B-to-Z double bill at Cinematek | Offscreen
Every last Friday of the month, we collaborate with the Cinematek's B-to-Z rendez-vous in Brussels, a moment in the history of alternative cinema that shouldn't be missed. Unearthed from the dark recesses of the archive: hilarious B-movies, blood-chilling thrillers, Gialli, slashers and other exploitation cinema gems… Take advantage of the 2-for-1: two films with a common theme for the price of a single ticket.
31 March 2017
Like every year, the B-to-Z of March is linked to the festival. With famous schizophrenics as this month's theme, we present “Dr. Jekyll and His Women”, Borowczyk's highly personal and sexualised version of the classic story. A second split personality can be found in...
24 February 2017
The anthology film (also known as the omnibus or portmanteau film) is a feature film that consists of several short films, made by one or more directors. Ealing Studios' "Dead of Night" (1945) was a landmark in the history of British horror. Amicus Productions, rival...
27 January 2017
The vigilante film is one of cinema's most controversial subgenres, featuring heroes that take the law into their own hands.With Quentin Tarantino as a big fan, "Rolling Thunder" is one of the best known examples of the genre. In some way a "Taxi Driver Part 2" it...
30 December 2016
John Carpenter's "Big Trouble in Little China" was a rather unusual film at the time of its release. A mixture of redneck-adventure comedy with fantastic martial arts, in the spirit of Tsui Hark's "Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain", still underestimated by western...
25 November 2016
Movie monsters come in all shapes and sizes. And if they're from outer space, you would expect those forms to be most bizarre and unnatural. But this can disappoint. Most extraterrestrials in cinema have distinctly humanoid characteristics or look suspiciously like...
28 October 2016
In the early seventies, French cinema was enriched by the work of several cineasts who excelled in a – for its time – daring combination of surrealism and eroticism. The films of Jean Rollin are drenched in typical French fantastique, full of phantasmagorical imagery...
30 September 2016
There's no need to seek a deeper sociological explanation for the wave of small monsters that flooded the cinema's and video stores in the eighties. It had just one sole reason, and that was the gigantic success of Joe Dante's “Gremlins”. Soon, the public had to endure...
26 August 2016
Dangerous sea monsters are not only found on the ocean floor like in last month's B-to-Z: this time around, the creatures come on land to wreak havoc!In "The Horror Of Party Beach", American schlockmeister Del Tenney ("I Eat Your Skin", "The Curse of the Living...
29 July 2016
Are you spending the summer in Brussels, away from the crowded beaches of the Costa del Sol? B-to-Z invites you to take a plunge into the deep… and end up in the clutches of two sea monsters!In the late eighties, sci-fi made a U-turn, away from distant galaxies as it...
24 June 2016
The release of "The Force Awakens" reinforced the status of George Lucas' space opera as the most succesful film franchise ever to play the theatres. The 1977 release of the saga's first film was already a massive hit and led to a whole series of rip-offs and spoofs....
27 May 2016
Hospitals: we'd rather get out of them than wind up in them. Painful examinations, misdiagnosis and medical blunders: the corridors of the medical institutions are full of dread of illness and death. Genre filmmakers are eager to tap into this fear. The little known...
29 April 2016
Blind heroes chased by mysterious killers: nail-biting tension and masterful mise-en-scène in this double bill."Blind Terror" is a hidden gem of suspense cinema with Mia Farrow in one of her best acting performances as a blind woman chased by a mysterious maniac....
26 February 2016
"The Reflecting Skin" is the first film by the British director Philip Ridley (who made only three films in twenty years). A creepy, dreamlike journey into the magical universe of childhood, set in a disquieting and unreal decor of rural America. A young Viggo...
29 January 2016
On the occasion of the release of Quentin Tarantino's “The Hateful Eight”, this B-to-Z offers you a trip to the western all'italiana universe that inspired the American filmmaker.“Il Pistolero dell'Ave Maria” (“Forgotten Pistolero”) is one of the highlights from the...
25 December 2015
Voodoo is a religion that was imported by African slaves to the West-Indies. Hollywood used it for the first time as a theme in “White Zombie” (1932) but it would soon be a staple in the horror genre.The excellent Hammer production “The Plague of the Zombies” bathes in...