Escapism turns to cult classics

Sundance has its indie charms. Venice boasts a global crowd. But who among the film festival brethren can satisfy the outlandish palates of the splatter-happy sci-fi crowd?

Set your phasers to stun and hold onto your wits: the Escapism Film Festival is crashing the Carolina Theatre with a host of monsters, maniacs and malicious New Zealand sheep in tow.

The three-day festival will feature the sort of grindhouse cult content that has titillated fans of geek-dom for decades. From sci-fi classics to horror comedies, Escapism offers a suspension of reality in a season of pre-Oscar plot severity.

But the festival wasn't always a celebration of fiction and gore.

"Originally escapism was going to be more of a chance to fill a lot of the recent Hong Kong/Japanese action films that weren't getting screen time in the Triangle," said Jim Carl, senior director for the Carolina Theatre. "And then what happened is we started realizing that the trend toward the remakes of Asian films. waned a little bit in the last couple years."

With dramatically declining audience numbers in 2004, Carl and fellow film programmers were forced to take a year's hiatus to rethink and reinvent.

As chance would have it, a Carolina Theatre staff member was able to acquire a rare 35 mm original copy of comic horror flick, The Monster Squad. Part of the '80s-kid team-up adventures made famous by The Goonies and The Lost Boys, the film has grown to cult status in the last 20 years and was quite conveniently about to debut a two-disc Special Anniversary Edition DVD.

The release of the DVD would have been impossible without their loyal network of Monster Squad fans, said Andrew Gower, who starred in the lead role of Sean Crenshaw.

"Fans just came out of everywhere and were demanding it. So it was really sort of a fan-based grassroots thing that got the studio off their ass," Gower said. "For some reason this film resonated and struck somebody at the time they saw it, in some shape or form that affects them forever."

The Carolina Theatre screened The Monster Squad only two years before to a sold-out theater. This time around, with the original copy and the help of Gower and co-star Ashley Bank as guests-in-attendance, the Escapism Film Festival was able to make the audience favorite a perfect centerpiece to the reinvented festival.

When Director William Lustig, of grindhouse favorite Maniac, also signed on as a guest-in-attendance, Carl and crew could sense the cult classic direction for which Escapism was destined.

Researching into the wee hours of the morning, the team plucked features and shorts from diverse quadrants of the film industry. The mythological thriller Cthulhu was discovered among the Seattle International Film Festival programming and Christmas conspiracy theory Stalking Santa at a comedy festival.

The largest task, however, was persuading the folks at The Walt Disney Studios to unlock their mysterious magic vault where Tron had been safely stowed away for years.

"There's a huge black market out there of film collectors who would love to get their hands on original 35 mm negative of one of Disney prints," Carl said. "Theft among 35 mm film community is very high when it comes to these prints, so Disney is very, very skeptical about letting them out of the archive."

With Tron finally added to the programming, the festival was still in need of short films. A casual request to a contact at Pixar Animation Studios led to an influx of over 30 never-before-seen shorts created by members of the animation staff.

The event offers the new and improved "Ten Pass" for students wishing to spend less and watch more. Carl hopes that audiences will take a chance with the more eccentric selections of genre film, from the 25th anniversary screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (a Kirk, Spock and Scottie mission sans Tribbles) to the sweep of North Carolina premieres ready to take the stage in a competition for fiction-based absurdity. With tag lines such as, "Do you have the Crazy?" and "Get ready for the Violence of the Lambs!," the horror-humor duo is set to snag the spotlight in the aptly named "Bloody Funny Program," one of the many thematic subsections .

The Asian origins will remain relevant with the screening of Japanese film Paprika and short film Apocolypse Oz, said Carl, who added that the latter film is a cross between The Wizard of Oz and Apocalypse Now, completely without humor or camp yet somehow works.

Gower and Bank will host a post-screening Q & A and lobby meet and greet. Gower says he looks forward to interacting with Monster Squad fans and says that the festival is a valuable revisiting of a beloved decade.

"It seems like [the 80s] were a simpler time. Films were made just as complicated and more so because we were right on the end of when everything was done by hand and with models and clay and makeup effects and special effects instead of just CGI," Gower said. "You go to this event and you're going to get taken back to a time that's not today, a time when a lot of us were younger, a little more carefree. And everyone loves that feeling."

The Escapism Film Festival is held at Carolina Theatre, Fletcher Hall, Oct. 5-7. Tickets are $8, 10-film passes are $50.

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