!Facebook Event Page!

The Setup

Horror movies derive a great deal of their tension from our darkest fears of everyday places and things. In this case, those very things are the fauna of Mother Nature herself. That’s right. Our pets, our animal bretheren, and those cute fuzzy creatures that always populate the background of the latest Disney animated “classic.” These films seek to prove to you just how…terrifying a fluffball of fuzzy furry fury can truly be.

Squirrels are adorably harmless creatures that populate our back yards and woodlands. But what about rabid squirrels? Dear god! That’s scary!!! But wait, what if they were wait-for-it. . . Radioactive Rabid Vampire Squirrels? That’s our movie! R.R.V.S: Curse of the Blood Acorn

Every era has a flagship “Killer Animals” movie, in which animals are corrupted by whatever the culture was afraid of at the time. Radiation, disease, communism, technology, fast food, etc. turn animals into some sort of rabid killer…or otherwise piss them off so much that they decided-collectively or on their own-that they’ve had enough.

The Formula

Take the cutest animal you can think of. Now expose it to a nuclear, biological or chemical agent that makes it more blood thirsty than a drunk hockey fan snorting a fistful of speedballs and ground up PCP. Stand back and watch the fun. Additionally, every Killer Animal movie will have one of the following scenes:

• “Awww. .  . how cute. .” Some idiot will attempt to pet, snuggle or capture the now amazingly dangerous animal and loose a limb, possibly their life.
• “Dear God, They’re everywhere!!” It will turn out that either one animal is so fast it’s everywhere at once, or it spreads it’s ichor through the local animal population turning them all against the humans.
• There will be an “Expert” Someone who has dealt with this of thing before, back in the 50’s, but it was covered up by the government.
• KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!: At some point one of the formerly domesticated monsters will be set ablaze.

The Menu

In addition to our typical selection of chips, beer, liquor, and snacks-there will be:

The Booze: Wild Turkey, Warm Woolly Sheep

Because in the face of such terrifying and horrible movies, we need a warm glass of milk to calm down our nerves (mixed with booze, of course).

The Food: The Flesh of Deadly Animals! Or, you know, Peeps

That’s right: BEEF JERKEY to prove who’s at the top of the food chain, and marshmallow animal effigies for ritual burnings.

The Movies

Night of the Lepus (1972): A regular feature of Sunday afternoons in the 80’s, this movie proves that with good sound production, you can almost make rabbits scary. Almost. The beasties terrorize a barely populated western town for an entire evening.

Black Sheep (2006): Chris Farley is back from the grave and looking to eat EVERYONE! No. Wait. Even scarier! This movie is about killer sheep rampaging through the gorgeous landscape of New Zealand. It has everything: flesh-eating zombie sheep, flying Terry Tate sheep and…wait for it: WERESHEEP. Already a cult classic everywhere else in the world, we’re going to give this movie its due.

Suggested Alternatives

Orca (1977) : A strange fever dream of a movie, whose lesson is this: DO NOT KILL BABY WHALES, or their parents will hunt you to ends of the earth.

Tentacles (1977): Wow, ’77 was a year for movies about dangerous marine life, eh? An “all-star cast” (read: Henry Fonda) are terrorized by a giant octopus. The IMDB error page says it all: “Factual errors: Octopuses don’t roar.”

Slugs (1988): Cavalcade Staff Writer John Higgins was seven when he first saw this movie. It was funny even then.

This article was co-authored with John Higgins.

It’s about goddamned time I had fun watching a movie. The Hollywood adaptation of 80s TV staple The A-Team is a laugh riot, and in a good way.

We start it off right, somewhere in Mexico, where we meet Hannibal (Liam Neeson), B.A. Baracus (Quinten Jackson), Howling Mad Murdock (Sharlto Copley) and Face (Bradley Cooper) in a completely silly but awesome sequence. We jump ahead 8 years (and 80 successful missions) to the final days of withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, meaning it takes place in the future, I suppose.

The boys are tricked by a barely competent, completely evil C.I.A. agent named Lynch (Patrick Wilson),  who dupes them into . . . standing too close while someone else blows up some counterfeit money and the team’s commanding general. That someone else is, in fact, the ultra-competent military contractor Pike (Brian Bloom), the first villain since Ledger’s Joker to pose a credible threat to a protagonist. He’s just a great screen presence and actually presents a real menace.

The plot really isn’t worth mentioning, as it’s poorly done and more than a little silly. There’s actually a reveal that’s straight out of Scooby Doo . What is worth mentioning: this movie is freakin’ hysterical. At it’s heart, The A-Team is a comedy, but unlike most comedies, things explode a lot. There are scenes that are just sublime in their humor, especially those devoted to making fun of the CIA and their legendary incompetence. Between Pike being a rather scary guy and Lynch being arrogant, yet incompetent in a way we haven’t seen since Cobra Commander, their dynamic yields as many laughs as the heroes’ shenanigans.

Patrick Wilson does a fine job as Lynch. He’s the sort of guy you just want to punch in the throat. At one point, he says a video of a building actually being blown up looks just like Call of Duty, which is something a strawberry douche would say.

The action set pieces are absurdly awesome, as well. We’ve all seen the tank falling out of the sky via parachute in the preview, but how they get out of it is a site to behold.

Really, the best part of this movie, much like the Losers, is the characters just being goofy despite their lives being in constant danger. The real fun of this film is the endless string of great lines and the dynamic between the four main players. Even Quinton Jackson does a great job as Baracus, and well, I don’t expect much from MMA guys after the tragedy that was Universal Soldier: Regeneration.

Overall, this movie is worth the price of admission, but only if you approach it in the way it was intended. It is a comedy through and through. Although, unlike the original show, it does have a body count …the 80’s were, of course more innocent times. Couple this with The Losers, and it’s a recipe for a Cavalcade about people who just can’t take being shot at seriously.

If you’re interested:

CAVALCADE OF SCHLOCK PRESENTS SUMMER OF SCHLOCK OPENING EVENT!

MISFITS, MONSTERS AND MAYHEM!

Summer of Schlock will take place at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Gallery located at 8230 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, one block from the Silver Spring Metro, on Saturday, June 26, 2010. The first film will start at 9pm, to be followed by a brief intermission leading to the final movie of the double feature. For more information on The Cavalcade of Schlock, contact Micah Pearson or John Higgins.

Pearson was initially surprised by the interest others had for the Cavalcade “When I first came up with the idea for this thing, it was just a way to get a couple friends together and have a few laughs. But after the first few meetings, we couldn’t fit all the people in my apartment anymore!” It was then that they found their current home at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Gallery.

A combination of book club, drive-in cinema, and performance art, the Cavalcade of Schlock seeks to bring together the joys of bad movies and good friends in a pop-culture extravaganza. All summer the brave volunteers will select a theme and choose 2 films from a vast array of nearly forgotten cult classics of exploitation and B-movie cinema. They then, as a group, provide food and beverages along said theme. It’s an interactive, raucous experience that evokes the anarchic energy of a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening while taking advantage of the nicer weather in the summer months.

The Cavalcade of Schlock, the brainchild of DC Metro area resident Micah Pearson, hosting an outdoor event showing both the classic movie The Goonies (1985), a tale of adventure and friendship shared by a band of misfit kids and the lesser known Monster Squad (1987), also about a band of misfit kids, only they fight monsters! This even is the first of a three month long series: The Summer of Schlock.

Details Below:

The Goonies is a 1985 American adventure-comedy film directed by Richard Donner. The screenplay was written by Chris Columbus from a story by executive producer Steven Spielberg. A band of kids from the “Goon Docks” neighborhood of Astoria, Oregon, hoping to save their homes from demolition, go on an adventure to find the buried treasure of One-Eyed Willy, a legendary 17th-century pirate.

The Monster Squad is a comedy/horror film written by Shane Black and Nicholas Hill and directed by Fred Dekker (who also wrote/directed Night of the Creeps). It was released by Tri-Star Pictures on August 14, 1987. The film features the classic monsters (re-imagined by a team of special effects artists including Stan Winston), led by Dracula (Duncan Regehr).

I’m going to level with you guys:  Black Dynamite may, in fact, be the greatest movie ever made, and thus, the following review will not do it any sort of justice.  Much like The Matrix (1999), no one can be told what Black Dynamite is, you have to see it for yourself.

Directed and co-written by Scott Sanders, Black Dynamite is a hilarious movie, and the parts that aren’t funny are totally badass…and the parts that aren’t badass, are even MORE BADASS.  Yeah, it’s like that.  A send-up of the Blaxploitation films of the ’70s, it could easily be compared to Keenan Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka! (1988) .  But while Wayans’ film is also rooted in the Blaxploitation genre, it’s really in the style of the Zucker Bros. parodies like Airplane! (1980) and The Naked Gun (1988). Black Dynamite on the other hand, turns Blaxploitation conventions and clichés up to 11, goes beyond mere parody, and in turn becomes the purest Blaxploitation film ever.

Michael Jai White stars as the titular Black Dynamite, the baddest mofo in the history of bad mofos.  When he isn’t running his nightclub, pimping hos, avenging his brother Jimmy’s death, protecting the weak, or simultaneously sexually satisfying three women at once; he does what he does best: TAKE IT TO THE MAN! This time, though, he’s got his work cut out for him.  In under 90 minutes, Black Dynamite has to clean up the streets, exact bloody vengeance, protect a foxy female force for change in the community, thwart a government plot to shrink black mens’ pride and joy and, as mentioned above, stick it to The Man.  While it’s a good thing Black Dynamite also just happens to be “the greatest CIA agent the CIA ever had in the history of the CIA,” it’s fortunate he’ll also have some help from an assortment of a few of the goofiest of Black militants and baddass pimps (including Arsenio Hall and Bokeem Woodbine)!

The driving force behind the whole picture is Michael Jai White.  It was his vision and utter commitment to badassery that makes this film a sheer joy to watch.  You’ve loved him in such films as Spawn (1997), Universal Soldier: The Return (1999) , both The Toxic Avenger II (1989) and III (1989) , and The Dark Knight (2008) .  Can we all just agree that he’s the man already?  Or at the very least, can you all go out and watch the highly underrated Thick as Thieves (1998)?  It’s also directed by Scott Sanders, and is the best low-budget crime flick I’ve seen that didn’t have a “written by Elmore Leonard” credit. However, you should definitely check out Black Dynamite first…

…and do not interrupt his Kung Fu.