Golden Swallow & Kill and Kill Again

We come once again to that special time in the month marked arbitrarily as the "third-Monday." It may not mean much to most, but to those in the know, it means Kung Fu Grindhouse.

First out of the gate at 6pm comes:
Awful Hour: In which your eyes feast upon the lost treasures of the VHS age.

Then at 7pm: 1968's Golden Swallow. This beautifully shot Shaw Brothers classic directed by Chang Cheh  features Cheng Pei-pei reprising her role as Golden Swallow from the film Come Drink with Me. She is wrongfully framed for murder and must fight her way to innocence. Two men with an eye for Golden Swallow and jealousy for each other stand by her side in an intense action love triangle.

Finally capping off a night of intense martial combat comes Kill and Kill Again, a 1981 South African karate film with a healthy dose of humor.Steve Chase does his merry best to stop an evil guy bent on ruling the world with an army of "karate slaves." The comparisons to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoon don't stop there as Steve teams up with a gaggle of silly goons and pretty gals to flex, sweat, wisecrack and keee-ai his way to victory in finest Afrikaans fashion.

You know how these things work, so be there on February 17 at 6pm for the REAL DEAL.
Seats fill up fast, so don't be late.

Exterminator City

Our January 20, 2014 installment features one of the most fascinating phenomena of the 20th century. And what better time than the 21st. We open a new year of KFG with some of our terrible favorites of the last years, and by terrible I mean of course, AMAZING!

First up at 6 is of course Awful Hour in which the refuse of a billion video cassettes washes up on the shores of the Sunset Screen...

Then at 7pm we present for your satisfaction the 1988 Italian masterpiece Robowar. Directed by the nefarious Bruno Mattei, this gem stars Reb Brown in a bizarre mashup of Terminator and Predator with a synth soundtrack. Ooof!

Finally at 8:30 the cream of the crop, 2005's Exterminator City in which a robot exterminator goes insane and starts murdering softcore actresses. Robo-priests, robo-psychiatrists and hard-boiled robot-detectives all do their part in making this one of the most screwy messes in recent memory. And they're all puppets. Yes, puppets. Silly gore, unintelligible dialogue and surgically augmented mammary glands abound in this extremely low budget favorite. WARNING: unnecessary nudity, terrible acting, bloody puppets and groaning make up the bulk of this film.

See you on JANUARY 20th!

Christmassacre

Silent Night, Deadly Night - 1984A KFG classic, SNDN shows what happens when the mind of a precious child is warped by christmas mayhem. All grown up and still scarred by the wounds of the past Billy snaps the only way he knows how, Santa Style.
Elves - 1989Grizzly Adams white knights his way through the night in this charming holiday gem. An evil elf/troll is unknowingly summoned by a ditsy Anti-Christmas ritual in Colorado and he's looking for a virgin to create the elf master race. Blood is spilled, guns are fired and puppets awkwardly walk. This film was buried with the death of VHS and is not to be missed. 

No Thanksgiving

Bounty is always subject to a measure of quality, and this year we're celebrating the season of plenty with the lower end of the spectrum:

6:00pm - Awful Hour - Searching for the finest only leads to rejects which we cannot help but share...

7:00 - Garbage Pail Kids - The name says more than they could have hoped! Perhaps one of the most misguided films of all time, GPK is  live-action visual nausea of the purest pedigree. Like the Super Mario Bros. movie only barfier! We can do ANYTHING while working with each other!

8:30 - To The Limit - The late great Anna Nicole Smith's legacy of lunacy will probably soon be forgotten, but not if we can help it! To the Limit is but one of the three or so feature films she did and boy is it a stinker. Ninja secret agent Nicole battles disgruntled 'Nam vets for posession of a shiny CD-ROM disc in this incredible explosion of talent!




This November 18, come on down to the Sunset and say "No-Thanks!" to quality cinema while you enjoy some of the choiciest offerings from the bottom of the pail.
See ya there!...
And go LIKE us on that one website, we post fun pictures there.

Unseen Horror

Yes it's true, after a year of waiting (or only a month if you count last month's show) we're back in action for another mind boggling extravaganza of extravagant proportions. We had so much fun (and apparently you did too) with our unseen horror event last year, we had to do it again which means this:
1.) We went to Scarecrow Video and picked three movies we'd never seen before simply based on the boxes.

2.) We worked very hard at not watching them in the meantime so that we could see 'em for the first time with you on the Sunset big screen on October 28th...

The delectable selections for this event include....

6pm - Attack of the Beast Creatures: The box art was horrible, but the pictures promise nothing short of hilarity as small red doll monsters brutally dispatch the actors.
7:30 - Roller Blade: Not truly a horror film, but the promise of post-apocalyptic roller-skating was too much to resist. Yes I said "skate" because this was made before the days of "blades," but thankfully not before the days of sharp metal instruments of violence.

9:00 - Rat Man: The box art was a murky photograph that didn't tell us much, but the tagline, "The Critter from the Shitter" sold it instantly. A small hideous man who lives in the sewers is clearly up to no good...

Which means you'd better be there for the action at the Sunset Tavern in Ballard on Monday, October 28th. The first film starts at 6pm, so get there early for a good seat, this is gonna be special.

Fantasy Killer Mission Workout Force

This September is all fired up to be about as shocking as they come. With a couple of feature films cranking the crazy up to 11, we open the evening with an appetizer of:

6:00pm – The Awful Hour, in which the title pretty much says it all. Phill dredges up the muck from a stagnant cesspool of VHS culture…

At 7:00 pm - To heavily paraphrase the immortal words of Bill Hicks; If you don’t think drugs have done anything good for our culture, you’re mistaken. He was talking mostly about music of course, but Mi ni te gong dui, or Fantasy Mission Force if you prefer, is a cinematic case-in-point. Regarded by many of it’s lucky witnesses, as among the most nonsensical, downright insane kung-fu movies ever made. We’ve heard that before here at Kung Fu Grindhouse, but with Abraham Lincoln, zombies, Nazis, Cannibals and Jackie Chan this is sure to be a strong contender for the head-slap awards.

Then at 8:30 - The connection seems at first tenuous, but pornography and fitness videos both indulge the evangelical tradition in a way that would do Jimmy Swaggart proud. Without the sin, there could be no weeping (or sweating as it were,) flagellating repentance. Without beauty there could be no ugly. It is entirely fitting that this irrational contradiction would be taken to its psychosexual apex in a straight-to-video horror flick from the 80’s. If you thought Death Spa was good, wait until you see Killer Workout. (AKA Aerobicide) This is gonna hurt.

We'll see you at The Sunset on September 16th, with bells on.

Invincible Super Chan

Yes it's true, after a nearly five week absence from our lives, the Grindhouse is back to soothe battered nerves. On Monday August 19th this divine reprieve will grace the screen with three delightful anodynes, beginning with:

Awful Hour @ 6: Scrounged from the depths of obsolete media storage formats comes an hour of the finest and perhaps funniest of video sado-masochism. we're going to mix it up a bit this month in the hopes that more of you videophiles will come out and enjoy these sixty unique minutes of video carnage. You'll never get them back.

Stone Cold @ 7: Seattleites have a long memory for sports failures, but few have been as sorely recalled as that of the BOZ. In spite of his largely risible tenure with the 'Hawks however, his cinema career has been, well, largely risible. Although slated to appear in The Expendables 3, Brian Bosworth's acting debut was in 1991 undercover mullet-cop goes rogue-biker flick Stone Cold. The final judgement, at least as far as we're concerned, rests in your hands...

Invincible Super Chan @ 8:30: Set aside all your woes however and travel back twenty years before Boz to find yourself in a world unlike any before or since. Is there any point at all in trying to make sense of the violence and absurdity that is Super Chan? No good edits or prints of this exist in the US market, so we'll content ourselves with this ride through the time stream of absurdity the best we can; with a drinking game! An unhinged and wacky trip through magical flight, decapitations and giant edible boulders. But don't take my word for it, come see this silly business for yourself on August 19th at The Sunset BIG SCREEN.
Kung Fu Grindhouse is the truth, and the truth never got more important than this people.