Shocktober: Tintorera! at the Two Boots Theater Today!
Does anyone else want to go to the movies today? I’m going to this:
Two Boots Pioneer Theater
7:00PM
It’s a Mexican Jaws rip-off/sexploitation combo! Supposed to be awful but wonderful! From IMDB:
“The fact that a shark is running amok is almost completely ignored by the director, who spends more time concentrating on the nudity and the background scenery. Perhaps the budget was so low they couldn’t afford to include many shark attack sequences.”
“The film has absolutely incredibly slow pace and it will be too much for most to watch without falling asleep. There is plenty of scenes depicting sharks being killed by people or each other and also the “sharks attacking human being” scenes are pretty dull and thus funny. There’s plenty of naked skin and bodies and also some blood so the exploitation elements are there as they were in TREASURE, too.”
“Also, if you are a gay man interested in exploitation cinema you are bound to like it: the homosexual overtones between Esteban and Miguel are painfully obvious and there are numerous shots of Hugo Stiglitz cute little ass.”
Feel free to join me! I’ve heard about this movie for a while now, and am so psyched that the Two Boots is finally showing something decent, or at least, decent in my opinion. Most of the time their programming consists of premieres of straight-to-video horror garbage presumably paid for by the DVD companies hoping that they’ll get a NY Times review. Or if it’s not horror shite, it’s crap indie with the same goal of getting a review in the Times - usually these reviews are horrible but Two Boots cuts them out and puts them in the window anyway.
It seems like a few years ago the Two Boots was really an auxiliary second run theater that used to show the sort of indie movies that played the Quad and the Cinema Village that you really wanted to see but never got the chance. So the Two Boots would take that stuff and you could usually find something great to see there. I remember it as the place where I first saw Fat Girl. I walked out with my jaw on the floor. They’d also screen cult films - the whole midnight Donnie Darko cult originated there along with repeat screenings of classic NYC cult fare like Liquid Sky and classic horror fare like Evil Dead 2 and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
That used to be fun. They had a John Waters marathon along with a lookalike contest that I came in second in, and a tribute to character actor Luis Guzman, which was really amazing. But now it just seems like the theater is a for-rent venue with a “show whatever you want” attitude - no attempt to curate or program in a decent way. The Two Boots seems like it would be the perfect place to revive the cult of the grindhouse and deuce exploitation films in the same way that Bill Landis used to do his Sleazoid Express screenings in the 80’s and early 90’s. None of these films have a regular screening place in New York anymore. Unfortunately, it seems like management wants to run the place like a banquet hall instead of a real venue, and it’s a shame. I guess you could probably argue that straight-to-video horror IS the modern equivalent of the grindhouse exploitation films - but most of them seem to lack that shameless fuck-you-pay-me attitude that makes the Ilsa movies or Lucio Fulci or Joe D’Amato’s films such unbelievable genius (the term used very loosely).
Anyway, today it’s all about Tintorera! Seriously, join me, it’s going to be fun! Check back for my review.