117-119 Clerkenwell Road
London, EC1R 5BY
A fully licensed grindhouse cinema, bar and video shop
Shop + bar are open
during doors
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No late admittance after 15 minutes.
MERMAID LEGEND
(1984, Japan, Toshiharu Ikeda)
When a fisherman murders a woman to steal her land, her spirit returns from the sea to exact vengeance on the corrupt men who destroyed her life. What follows is a surreal blend of political thriller, ghost story, and feminist revenge tale.
Bathed in crimson light and ocean mist, Mermaid Legend channels the fury of Lady Snowblood through the dreamlike lens of the Japanese New Wave—a haunting, operatic vision of retribution and rebirth.
ECO-REVENGE DOUBLE FEATURE
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
CLEARCUT
(1991, Canada, Ryszard Bugajski)
In the wake of a failed protest against a logging company, a lawyer finds himself drawn into a violent confrontation led by an enigmatic Indigenous man who takes the fight far beyond the courtroom.
Shot in the forests of northern Ontario, Clearcut burns with moral ambiguity and environmental rage—part psychological thriller, part political parable. Graham Greene delivers a mesmerising, unsettling performance in this overlooked Canadian masterpiece.
ECO-REVENGE DOUBLE FEATURE
Doors 8.30pm
Film 9pm
VARIETY + MYSTERY SHORT (1961, 16 min)
(1983, USA, Bette Gordon)
A young woman takes a job selling tickets at a Times Square porn cinema and becomes fixated on one of its mysterious patrons. As her curiosity deepens into obsession, the boundaries between spectator and participant, fantasy and reality, begin to erode.
Co-written by Kathy Acker and shot in the decaying glow of early ’80s New York, Variety is a landmark of feminist independent cinema—part noir, part psychosexual study, and part urban dreamscape, alive with desire, danger, and unanswered questions.
THE GAZE GOES BOTH WAYS: Introduced with accompanying zine by Agnė Qami
Doors 5.30pm
Film 6pm
and
Doors 8pm
Film 8.35pm
RATBOY
(1986, USA, Sondra Locke)
Discovered living feral in the wilderness, a half-human, half-rat boy becomes an instant media sensation as exploiters and opportunists swarm to control his story. What begins as a tabloid curiosity evolves into a strangely tender, tragic fable about loneliness, fame, and otherness in Reagan’s America.
The directorial debut of Sondra Locke, Ratboy is a forgotten oddity of 1980s Hollywood—part creature feature, part social satire, and wholly unlike anything else to crawl out of the studio system.
SONDRA LOCKE DOUBLE FEATURE!
Introduced and programmed by Charlie Evans-Flagg
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
(1986, USA, Sondra Locke)
Discovered living feral in the wilderness, a half-human, half-rat boy becomes an instant media sensation as exploiters and opportunists swarm to control his story. What begins as a tabloid curiosity evolves into a strangely tender, tragic fable about loneliness, fame, and otherness in Reagan’s America.
The directorial debut of Sondra Locke, Ratboy is a forgotten oddity of 1980s Hollywood—part creature feature, part social satire, and wholly unlike anything else to crawl out of the studio system.
SONDRA LOCKE DOUBLE FEATURE!
Introduced and programmed by Charlie Evans-Flagg
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
DEATH GAME
(1977, USA, Peter S. Traynor)
A rainy night, a knock at the door, and two stranded young women seeking shelter. What seems like a harmless act of kindness soon spirals into a sadistic game of seduction and psychological torment.
A razor-edged chamber piece simmering with paranoia and sexual menace, Death Game turns domestic space into a battleground of guilt and desire. Long overshadowed by Eli Roth’s remake Knock Knock, this is the original—nastier, stranger, and far more dangerous.
SONDRA LOCKE DOUBLE FEATURE!
Introduced and programmed by Charlie Evans-Flagg
Doors 8.30pm
Film 9pm
THE SHOUT
(1978, UK, Jerzy Skolimowski)
In the windswept Devon countryside, a mysterious stranger intrudes upon a composer’s quiet life, claiming to have learned a supernatural “shout” capable of killing anyone who hears it. As the tale unfolds, the line between sanity and myth begins to blur.
A haunting collision of the pastoral and the surreal, The Shout channels English folklore through Skolimowski’s elliptical, dreamlike style—anchored by eerie sound design and unforgettable performances from Alan Bates, John Hurt, and Susannah York.
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
MYSTERY MOVIE
?
Not for the easily offended, and strictly programmed for adult audiences only - our mystery films are eye-popping forays into the bold and bonkers world of psychotronic cinema. Expect the unacceptable.
Doors 8:10pm
Film 8.45pm
BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
(1974, USA/Mexico, Sam Peckinpah)
When a Mexican crime boss puts a bounty on the man who impregnated his daughter, a down-on-his-luck bar pianist sees one last chance for fortune—and redemption. But what begins as a simple job descends into a grim, tequila-soaked odyssey through love, greed, and decay.
Bleak, beautiful, and unflinchingly personal, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia stands as Peckinpah’s most ferocious statement: a road movie from hell, drenched in dust, sweat, and doomed romance.
Doors 2.30pm
Film 3:15pm
(1974, USA/Mexico, Sam Peckinpah)
When a Mexican crime boss puts a bounty on the man who impregnated his daughter, a down-on-his-luck bar pianist sees one last chance for fortune—and redemption. But what begins as a simple job descends into a grim, tequila-soaked odyssey through love, greed, and decay.
Bleak, beautiful, and unflinchingly personal, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia stands as Peckinpah’s most ferocious statement: a road movie from hell, drenched in dust, sweat, and doomed romance.
Doors 2.30pm
Film 3:15pm
SYMPATHY FOR THE UNDERDOG
(1971, Japan, Kinji Fukasaku)
After ten years in prison, a yakuza boss returns to a changed Japan—his turf taken, his men scattered, his honour outdated. Determined to reclaim his dignity, he leads his ragtag crew to Okinawa for one final stand against the new corporate order of organised crime.
Shot with Fukasaku’s trademark verve and fatalism, Sympathy for the Underdog is a melancholy gangster elegy—part outlaw saga, part requiem for a disappearing code of honour.
Doors 5.15pm
Film 5.45pm
THE NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER
(1980, USA, Robert Butler)
A tough, New York City ex-cop relentlessly searches for his kidnapped teenage daughter, held by a deranged drifter who’s mistaken her for the child of a wealthy businessman. As the chase rages through the city’s derelict streets and subways, both men are pushed to the brink.
Restored at long last, this notorious cult thriller has been nearly impossible to see on any format except VHS for over four decades—a furious, grimy portrait of Manhattan at its wildest.
Doors 8.30pm
Film 9pm
CULTPIX PRESENTS: MAID IN SWEDEN
(1971, Sweden/USA, Dan Wolman)
A naïve young woman travels from her rural village to visit her sophisticated sister in Stockholm, only to find herself adrift in a world of desire, deception, and disillusion. What begins as a coming-of-age story unfolds into a quietly haunting portrait of innocence lost in the city’s cold light.
With its languid pace and melancholy tone, Maid in Sweden stands apart from the era’s sexploitation wave—an erotic drama steeped in alienation, longing, and the uneasy promise of liberation.
SUNDAY SINNERS WEEKLY DOUBLE FEATURE!
Doors 5.30pm
Film 6pm
CULTPIX PRESENTS: EXPOSED aka EXPONERAD
(1971, Sweden, Gustav Wiklund)
Christina Lindberg stars as Lena, a young woman who leaves her small town for Stockholm in search of independence and excitement—only to be drawn into a shadowy world of manipulation and control. Torn between erotic freedom and exploitation, Lena’s story unfolds as a cool, disquieting study of vulnerability and voyeurism.
Stylish, icy, and unsettling, Exposed captures the contradictions of early ’70s Swedish erotica—its promises of liberation undercut by loneliness and surveillance. Lindberg’s magnetic presence anchors one of her most haunting performances.
SUNDAY SINNERS WEEKLY DOUBLE FEATURE!
Doors 7.30pm
Film 8pm
(1971, Sweden, Gustav Wiklund)
Christina Lindberg stars as Lena, a young woman who leaves her small town for Stockholm in search of independence and excitement—only to be drawn into a shadowy world of manipulation and control. Torn between erotic freedom and exploitation, Lena’s story unfolds as a cool, disquieting study of vulnerability and voyeurism.
Stylish, icy, and unsettling, Exposed captures the contradictions of early ’70s Swedish erotica—its promises of liberation undercut by loneliness and surveillance. Lindberg’s magnetic presence anchors one of her most haunting performances.
SUNDAY SINNERS WEEKLY DOUBLE FEATURE!
Doors 7.30pm
Film 8pm
MULTIPLE MANIACS
(1970, USA, John Waters)
In the trash-strewn backstreets of Baltimore, Lady Divine presides over her travelling “Cavalcade of Perversion,” a sideshow of gleefully scuzzy provocations that barely contains her own escalating mania. When betrayal pushes her to the edge, the film spirals into a delirious rampage that slides between satire, hysteria, and apocalyptic excess.
A landmark of early underground cinema, Multiple Maniacs captures Waters’ Baltimore at its most feral—shot on ragged 16mm, fuelled by Catholic kitsch, and driven by the volatile charisma of Divine. What emerges is a grime-smeared portrait of American subculture in revolt: anarchic, confrontational, and strangely poignant beneath the chaos.
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
PINK FLAMINGOS
(1972, USA, John Waters)
Deep in the fringes of Baltimore’s counterculture, outlaw celebrity Divine is drawn into a grotesque contest for the title of “Filthiest Person Alive.” Her rivals—a deranged suburban couple running a black-market baby ring—set off a chain of retaliatory humiliations that escalate into an anarchic showdown where taste, decorum, and sanity are gleefully abandoned.
A cornerstone of midnight-movie culture, Pink Flamingos renders early-’70s America as a trash-strewn carnival of perversity and performance. Shot with guerrilla scrappiness and powered by the unshakeable bravado of Divine and the Dreamlanders, Waters transforms filth into a kind of anti-glamour folk art—a provocation that remains both historically vital and defiantly unassimilable.
Doors 8:15PM
Film 8:45PM
RAVENOUS
(1999, UK/USA/Mexico, Antonia Bird)
Upon receiving reports of missing persons at Fort Spencer, a remote Army outpost on the Western frontier, Capt. John Boyd investigates. After arriving at his new post, Boyd and his regiment aid a wounded frontiersman who recounts a horrifying tale of a wagon train murdered by its supposed guide – a vicious U.S. Army colonel gone rogue. Fearing the worst, the regiment heads out into the wilderness to verify the gruesome claims.
A wicked fusion of frontier myth, black comedy, and horror, Ravenous reframes westward expansion as a tale of consumption—territorial, bodily, and moral. Antonia Bird steers the film’s shifting tones with precision, aided by striking location work and Michael Nyman & Damon Albarn’s off-kilter score. The result is a sharply observed period piece that treats American manifest destiny as both a historical engine and a monstrous appetite.
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE
(1980, Italy, Antonio Margheriti)
Released from captivity in Vietnam, two American Army officers return to civilian life and discover they have acquired an insatiable taste for human flesh. A city is terrorised… as they stalk the inhabitants to satisfy their primitive appetites.
Blending post-Vietnam malaise with Italy’s cycle of urban thrillers, Cannibal Apocalypse shifts the cannibal film from the jungle to the metropolitan fringe, treating trauma as something both internalized and socially volatile. Margheriti grounds the exploitation shocks in a recognizably anxious late-1970s America, where returning soldiers, decaying infrastructure, and media hysteria intersect—producing a hybrid of war story and infection thriller that’s as grimy as it is oddly melancholic.
Doors 8:15pm
Film 8:45pm
A SNAKE OF JUNE
(2002, Japan, Shinya Tsukamoto)
In a rain-soaked Tokyo summer, a quiet mental-health counsellor receives a series of anonymous messages containing intimate photographs of herself. The blackmailer’s demands push her into parts of the city—and of her own desire—she has long suppressed, drawing her into a tense negotiation between exposure, vulnerability, and control.
Shot in a grainy blue-tinted palette, A Snake of June channels Tsukamoto’s industrial obsessions into a more intimate register: a psychosexual drama where humidity, architecture, and surveillance shape the characters’ inner lives. The result is a study of modern urban alienation that balances eroticism with psychological precision, using the city’s relentless rain and claustrophobic spaces to map the boundaries between repression and liberation.
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
TOKYO FIST
(1995, Japan, Shinya Tsukamoto)
A weary salaryman’s life begins to rupture when he crosses paths with a childhood friend who has transformed himself into a ferocious underground boxer. As rivalry takes hold, the man’s girlfriend drifts toward the fighter’s world of bruised flesh and ritualized violence, pushing all three into a cycle of desire, jealousy, and self-reconstruction.
Tokyo Fist reimagines the boxing film as an urban psychodrama, where bodies absorb the pressures of work, alienation, and city living. Tsukamoto’s kinetic camera, metallic palette, and jarring edits turn Tokyo into a pressure cooker of cramped apartments and overlit streets—a landscape where pain becomes a language of identity, and transformation arrives through impact rather than introspection.
Doors 8pm
Film 8:30pm
SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM
50th Anniversary Screening
(1975, Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
On the 50th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s still controversial masterpiece, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, join us for a special hosted screening offering rare insights into the making of one of the most important and influential films in 20th century cinema.
Doors 5.30pm
Film 6pm
MYSTERY MOVIE
?
Not for the easily offended, and strictly programmed for adult audiences only - our mystery films are eye-popping forays into the bold and bonkers world of psychotronic cinema. Expect the unacceptable.
Doors 8:15pm
Film 8.45pm
CUTTER’S WAY
(1981, USA, Ivan Passer)
When a drifting yacht salesman witnesses a body being dumped in a Santa Barbara alley, his hesitant report stirs the suspicions of his friend Richard Cutter—a volatile, disabled Vietnam veteran who channels his bitterness into a quixotic quest for justice. As Cutter presses the case, the trio he forms with his wife and friend becomes entangled in local privilege, buried secrets, and the uneasy moral terrain of post-Vietnam America.
A quietly devastating neo-noir, Cutter’s Way blends California sunshine with an undercurrent of disillusionment, capturing a community where wealth insulates guilt and loyalty becomes a fragile currency. Ivan Passer’s direction favours stillness and emotional abrasion over genre mechanics, while the performances—especially John Heard’s wounded ferocity—foreground lives shaped by war, loss, and stifled hope. The result is a haunting portrait of friendship and suspicion in an America struggling to recognise itself.
Doors 5.30pm
Film 6pm
CHRISTMAS EVIL
(1980, USA, Lewis Jackson)
Haunted since childhood by a traumatic glimpse of Santa Claus as something unsettlingly human, a lonely toy-factory worker drifts through adulthood with an almost devotional obsession for the holiday. As he grows increasingly disillusioned with corporate cynicism and everyday cruelty, his fixation hardens into a mission—first moral, then violent—as he attempts to enforce his own vision of Christmas “purity.”
More character study than conventional slasher, Christmas Evil blends urban melancholy with a gently surreal tone, capturing a New York caught between festivity and decay. Lewis Jackson’s film treats its protagonist less as a monster than as a product of isolation and fantasy, turning seasonal iconography into a portrait of fragile idealism buckling under social pressure. The result is a distinctive entry in holiday horror: mournful, odd, and quietly incisive about the myths we try—and fail—to live by.
Doors 8pm
Film 8:30pm
NIGHTFALL
(1956, USA, Jacques Tourneur)
A drifting commercial artist wanders through wintry Wyoming after stumbling into a pair of ruthless criminals and a suitcase of stolen money. Hunted across the snowfields and into Los Angeles, he becomes entangled with an insurance investigator and a sympathetic model, as his account of what happened grows increasingly fraught and contested.
A late-period noir from master stylist Jacques Tourneur, Nightfall distills the genre’s anxieties into wide-open landscapes and stark urban edges. Working from a David Goodis novel, Tourneur uses economical staging and offbeat rhythms to blur guilt, chance, and mistaken identity. The result is a lean, atmospheric thriller where moral uncertainty hangs as heavily as the winter light, and redemption feels perpetually out of reach.
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT
(1984, USA, Charles E. Sellier Jr.)
After witnessing his parents’ murder on Christmas Eve, a young boy is raised in a stern Catholic orphanage where punishment is confused with morality and fear becomes ritual. Years later, working in a small-town toy store during the holidays, his unresolved trauma resurfaces—triggering a violent descent that turns Santa’s red suit into an emblem of terror.
A flashpoint in 1980s moral-panic culture, Silent Night, Deadly Night filters slasher conventions through the anxieties of Reagan-era Americana: the collision of family values, religious discipline, and the commodified cheer of the holiday season. Lean, grubby, and unexpectedly sad beneath its notoriety, the film stands as a snapshot of an era when horror’s transgressions clashed loudly with its audience’s ideals.
Doors 8pm
Film 8:30pm
HEATED WORDS
Heated Words present a night of rarely seen films chronicling
New York's outlaw youth cultures of the 1970's and 80's.
Q&A with Shotgun director Steve Goodman.
Live heat pressing by Heated Words – bring your own shirts.
Music from specialist soundtrack label Unsettled Scores Records.
Exclusive printed program available featuring interviews, prison letters, previously unseen images and pages from ex-street gang member D.S.R’s scrapbook.
Including:
Heated Words (Rough Cut)
(2016, UK, Rory McCartney & Charlie Morgan) 30 mins.
The New York Graffiti Experience
(1976, USA, Fenton Lawless) 17 mins.
Shotgun
(1982, USA, Steve Goodman) 21 mins.
Magic Bluebird
(2024, USA, Mike Demar) 35 mins.
Doors 7.30pm
Screenings 8.30pm
Heated Words present a night of rarely seen films chronicling
New York's outlaw youth cultures of the 1970's and 80's.
Q&A with Shotgun director Steve Goodman.
Live heat pressing by Heated Words – bring your own shirts.
Music from specialist soundtrack label Unsettled Scores Records.
Exclusive printed program available featuring interviews, prison letters, previously unseen images and pages from ex-street gang member D.S.R’s scrapbook.
Including:
Heated Words (Rough Cut)
(2016, UK, Rory McCartney & Charlie Morgan) 30 mins.
The New York Graffiti Experience
(1976, USA, Fenton Lawless) 17 mins.
Shotgun
(1982, USA, Steve Goodman) 21 mins.
Magic Bluebird
(2024, USA, Mike Demar) 35 mins.
Doors 7.30pm
Screenings 8.30pm
AFFLICTION
(1997, USA/Canada, Paul Schrader)
In a snowbound New Hampshire town, a small-town policeman seizes on a local hunting accident as a chance to prove his worth—to his community, to his estranged daughter, and above all to himself. As he digs into the case, long-suppressed anger and childhood trauma resurface, pulling him into a tightening spiral of obsession that mirrors the cold, isolating landscape around him.
Adapted from Russell Banks’s novel, Affliction is a stark study of American masculinity shaped by violence, labour, and family legacy. Schrader’s restrained direction emphasises routine, silence, and winter’s oppressive weight, while Nick Nolte delivers a bruising portrait of a man struggling to escape inherited patterns. The film unfolds less as a mystery than as an inquiry into generational damage—unflinching, mournful, and anchored in a meticulous sense of place.
Doors 5:30pm
Film 6pm
COLD COMFORT
(1989, Canada, Vic Sarin)
Dolores has everthing she wants for her birthday: a party, 18 glowing candles, and Stephen, the handsome stranger who’s more than a guest. He’s a prisoner. Cold Comfort bristles with the suspense, passion and danger of three people caught up in a madman’s game.
Shot against the stark Canadian winter, Cold Comfort uses limited space and a small ensemble to build an atmosphere of creeping menace. Vic Sarin’s direction favours quiet ruptures over overt violence, letting power dynamics shift in small, disquieting increments. The result is a chamber-piece thriller about entrapment—emotional, physical, and familial—where the surrounding wilderness feels less threatening than the fragile, volatile equilibrium inside.
Doors 8.15pm
Film 8.45pm
THE GREAT SILENCE
(1968, Italy, Sergio Corbucci)
In the snowbound wilderness of Utah, a mute gunslinger known only as Silence drifts into a community terrorised by bounty hunters who exploit harsh winter lawlessness for profit. When a young widow seeks justice for her murdered husband, Silence’s intervention pits him against the glacial brutality of a legendary killer—and the indifferent authority that enables him.
One of the bleakest and most politically charged of all spaghetti westerns, The Great Silence transforms frontier myth into a study of economic predation and moral impotence. Corbucci’s stark compositions and Ennio Morricone’s mournful score frame a landscape where survival favours the ruthless and heroism is swallowed by the snow. The film’s uncompromising conclusion remains a landmark of the genre’s willingness to strip away illusion and confront the cost of violence with unflinching clarity.
Doors 5.30pm
Film 6pm
RAVENOUS
(1999, UK/USA/Mexico, Antonia Bird)
During the Mexican–American War, a disgraced officer is posted to the remote outpost of Fort Spencer, a half-abandoned station buried in the Sierra Nevada winter. When a starving stranger arrives with a tale of a wagon party driven to cannibalism, the garrison sets out to investigate—only to uncover a more insidious hunger, one that promises strength even as it destroys.
A mordant blend of frontier horror and black comedy, Ravenous reframes westward expansion as a cycle of consumption—territorial, bodily, and ideological. Antonia Bird’s sharp tonal control, combined with Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn’s jagged, off-kilter score, gives the film its singular rhythm. The result is a pointed, atmospheric critique of American mythmaking, where manifest destiny becomes indistinguishable from appetite, and survival demands an uneasy reckoning with the costs of power.
Doors 8pm
Film 8.30pm
THE PASSING
(1983, USA, John Huckert)
Two elderly World War II buddies are living - and dying - together in their small home. One becomes a patient where salvage-worthy, older attributes are combined with useable, younger body parts. He returns, unrecognized by the other.
Shot over several years on a shoestring budget, The Passing blends domestic realism with bleak sci-fi abstraction, creating a tone that feels simultaneously intimate and dislocated. Huckert uses fragmented editing, subdued performances, and a subdued suburban milieu to explore aging, guilt, and the desire to outrun death. The result is a strangely affecting hybrid—part genre experiment, part meditation on time—whose rough edges deepen its sense of melancholy and quiet unease.
Featuring an introduction by Video Bazaar
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
MYSTERY MOVIE
?
Not for the easily offended, and strictly programmed for adult audiences only - our mystery films are eye-popping forays into the bold and bonkers world of psychotronic cinema. Expect the unacceptable.
Doors 8:15pm
Film 8:45pm
THE SILENT PARTNER
(1978, Canada, Daryl Duke)
Toronto, Canada. A few days before Christmas, Miles Cullen, a bored teller working at a bank branch located in a shopping mall, accidentally learns that the place is about to be robbed when he finds a disconcerting note on one of the counters.
A chilly, precision-tooled thriller that turns a shopping-mall bank counter into the site of a psychological duel. Duke transforms a simple robbery setup into a battle of wills, where a mild-mannered teller’s quiet cunning clashes with a robber whose calm hides a streak of genuine menace.
Doors 3pm
Film 3:30pm
BLACK CHRISTMAS
(1974, Canada, Bob Clark)
As the residents of the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house prepare for the festive season, a stranger begins to harass them with a series of obscene phone calls.
Bob Clark’s pioneering slasher laces its yuletide setting with a creeping sense of domestic violation, turning the sorority house—supposed space of camaraderie—into an echo chamber of dread. Fragmented phone calls and unseen movements in the attic create an atmosphere where the familiar is forever on the verge of becoming grotesque.
Doors 5:30pm
Film 6pm
(1974, Canada, Bob Clark)
As the residents of the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house prepare for the festive season, a stranger begins to harass them with a series of obscene phone calls.
Bob Clark’s pioneering slasher laces its yuletide setting with a creeping sense of domestic violation, turning the sorority house—supposed space of camaraderie—into an echo chamber of dread. Fragmented phone calls and unseen movements in the attic create an atmosphere where the familiar is forever on the verge of becoming grotesque.
Doors 5:30pm
Film 6pm
DEAD MOUNTAINEER’S HOTEL
(1979, Estonia, Grigori Kromanov)
The police get a call-out to a lonely hotel in the Alps. When an officer gets to the hotel everything seems to be alright. Suddenly, an avalanche cuts them off from the rest of the world and strange things start happening.
Kromanov blends noir, locked-room mystery, and philosophical sci-fi into a snowbound enigma. As an avalanche seals off the remote hotel, the film drifts between genres with dreamlike confidence, its crisp Alpine setting at odds with the increasingly uncanny behaviour of its guests.
Doors 8pm
Film 8:30pm
NATURAL ENEMIES
(1979, USA, Jeff Kanew)
Paul Steward, editor of a scientific journal, considers his life to be an empty failure. Awake one morning after a sleepless night, he comes to a decision: this evening he will take a rifle and shoot and kill his wife, their three children and then himself.
A stark portrait of despair that approaches domestic life like a system quietly eroding from within. Kanew’s film refuses sensationalism, instead charting a suburban man’s catastrophic unraveling with a clinical, almost disquieting calm.
Doors 4:30pm
Film 5pm
SEEDS
(1968, USA, Andy Milligan)
‘Sown in incest! Harvested in hate!’
An angry, alcoholic matriarch tyrannizes her spoiled, grown-up children during an unwanted family get-together during Christmas, where someone begins killing them one by one.
Milligan’s scratchy, claustrophobic nightmare of familial rot condenses the director’s obsessions—resentment, repression, and bodies pushed to grotesque extremes—into a feral holiday gathering. Shot with his trademark intimate aggression, the film uses cramped interiors and jagged performances to evoke a family suffocating under its secrets.
Doors 7pm
Film 7:30pm
THE CHANGELING
(1980, Canada, Peter Medak)
After a tragic event happens, composer John Russell moves to Seattle to try to overcome it and build a new and peaceful life in a lonely big house that has been uninhabited for many years. But, soon after, the obscure history of such an old mansion and his own past begin to haunt him.
Medak’s elegantly paced ghost story entwines personal grief with a house whose emptiness seems to breathe. The film draws its power from atmosphere rather than spectacle: echoing corridors, the distant thump of a ball, and a protagonist whose mourning makes him porous to the past.
PART OF OUR GEORGE C. SCOTT DOUBLE FEATURE!
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
(1980, Canada, Peter Medak)
After a tragic event happens, composer John Russell moves to Seattle to try to overcome it and build a new and peaceful life in a lonely big house that has been uninhabited for many years. But, soon after, the obscure history of such an old mansion and his own past begin to haunt him.
Medak’s elegantly paced ghost story entwines personal grief with a house whose emptiness seems to breathe. The film draws its power from atmosphere rather than spectacle: echoing corridors, the distant thump of a ball, and a protagonist whose mourning makes him porous to the past.
PART OF OUR GEORGE C. SCOTT DOUBLE FEATURE!
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
THE EXORCIST III
(1990, USA, William Peter Blatty)
On the fifteenth anniversary of the exorcism that claimed Father Damien Karras’ life, Police Lieutenant Kinderman’s world is once again shattered when a boy is found decapitated and savagely crucified.
Blatty resurrects the philosophical and spiritual dread of the original Exorcist, not through spectacle but through mood, rhythm, and the grim patience of police procedural. The film slips between dream logic and grounded investigation as Kinderman confronts murders that echo a killer long dead.
PART OF OUR GEORGE C. SCOTT DOUBLE FEATURE!
Doors 8:15pm
Film 8:45pm
CUTTER’S WAY
(1981, USA, Ivan Passer)
Alex Cutter is a boozy, belligerent and deeply cynical Vietnam veteran whose encounter with a landmine during the war has left him minus an eye, a leg and an arm. When his drifter playboy friend Richard Bone is falsely accused of murder, Cutter sets out for revenge in his own inimitable style.
Cutter’s chaotic righteousness and Bone’s drifting moral inertia form a partnership as combustible as the conspiracy they half-stumble into. Atmospheric, bitterly funny, and emotionally precise, it stands among the most potent portraits of post-war American malaise.
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
THE SILENT PARTNER
(1978, Canada, Daryl Duke)
Toronto, Canada. A few days before Christmas, Miles Cullen, a bored teller working at a bank branch located in a shopping mall, accidentally learns that the place is about to be robbed when he finds a disconcerting note on one of the counters.
A chilly, precision-tooled thriller that turns a shopping-mall bank counter into the site of a psychological duel. Duke transforms a simple robbery setup into a battle of wills, where a mild-mannered teller’s quiet cunning clashes with a robber whose calm hides a streak of genuine menace.
Doors 8:15pm
Film 8:45pm
REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE
(2025, USA, Caroline Golum)
Between pandemics, people’s revolts and male institutions, this period film cheekily combines fantastic psychedelia and handmade sets. Inspired by the life story of Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic and the first woman to write a book in English.
With director Caroline Golum in person from NYC!
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
WAKE IN FRIGHT
(1971, Australia, Ted Kotcheff)
A young schoolteacher descends into personal moral degradation after finding himself stranded in a brutal, menacing town in outback Australia.
A descent into a uniquely Australian hell, Kotcheff’s outback nightmare traps its protagonist in a cycle of drink, violence, and ritualised masculinity. The film’s oppressive heat and unbroken tension evoke a place where social norms evaporate under the sun.
Doors 8pm
Film 8:30pm
BLACK CHRISTMAS
(1974, Canada, Bob Clark)
As the residents of the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house prepare for the festive season, a stranger begins to harass them with a series of obscene phone calls.
Bob Clark’s pioneering slasher laces its yuletide setting with a creeping sense of domestic violation, turning the sorority house—supposed space of camaraderie—into an echo chamber of dread. Fragmented phone calls and unseen movements in the attic create an atmosphere where the familiar is forever on the verge of becoming grotesque.
Doors 6pm
Film 6:30pm
SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT
(1984, USA, Charles E. Sellier Jr.)
After witnessing his parents’ murder on Christmas Eve, a young boy is raised in a stern Catholic orphanage where punishment is confused with morality and fear becomes ritual. Years later, working in a small-town toy store during the holidays, his unresolved trauma resurfaces—triggering a violent descent that turns Santa’s red suit into an emblem of terror.
A flashpoint in 1980s moral-panic culture, Silent Night, Deadly Night filters slasher conventions through the anxieties of Reagan-era Americana: the collision of family values, religious discipline, and the commodified cheer of the holiday season. Lean, grubby, and unexpectedly sad beneath its notoriety, the film stands as a snapshot of an era when horror’s transgressions clashed loudly with its audience’s ideals.
Doors 8:15pm
Film 8:45pm
PSYCHOTRONIC XMAS MARATHON
An all-day plunge into the delirious, the deranged, and the seasonally inappropriate. Curated from the outer reaches of exploitation and yuletide oddities, this Christmas tradition embraces everything unwholesome about festive cinema.
Expect deep cuts, tonal whiplash, and the peculiar warmth that comes from sharing truly questionable films with strangers - plus a few other festive surprises.
Four movies plus shorts and extras.
3PM - 12AM
DON’T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS
(1984, UK, Edmund Purdom/Alan Birkinshaw)
It’s just days before Christmas in London, but not everyone is full of good cheer - as a maniac with a pathological hatred of Santa Claus stalks the streets, butchering any man that’s unlucky enough to be wandering around dressed as Old Saint Nick.
A sleazy, oddly mournful London slasher that turns the city’s winter streets into a theatre of anti-festive carnage. The film’s patchwork production only adds to its charm: jagged edits, lurid lighting, and an atmosphere of grubby melancholy evoke a capital where goodwill has long curdled.
Doors 3pm
Film 3:30pm
DIAL CODE: SANTA CLAUS
(1989, France, Rene Manzor)
Thomas de Frémont, a precocious child obsessed with action films, sets himself up for a terrifying Christmas Eve after he unwittingly makes contact with a deranged psychopath who claims he’s Santa Claus.
Inventive, visually exuberant, and threaded with a dark fairy-tale logic, Dial Code: Santa Claus stands as one of the most striking European holiday thrillers of its era—a precursor to Home Alone with sharper teeth.
Doors 5pm
Film 5:30pm
CHRISTMAS EVIL
(1980, USA, Lewis Jackson)
Haunted since childhood by a traumatic glimpse of Santa Claus as something unsettlingly human, a lonely toy-factory worker drifts through adulthood with an almost devotional obsession for the holiday. As he grows increasingly disillusioned with corporate cynicism and everyday cruelty, his fixation hardens into a mission—first moral, then violent—as he attempts to enforce his own vision of Christmas “purity.”
More character study than conventional slasher, Christmas Evil blends urban melancholy with a gently surreal tone, capturing a New York caught between festivity and decay. Lewis Jackson’s film treats its protagonist less as a monster than as a product of isolation and fantasy, turning seasonal iconography into a portrait of fragile idealism buckling under social pressure. The result is a distinctive entry in holiday horror: mournful, odd, and quietly incisive about the myths we try—and fail—to live by.
Doors 7:30pm
Film 8pm
(1980, USA, Lewis Jackson)
Haunted since childhood by a traumatic glimpse of Santa Claus as something unsettlingly human, a lonely toy-factory worker drifts through adulthood with an almost devotional obsession for the holiday. As he grows increasingly disillusioned with corporate cynicism and everyday cruelty, his fixation hardens into a mission—first moral, then violent—as he attempts to enforce his own vision of Christmas “purity.”
More character study than conventional slasher, Christmas Evil blends urban melancholy with a gently surreal tone, capturing a New York caught between festivity and decay. Lewis Jackson’s film treats its protagonist less as a monster than as a product of isolation and fantasy, turning seasonal iconography into a portrait of fragile idealism buckling under social pressure. The result is a distinctive entry in holiday horror: mournful, odd, and quietly incisive about the myths we try—and fail—to live by.
Doors 7:30pm
Film 8pm
DIAL CODE: SANTA CLAUS
(1989, France, Rene Manzor)
Thomas de Frémont, a precocious child obsessed with action films, sets himself up for a terrifying Christmas Eve after he unwittingly makes contact with a deranged psychopath who claims he’s Santa Claus.
Inventive, visually exuberant, and threaded with a dark fairy-tale logic, Dial Code: Santa Claus stands as one of the most striking European holiday thrillers of its era—a precursor to Home Alone with sharper teeth.
Doors 5pm
Film 5:30pm
SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT
(1984, USA, Charles E. Sellier Jr.)
After witnessing his parents’ murder on Christmas Eve, a young boy is raised in a stern Catholic orphanage where punishment is confused with morality and fear becomes ritual. Years later, working in a small-town toy store during the holidays, his unresolved trauma resurfaces—triggering a violent descent that turns Santa’s red suit into an emblem of terror.
A flashpoint in 1980s moral-panic culture, Silent Night, Deadly Night filters slasher conventions through the anxieties of Reagan-era Americana: the collision of family values, religious discipline, and the commodified cheer of the holiday season. Lean, grubby, and unexpectedly sad beneath its notoriety, the film stands as a snapshot of an era when horror’s transgressions clashed loudly with its audience’s ideals.
Doors 8:15pm
Film 8:45pm
THE GREAT SILENCE
(1968, Italy, Sergio Corbucci)
In the snowbound wilderness of Utah, a mute gunslinger known only as Silence drifts into a community terrorised by bounty hunters who exploit harsh winter lawlessness for profit. When a young widow seeks justice for her murdered husband, Silence’s intervention pits him against the glacial brutality of a legendary killer—and the indifferent authority that enables him.
One of the bleakest and most politically charged of all spaghetti westerns, The Great Silence transforms frontier myth into a study of economic predation and moral impotence. Corbucci’s stark compositions and Ennio Morricone’s mournful score frame a landscape where survival favours the ruthless and heroism is swallowed by the snow. The film’s uncompromising conclusion remains a landmark of the genre’s willingness to strip away illusion and confront the cost of violence with unflinching clarity.
Doors 5.30pm
Film 6pm
WAKE IN FRIGHT
(1971, Australia, Ted Kotcheff)
A young schoolteacher descends into personal moral degradation after finding himself stranded in a brutal, menacing town in outback Australia.
A descent into a uniquely Australian hell, Kotcheff’s outback nightmare traps its protagonist in a cycle of drink, violence, and ritualised masculinity. The film’s oppressive heat and unbroken tension evoke a place where social norms evaporate under the sun.
Doors 8pm
Film 8:30pm
THE CHANGELING
(1980, Canada, Peter Medak)
After a tragic event happens, composer John Russell moves to Seattle to try to overcome it and build a new and peaceful life in a lonely big house that has been uninhabited for many years. But, soon after, the obscure history of such an old mansion and his own past begin to haunt him.
Medak’s elegantly paced ghost story entwines personal grief with a house whose emptiness seems to breathe. The film draws its power from atmosphere rather than spectacle: echoing corridors, the distant thump of a ball, and a protagonist whose mourning makes him porous to the past.
Doors 4:30pm
Film 5pm
DIAL CODE: SANTA CLAUS
(1989, France, Rene Manzor)
Thomas de Frémont, a precocious child obsessed with action films, sets himself up for a terrifying Christmas Eve after he unwittingly makes contact with a deranged psychopath who claims he’s Santa Claus.
Inventive, visually exuberant, and threaded with a dark fairy-tale logic, Dial Code: Santa Claus stands as one of the most striking European holiday thrillers of its era—a precursor to Home Alone with sharper teeth.
Doors 7:30pm
Film 8pm
DAY OF THE BEAST
(1995, Spain, Álex de la Iglesia)
The story revolves around a Basque Roman Catholic priest dedicated to committing as many sins as possible, a death metal salesman from Carabanchel, and the Italian host of a TV show on the occult. These go on a literal “trip” through Christmas-time Madrid to hunt for and prevent the reincarnation of the Antichrist.
De la Iglesia’s apocalyptic Christmas black comedy spins chaos from the collision of faith, pop-culture detritus, and late-’90s Madrid nightlife. Frenetic and darkly hilarious, the film frames its doomsday plot as a critique of media spectacle and religious paranoia.
Doors 5:30pm
Film 6pm
STRANGE DAYS
(1995, USA, Kathryn Bigelow)
Former policeman Lenny Nero has moved into a more lucrative trade: the illegal sale of virtual reality-like recordings that allow users to experience the emotions and past experiences of others. While they typically contain tawdry incidents, Nero is shocked when he receives one showing a murder.
Sleek, urgent, and morally tangled, Strange Days fuses cyberpunk aesthetics with deeply human concerns, capturing a society teetering between collapse and reinvention as the century turns.
Doors 8pm
Film 8:30pm
(1995, USA, Kathryn Bigelow)
Former policeman Lenny Nero has moved into a more lucrative trade: the illegal sale of virtual reality-like recordings that allow users to experience the emotions and past experiences of others. While they typically contain tawdry incidents, Nero is shocked when he receives one showing a murder.
Sleek, urgent, and morally tangled, Strange Days fuses cyberpunk aesthetics with deeply human concerns, capturing a society teetering between collapse and reinvention as the century turns.
Doors 8pm
Film 8:30pm
THE NICKEL NEW YEARS EVE PARTY
Details to follow...
Digital
Wednesday
31.12
Tickets soon
︎
117-119 Clerkenwell Road
London, EC1R 5BY
A fully licensed grindhouse cinema, bar and video shop
Shop + bar are open
during doors
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