NC-17
Newspaper editor Arthur Sherwood is on a hunting trip when he accidentally stumbles upon a nudist camp in the woods. He is very much shocked by this and decides to send reporter Stacy Taylor to the camp so she can write an expose on the camp and have it shut down. However, much to her surprise, Stacy finds that she enjoys the nudist lifestyle and writes some very positive articles on her experiences, which doesn't sit well with Arthur. Arthur then decides to join the camp himself and writes his own story.
Comedy Summer Series at The 4Star Theater - May 25th lineup Headliner: Jerry Law Jerry Law is a comedian based out of Oakland, CA that performs all over the United States. Jerry Law can be seen at numerous comedy clubs and festivals around the nation, and has been feature on CBS “Let’s Make A Deal” and many other platforms. He has a special titled “From the Cage to the Stage” where he displays his experiences and versatility as a performer. Jerry is very energetic on stage and his stories about being a first time father after spending over a decade in prison are real life situations, yet hysterical! He also tackles relationships and what life is like after finding his purpose. Featuring Miss K Kidd Oakland native Miss K Kidd is a well known bay area comedian hailing from Oakland, CA. She touched stages from Cali to New York in her tenure so far. Opening for notable comidians such as Tacarra Williams, Damon Williams, Ray Grady among others. She has also been seen in movies on Tubi as well as HBO+. She also produces her own shows around the Bay Area. Definitely one of the hardest women female comedians out of the Bay Area. Keep an eye out for Miss K Kidd Dan Guan Dan Guan is a San Francisco based comedian originally from Boston, Massachusetts. With his wit, he draws his humor from his own growing up experience as one of the few American-Born Chinese kids in his New England town with his immigrant family. Dan performs at venues locally and across the country, such as the Punch Line San Francisco, Cobb’s Comedy Club, and Don’t Tell Comedy. He has also appeared at the Oakland Comedy Festival 2022 and the North Carolina Comedy Festival 2022. Alisha Dillon Alisha Dhillon is an up and coming stand up comedian based in the Bay Area, California. She’s known for her fun, yet blunt style on stage and ability to make people laugh at difficult topics. Alisha is the current Roast Battle Champion of San Francisco. Her recent credits include JFL Vancouver, a 30 minute Comedy Invasion special, multiple appearances in SF Sketchfest, and opening for Akaash Singh and Julie Kim. Nate Schwartz Nate is a rising Bay Area comedian and 4 Star regular who’s performed at the San Jose Improv, Alameda Comedy Club, as well as Rooster T Feathers. His unfiltered takes on life will either leave you laughing or mortified… hopefully laughing. Hosted By Karen Braswell Rising San Francisco based comedian. Originally from New York, Karen left Wall Street to pursue a career in anything else, and now performs comedy on every stage, sidewalk and dive bar. With a fresh take on things like dating, dogs and growing up as a teacher’s pet, Karen turns expectations on their head with her irreverent style.
TBC
Since 1981, Condit’s videos have created heroines whose lives swing between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, youth and fragility. Her work puts a subversive spin on the traditional mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. Exploring the dark side of female subjectivity, her “feminist fairy tales” focus on friendships, age, and the natural world. BENEATH THE SKIN (1981), 12 minutes NOT A JEALOUS BONE (1987), 11 minutes POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN (1983), 12 minutes SUBURBS OF EDEN (1996), 16 minutes OH, RAPUNZEL! (1996), 24 minutes
R
A cop who loses his partner in a shoot-out with gun smugglers goes on a mission to catch them. In order to get closer to the leaders of the ring he joins forces with an undercover cop who’s working as a gangster hitman. They use all means of excessive force to find them.
PG-13
Classics on Film Presents ~ Jurassic Park (1993) on 35mm Film! Directed by Steven Spielberg AN ADVENTURE 65 MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING. A wealthy entrepreneur secretly creates a theme park featuring living dinosaurs drawn from prehistoric DNA. Before opening day, he invites a team of experts and his two eager grandchildren to experience the park and help calm anxious investors. However, the park is anything but amusing as the security systems go off-line and the dinosaurs escape.
R
MEDIA MELTDOWN MOVIE MADHOUSE The maniacal minds behind Media Meltdown (Piranha Psychotronica and Kafka X) bring you a new experience in cinematic depravity… Media Meltdown Movie Madhouse! Following their long running cult film series at the Balboa and 4 Star, Media Meltdown shines a light on an even stranger side of cinema. Prepare yourself to enter into a world of face-flaying forgotten and forsaken films… Made-for-TV, Direct-to-Video, VCR games, and more wiley weirdness than your minds can handle! So come to the 4 Star Theatre every 3rd Sunday and commit yourself to… MEDIA MELTDOWN MOVIE MADHOUSE! Recommended for Adults Only With the Immortal Universe heating up over at AMC+, what a perfect time to revisit one of the earliest Anne Rice film adaptations, Exit to Eden (1994)! Starring Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Akroyd as bumbling cops with a penchant for going undercover who need to infiltrate a BDSM sex island to take down diamond-smuggling criminal Iman, Exit to Eden is lightyears away from its source material but manages to be an extremely fascinating movie thanks to its wild premise. You’ll see butts and boobs galore, along with Akryoyd and O’Donnell in a variety of fetish gear! This screening marks Media Meltdown’s five year anniversary and we’ll be playing erotic games, performing sensuous readings, and having local drag icons dom our audience so head on out and be prepared to submit a May's Movie Madhouse!
RRated R for violence, language and brief nudity
Point Break, 1991 Directed by Kathryn Bigelow 100% PURE ADRENALINE! In Los Angeles, a gang of bank robbers call themselves The Ex-Presidents commit their crimes while wearing masks of Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Johnson. The F.B.I. believes that the members of the gang could be surfers and send young agent Johnny Utah undercover at the beach to mix with the surfers and gather information.
R
MOViES FOR MANiACS presents: 25th Anniversary of SLC PUNK! (1998) + AMERiKANA (2001) Double Bill w/ James Duval IN PERSON Actor James Duval will be IN PERSON and writer/director James Merendino will be live via Facetime to celebrate the 25th anniversary 4K restoration of James Merendino's SLC PUNK! (1998) along with a very rare screening of their phenomenal follow-up feature: AMERiKANA (2001), which was the 13th Entry of Dogme 95. Presented by MOViES FOR MANiACS and hosted by Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, a very special Q&A will occur between the double bill. SLCPUNK.png 7:00pm - SLC PUNK! (1998) - 25th Anniversary 4K Restoration Based on the writer/director James Merendino's mid-1980s experience growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah, the film explores the hyper-kinetic daily life of a punk named Stevo (perfectly encompassed by Matthew Lillard), his best friend, "Heroin" Bob and a myriad of SLC tribes such as Rednecks, Heavy Metal guys, New Wavers, Neo-nazis, Punks and Mods. Actors Michael A. Goorjian, Jason Segal, Annabeth Gish and James Duval are all quite memorable in their respective roles making this quintessential 1990s film -- about the 1980s -- a fascinating amalgamated time-capsule that has been begging for a cinematic re-evaluation. James Duval, who plays Frank the Bunny Rabbit in DONNiE DARKO will be IN PERSON, and writer/director James Merendino will be live via Facetime to celebrate this 25th Anniversary 4K screening! Rated R. 98 minutes. 4K DCP courtesy of Sony. AMERiK.png 9:30pm - AMERiKANA (2001) This extremely rare screening of writer/director James Merendino's follow-up to SLC PUNK! pits James Duval and Michael A. Goorjian as a pair of best friends who take an EASY RiDER-esque road trip across the plains from South Dakota to Los Angeles in a vespa. The film is a hilarious yet devastatingly honest look at friendship, which makes perfect sense when realizing it was the thirteenth official Dogme 95 release. This often breath-taking and profoundly moving flick has been underrated and overlooked for far too long. James Duval, will be IN PERSON along with writer/director James Merendino who will be live via Facetime to discuss this lost mini-masterpiece. Unrated. 95 minutes.
On May 20, our jazz birthday series resumes with Jackie McLean in The Connection, Shirley Clarke’s classic cinema verite look at jazz musicians addicted to heroin. Clarke was a pioneer in found-footage film and also battled censorship upon the release of The Connection in 1961. Clarke’s filmography includes the Sam Shepard play, Savage/Love (1981) and Ornette: Made in America (1985). Josiah Luis Alderete, self-described Pocho Poet, will host and curate a reading of several Bay Area poets before the screening of The Connection. Alderete is the author of Baby Axolotls & Old Pochos and is the co-owner of Medicine For Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District. - Josiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Spanglish speaking Pocho y left handed callejero de Aztlán who has been part of La Area Bahia’s spoken word scene for over twenty years. He is the curator and host of the long running Latinx reading series Speaking Axolotl and is the author of two books of poetry “Baby Axolotls & Old Pochos(Black Freighter Press 2021) and the chapbook “Fuchi Faces de los Estados Jodidos”(For The Pueblo 2023). In 2023 he was the Poetry Center’s Mazza Writer in Residence at San Francisco State. Along with his bookstore sister Tân Khanh Cao, Josiah tends the portal known as Medicina Para Pesadillas Bookstore y Galeria on 24th street in La Mission. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is a queer Jewish Nicaragüense anarchist, artist, poet, and sexual health educator from the lands of the Tongva people, who is a long term guest on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land. They are the author of The Easy Body (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017) and La Movida (Nightboat Books, 2022), and have been at work on their third book of poetry, Bleeder / Promise of the Red Decade (the manuscript of which lives in an Esprit shoebox), for a really long time.
Rfor language, suicide, some sexuality and drug use.
The true story of the inseparable Von Erich brothers, who made history in the intensely competitive world of professional wrestling in the early 1980s. Through tragedy and triumph, under the shadow of their domineering father and coach, the brothers seek larger-than-life immortality on the biggest stage in sports.
PG
When a Spanish Jesuit goes into the South American wilderness to build a mission in the hope of converting the Indians of the region, a slave hunter is converted and joins his mission. When Spain sells the colony to Portugal, they are forced to defend all they have built against the Portuguese aggressors.
R
Director William Lustig will be IN PERSON to celebrate the 40th anniversary 4K restoration of his ruthlessly reverent riff on the DEATH WiSH-genre: ViGLANTE (1983) along with a gorgeous 4K restoration of his psychological horror masterpiece MANiAC (1980). Presented by MOViES FOR MANiACS and hosted by Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, a very special Q&A will occur between the double bill. 7:00pm - ViGiLANTE (1983) Quentin Tarantino has spoken at great lengths about Robert Forster's performance in ViGiLANTE being a major inspiration for casting him as the lead in JACKiE BROWN (1997). Here, Forster plays a working-class New York City man who is forced to confront the dirt and slime of the garbage-ridden 1980s NYC streets. His casual intensity culminates in "the performance of a lifetime" and should be taught to every genre actor in the business. This purely profound blue-collar ballbuster, reaches even grittier depths than most films made since. Shot in glorious Widescreen 2.35, look for Blaxploitation superstar Fred Williamson and the pioneering character actor Woody Strode (of John Ford's Westerns), whose performances should help inspire some wonderfully riotous post-film debates. Not to forget an amazing synth score by Jay Chattaway as well as some priceless Latin Salsa songs by the almighty Willie Colón, who also co-stars. Widescreen 4K DCP courtesy of Grindhouse Pictures. 9:30pm - MANiAC (1980) Close to 45 years since its sensational release, this surreally disturbing stalker masterpiece has not only accumulated one of the most devoted of cult following in exploitation cinema history, this nasty wonder deserves to be reevaluated along the lines of Abel Ferrara's feminist manifesto MS. 45 (1980) and William Friedkin's infamous queer time-capsule CRUiSiNG (1980). Joe Spinell's personal and deeply sensitive character study combined with the psychotic grit of Tom Savini's relentless and jaw-dropping special effects, sets this film apart from pretty much every movie of the era. Showcasing Jay Chattaway's legendary synth score, this 4K restoration of the unrated 88 minute Director's Cut (complete with the entire hotel room sequence) will be presented from a gorgeous DCP, courtesy of Grindhouse Pictures.