USA

Synopsis:
In the year 3978A.D. a spaceship with a crew of 4 crashes down on a distant planet. One of the crew members had died in space and the other 3 head out to explore the planet. They soon learn that the planet is much like their own. They then find the planet is inhabited by intelligent apes. One of the men is shot and killed and the others are taken to the apes’ city. There, one undergoes brain surgery and is put into a state of living death. The other befriends some of the apes but is feared by most. After being put through ape trial he escapes with a female human native to the planet. After helping his ape friends escape a religious heresy trial he escapes out into the wilderness with the female. There he learns the planet might not be so distant after all…Read More »

Quote:
Thorne Smith is a name one hardly ever hears these days, and that’s a shame. In the 1920s and early ’30s, he was the popular author of a genre-defining series of novels in which mortal men broke out of their humdrum lives to embark on comic-erotic, supernaturally tinged adventures in the company of an exciting woman (or women). The most popular of these, Topper, was filmed in 1937, three years after Smith’s death. (Smith’s novel The Passionate Witch also became the basis for a classic film comedy, I Married a Witch (1942), and later the TV series Bewitched.)Read More »

Synopsis:
In the early 1950s Howard Prince, who works in a restaurant, helps out a black-listed writer friend by selling a TV station a script under his own name. The money is useful in paying off gambling debts, so he takes on three more such clients. Howard is politically pretty innocent, but involvement with Florence – who quits TV in disgust over things – and friendship with the show’s ex-star – now himself blacklisted – make him start to think about what is really going on.Read More »

Quote:
Fred Halsted’s last worthwhile film! Shot at his own “stand-up fuck club.”

This film features a great punk/new wave soundtrack featuring the following songs:Read More »

A Canadian living in London is trying to succeed as a prizefighter, without much luck. He meets the sister of a local mob leader, and she soon draws him into the gang’s activities. When he finds himself being drawn into a murder plot, he finally realizes that his lover is only using him, and determines to escape the gang – but things don’t turn out the way he planned.Read More »

Orange Sunshine is the never-before-told story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love – a spiritual group of surfers and hippies in California, which became the largest suppliers of LSD during the 60’s and 70’s. This feature-length doc follows their rise to star-status in Psychedelic movement and the “bad trip” that followed.Read More »

Quote:
Stars Playgirl discovery Roger Huckstex in his big screen/feature film debut. Hot voyeurism as we cruise around L.A. with Roger in his milk truck. Kinky happenings as he discovers new uses for dildoes fastened to his hanging jockstrap.Read More »

Quote:
The Glass System, made from images shot in New York and Calcutta, looks at life as it is played out in the streets. Every corner turned reveals activities both simple and unfamiliar: a knife sharpener on a bicycle; a tiny tightrope walker; a man selling watches in front of a department store on Fifth Avenue; a hauntingly slow portrait of the darting eyes of schoolgirls on their way home; the uncompleted activities of a young contortionist. The sound in the film (which is from a Bengali primer written by British missionaries) is a meditation on how the English language teaches ideas about culture which are often incongruous. The disjunction between what you hear and what you see evokes reflections about the impact of globalization and the hegemony of Western-style capitalism.Read More »

Quote:
The last of this loose trilogy is Sextool. This is probably the most complex of Halsted’s films, with radical narrative shifts and some of the — still — raunchiest sex scenes in all of non-amteur gay porn. Sextool features the director’s trademark faceless machos: a pair of cops who shove their nightstick up a trick ‘s ass, and a group of sweaty gangbangers who whip, fuck, and fist a cornfed blonde sailor on a bunk bed without a mattress. This scene offers a distillation of Halsted’s world-view. The ruthless abuse of the neatly dressed, boyish, sweet-faced sailor is the director’s most pointed assault on everything wholesome that he hated in postwar American culture. The sailor-boy’s enthusiastic acceptance of his abuse is Halsted’s proof that the mindless “goodness” and optimism of the rising middle class deserved to be attacked, and he does it with gusto. Like the sailor, Joey Yale appears as a too-willing bottom, eagerly embracing the authentic abuse that the real Fred Halsted dishes out. Sadly, the culture wasn’t as accommodating as Yale; these films were censored and remain difficult, and in the case of Sextool, virtually impossible to see (much less own) even today outside rare cinematheque and museum screenings.Read More »