A Scuzzbucket Tradition
The Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East 3rd Street (at Ave. A), 212-591-0434; $9 tickets (usually), call for information and show.
You have to search a lot harder to find quality lowlife films in NYC nowadays. Fortunately, the Two Boots Pioneer Theater continues to maintain one scuzzbucket tradition. Their annual October Month of Horror is a meaty bone thrown to local gorehounds—even when they insist on dividing the line-up between drive-in classics and new indie films.
The Pioneer is even going with a horror host of sorts, with this October's slate "presented in association with Professor Reinhardt van Nostrand…Professor Emeritus of Schlechtendingen at the University of Würms, Germany, and a special consultant to the Pioneer Theater on matters of the Paranormal and the Occult." The professor has pretty good taste in dopey films, with a slate of films running on assorted dates throughout the month. (Best to keep track of it all at twoboots.com.)
Most of the month is dedicated to what's presented as "Zombie Parade: A Cultural Survey." That's mainly a way of noting that the Pioneer is serving up steaming intestines ripped from the guts of an international community. There's a slate of recent hipster zombie films including Zombie Honeymoon, Rooms For Tourists, Shaun of the Dead, and Incident At Blood Gorge. Classic faves include Carnival of Souls, Castle of Blood, Lucio Fulci's Zombie, The Evil Dead, and—most importantly—Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, an underseen schlock masterpiece that defined the holiday back when TBS showed it every Halloween.
The actual night of Halloween has a tired-but-still-brilliant double bill of Dario Argento's '70s slashers The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and Deep Red. The month's big event, however, is the All-Night Vampire Movie Marathon and Vampire Hunter Summit. Twenty bucks gets you locked up from 7 pm until dawn with a roster of vampire films sporting an NYCentric slant—including Habit, Vampire's Kiss, New York Vampire, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. (That last one had a nice window display at Macy's when it opened in 1992).
You'll also be able to attend individual screenings throughout the night at $6.50 a shot. That's a pretty good excuse to head out of the house to catch a film at 3 am. And there's going to be plenty of cornball horror-house vampire drama crammed between films, although it probably won't be as much fun as the all-night horror marathons your parents got to enjoy back in 1966. Still, it's nice to see somebody trying to get excited about Halloween in a way that doesn't involve drink specials or sex parties.
—J. R. Taylor
