assault on the business of manufacturing personalities. A sixties satire whose question has only become more pointed: who gets to decide what an image means?

OVER THE EDGE

(1979, United States, Jonathan Kaplan)

New Granada has houses, roads and a bright suburban future. It has almost nothing for its teenagers. Boredom becomes solidarity, solidarity becomes defiance, and the adults discover that treating young people as a problem can make their fears come true.

Jonathan Kaplan’s cult youth film catches adolescence with unusual sympathy and bite. A young Matt Dillon, a remarkable rock soundtrack and the unruly energy of its cast make rebellion feel exhilarating before the consequences land. A suburban pressure cooker that refuses to dismiss the kids as either innocents or delinquents.

SMOOTH TALK

(1985, USA, Joyce Chopra)

For Connie, summer means music, shopping trips and practising the person she wants to become. Then an older stranger pulls up outside her house while she is alone, and ordinary flirtation begins turning into something she cannot easily name—or escape.

Laura Dern and Treat Williams are extraordinary in Joyce Chopra’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates. Sunlit teenage restlessness gives way to a confrontation whose menace grows almost imperceptibly. The film understands the thrill of being seen and the terror of being claimed, making its shift from coming-of-age drama to psychological nightmare devastating.

THE HEARTBREAK KID

(1972, USA, Elaine May)

Lenny is three days into his honeymoon when he spots the woman he thinks he should have married. The bride is upstairs with sunburn. He is downstairs selling himself a completely different future.

Elaine May makes romantic self-delusion almost unbearably funny. Charles Grodin turns every conversation into a sales pitch, while Jeannie Berlin gives the discarded Lila a presence the film refuses to let him wish away. A romantic comedy with surgical instincts, exposing the monstrous entitlement hidden inside one ordinary man’s idea of the perfect match.

NAKED LUNCH

(1991, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, David Cronenberg)

The bug powder is addictive. The typewriter is alive. And Bill Lee’s latest assignment may be coming from an insect intelligence service. Fleeing into the Interzone, he tries to write a report from a reality that will not stay still.

David Cronenberg fuses William S. Burroughs’s fiction and biography into a wonderfully deadpan nightmare of addiction and authorship. Peter Weller plays the impossible with perfect weary conviction, while grotesque organic machines make language horribly physical. A literary adaptation that succeeds by becoming its own mutant creature.

MYSTERY MOVIE

DIVA

(1981, France, Jean-Jacques Beineix)

A postman secretly records the opera singer who refuses to be recorded. Another cassette contains evidence that powerful people would kill to suppress. When the two worlds collide, Paris becomes a maze of hired killers, impossible escapes and sudden romance.

Jean-Jacques Beineix makes every surface sing: blue light, wet streets, lofts and métro tunnels turn a thriller into an art-pop daydream. Opera and street culture, immaculate design and scruffy obsession exist in the same enchanted city. A defining burst of cinéma du look, made for anyone who has ever loved an image—or a voice—too much.

SCREAMPLAY + DIRECTOR/STAR RUFUS BUTLER SEDER Q&A

(1984, USA, Rufus Butler Seder)

Aspiring screenwriter Edgar Allan arrives in Hollywood and lands a janitor’s job in a fleabag apartment building. His neighbours become characters in his script. Then the murders he writes start happening for real.

Rufus Butler Seder turns a tiny budget into an entire expressionist world: painted sets, silent-cinema tricks and stark monochrome give this Hollywood nightmare a handmade magic. Underground legend George Kuchar is unforgettable as the landlord. A funny, macabre love letter to movie obsession, where the dream factory looks like something assembled in a very gifted man’s bedroom.

Director and star Rufus Butler Seder joins us for a Q&A.

Runtime: 91 mins

Certificate: 18

Saturday 28/11

Bar 5:30pm

Film 6pm

Digital

Book here