By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Among the more than 100 feature films showing at New York City’s Tribeca Festival beginning this Thursday, June 5, the wildest, craziest and scariest will be seen in the Escape from Tribeca section. Spanning the entire spectrum of horror, action, black comedy and other cultish genres, the Escape program was curated by Matt Barone and Jonathan Penner, who preview their selections in this RUE MORGUE chat.
Barone, who previously oversaw Tribeca’s now-defunct Midnight section, and Penner, who spent a number of years as an actor with credits including JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY and SNOOP DOGG’S HOOD OF HORROR, have assembled an impressive lineup of films old and new. In the fright category, Escape will host the world premieres of QUEENS OF THE DEAD, an LGBTQ+ zombie film from Tina Romero (you-know-who’s daughter); Josh Johnson and Grayson Tyler Johnson’s THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN, a documentary about the grindhouse auteur; Lauris Abele and Raitis Abele’s DOG OF GOD, a Latvian animated witchcraft saga employing some of the team from the Oscar-winning FLOW; Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman’s MAN FINDS TAPE, about a documentarian and her web-series-creator brother confronting supernatural evil in their Texas hometown; and ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE, a violent thriller about a falsely imprisoned man confronting small-town racism upon his release, written and directed by RZA. Also in the lineup: the New York premiere of PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS, an animated entry in the alien-hunter saga from PREY’s Dan Trachtenberg.
Then there are the equally exciting retro presentations: A 50th-anniversary screening of David Cronenberg’s SHIVERS (pictured above), with the filmmaker on hand for a Q&A moderated by Joe Hill; a 25th-anniversary showing of AMERICAN PSYCHO, accompanied by director Mary Harron; and THAT’S TRIBECXPLOITATION: THE ANDY MILLIGAN TIME MACHINE, a double feature of recently unearthed sexploitationers from the subject of THE DEGENERATE. For more info and to purchase tickets for all of these and more Tribeca films, head over to the fest’s official website.
Matt Barone and Jonathan Penner.
How did Escape from Tribeca wind up sort of absorbing Midnight to become the genre showcase at Tribeca?
MATT BARONE: This is the third year that Escape from Tribeca has happened. The first two, it was side by side with Midnight, and trying to differentiate itself in the sense that it wasn’t just new films; there were also anniversaries and retros. Last year, we had a big Godzilla party on which we worked with Toho, and a special screening of THE UNKNOWN, the Tod Browning film. So Escape established an identity of not just being new movies, but unpredictable and more fan-centric, whereas Midnight was always a more traditional type of genre presentation.
Going into this year, I just felt, as did the rest of the team, that it would be clearer for the audience if there was one big genre section instead of two–putting it all into one hub and giving that all the muscle. Going with Escape from Tribeca as the umbrella was very exciting for me, and I’m sure Jonathan agrees, because as I said, Escape from Tribeca has established an identity of being a bit unpredictable. So now that we have more real estate, we still a number of new films, but the remainder of the program can be a bit nimble, in the sense that we can do anniversaries, or in one year we can do two parties. So we can bring something fresh and unique that goes beyond the typical genre section in festivals like this, which gives it a kind of playfulness that we’re still building on. It gives the sense that anything goes, and you can expect the unexpected.
JONATHAN PENNER: Many festivals have a Midnight section; no other festival has an Escape section. Initially, when I was doing Escape and Matt was doing Midnight, I was saying Escape was more like psychotronic movies, so it wasn’t simply horror pictures. We had the 50th anniversary of ENTER THE DRAGON with Angela Mao the first year, and last year we had Steven Spielberg here with the 50th of THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS. So the idea that we can do retro screenings of films that aren’t necessarily straight genre pictures gives us a lot more real estate that we can cover and have fun with.
Your big retro event this time is SHIVERS with David Cronenberg and Joe Hill. How did that come together?
PENNER: That was fantastic. I had David Cronenberg’s information, and reached out to his office. It was as simple as that. I said, “Mr. Cronenberg has never been to the Tribeca Festival; it’s the 50th of SHIVERS and we would love to show it. Would he be interested in coming?” And very quickly they were like, “Yeah, that’d be awesome.” So that came together very quickly. And as we were talking about who could interview him, of course David made one of the greatest adaptations of Joe’s father Stephen King, THE DEAD ZONE. But we said, “Well, Stephen King’s not going to come, or if he did, we’d want to make it about him. What about Joe Hill?” We reached out to him, and he was like, “Oh my God, are you kidding? It would be my honor.” It happened quite quickly and easily. Honestly, I think that’s part of the power of Tribeca, that we have this big, star-studded, New York-based festival to help us leverage to get people like Spielberg last year and David Cronenberg this year, and Joe Hill and, incredibly, Mary Harron coming for the 25th anniversary of AMERICAN PSYCHO.
[Satirical humorist] Hasan Minhaj is going to interview Mary, and is going to bring a really fun, smart sensibility to that conversation. There’s still maybe a two percent chance that Christian Bale or Chloe Sevigny will come. Their invites are out and they’ve expressed interest, but their schedules are very, very tricky.
As far as the new films you’re showing, it’s a truly varied bunch; they span a number of genres. Was there any kind of criteria or selection process behind what you were looking for in the movies this year?
BARONE: A lot of it just had to do with the pool of films we had to look at, the stuff that was coming in. And this year, a lot of was we were seeing was more eclectic. There wasn’t a straight-down-the-line scary haunted-house movie, for example; everything was a little more of a hybrid. I think the program just reflects the vibe that we were seeing, and that we just wanted to show the best films possible. We want to give the audience as much fun as we can give them. And this year the selection really lent itself to that Escape-centric sentiment, where it’s much more of a fun, loose, rowdy crop of films. That wasn’t necessarily the plan going into it; if we saw a really good, bleak, scary movie, we would love to show that. It’s just the way things shook out this year that the best movies we saw were weirder and more genre-blending.
One good example of that is Tina Romero’s QUEENS OF THE DEAD. How did that one come to you?
BARONE: That’s one that I’m sure a lot of people have been aware of for a while; it’s been on people’s radar for a minute. I believe Tina went to Comic-Con last year or the year before, kind of teasing it. So it’s been percolating for a while, and I’ve been tracking it, and we reached out to the production team and they said, “Yeah, we’d love to submit.” They sent it over, and we just had a blast with it. It’s very cool, because it honors what her dad’s tradition and legacy are, but it doesn’t feel so much like George’s movies. It’s leans fully into the horror/comedy vibe, and it has a fresh energy to it, and the cast is really fun. The idea is that there’s this warehouse party being put together in Brooklyn by this ragtag group of promoters and partiers and drag queens, which gets disrupted because it happens to be the same night that a zombie outbreak happens, and now they all have to band together and survive. There’s a lot of energy to it, and it’s really exciting.
You know, all of us have watched all the horror films that have ever come out, and especially in the zombie genre, there are those stretches where you it feels like you’ve seen the same movies over and over again. QUEENS OF THE DEAD resets the vibe a little bit, and shows that there’s still a lot you can do with that type of film, if you have the right perspective.
Jonathan, do you have a favorite among the new films you’re showing?
PENNER: I like ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE a lot. It’s a RZA blaxploitation picture, though it’s got a lot on its mind. It’s sort of a modern version of THREE THE HARD WAY or a picture like that, where there’s a quite overt political message, with white supremacists fucking with black guys and getting fucked 10 times harder back. It’s fantastic; you will be sitting in the theater, or at home or wherever you get to see it, cheering for what happens. I love that; my sensibility is not only horror but also a lot of action. You know, RZA was a little bit after my time as a teenager, but Matt was like, “The new RZA picture is coming our way. He is my man!”
BARONE: Yeah, I grew up on Wu-Tang Clan. That’s my music, they’re my favorites, so the fact that we’ve got RZA coming to the festival as part of Escape is a real pinch-me, cool, full-circle moment for me.
PENNER: I also love THE DEGENERATE because of the subject, and it’s a really fine picture. It’s not a stand-up-and-cheer movie, but it’s about a genre stalwart. Finally, there’s a documentary about Andy Milligan, and it’s from Severin Films, who put out the huge boxed set THE DUNGEON OF ANDY MILLIGAN. It’s a much better movie than Milligan ever made! We had this crazy phone call with Severin, and I’m a big Russ Meyer fan, as we all are, and I knew they had the rights to some of the Meyer pictures. I said, “What are you guys doing with the Russ Meyer films? You want to do something at Tribeca?” They were like, “No, that’s not going to work. But do you know about this guy Andy Milligan?” And I almost fell out of my chair and said, “Well, yeah! What is it? Let’s do it, whatever it is.”
So we’re going to show the documentary, but–and this is really awesome–they also rediscovered two lost Milligan pictures that hadn’t been seen in over 50 years. They found one in a vault in France and one in a vault in Belgium. The pictures are KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME and THE DEGENERATES, and we are world-premiering them and also showing some late-’60s/early-’70s grindhouse trailers and ephemera. We’re going to be giving away posters and all sorts of stuff at the screening. Jimmy McDonough, who wrote the amazing Milligan biography THE GHASTLY ONE, which is one of the great show-business stories, is going to be there to introduce it, cast members from the original pictures will be there, and it’s going to be an amazing night as we try to reproduce as closely as possible a 42nd Street grindhouse experience today.
BARONE: That one goes back to what I was saying earlier about what gives Escape from Tribeca its identity, and what we’re trying to establish with it. I go to a lot of different festivals, and sometimes some of the most fun screenings are the weird, rediscovered, obscure films from the ’60s and ’70s that you’ll probably only get to see that one time in that theater. That’s something we figured out how to do here with these two films, and that I’d love to keep doing with this section, to bring some of that energy to Tribeca that it’s never really had in the past.
PENNER: And for everyone who comes to one of these retro screenings–SHIVERS, AMERICAN PSYCHO, or THE ANDY MILLIGAN TIME MACHINE–we’ve published a 116-page zine filled with new and old material about Mary Harron, David Cronenberg and SHIVERS and Milligan. We’ve reproduced articles from Video Watchdog and Fangoria, and have new material from Mike White, who does Cashiers du Cinemart, and a couple of other authors, myself included. This is going to be a fantastic giveaway, because we want to contextualize these screenings. We want people to have a souvenir the old-fashioned way. You go to a festival and you have something to walk away with. I’m really excited that we were able to put that together.
