Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com
Narcotics: Pit of Despair (Color, 1967)
The all-time classic of the genre, a real howler! Super-square kid is lured into the world of illicit drugs and other pleasures by the scheming drug dealer and his wanton woman. Sample voiceover: “Take a trip from Squaresville, get with the countdown, shake this square world and blast off to Kicksville!” Sounds good to me!!
Produced for the Canadian Department of Health and Welfare this jaw-dropping film montage depicts the difficulty of breaking the tobacco habit in a child-adulthood go-go frenzy of wild animation by Italian animator Carlos Marchiori. The story depicts the case history of a chain smoker-satirically told on a psychiatrist's couch, with the patient's recollections--illustrating the psychology of the smoking habit and the part that cigarette advertising plays in the addiction. With hopping music and brilliant kaleidoscopic montages.
Parent to Child about Sex (Color, 1965, excerpt)
A rabbi, a priest, and a psychologist want you to talk to your child about sex! No, it's not a raunchy joke, it's the basis of this Mad Men-styled sex- education short. Frank discussions amongst the panel on topics like wet dreams and menstruation give way to melodramatizations of the kind of sex-education every pubescent child needs.
Nobody does a drinking and driving scare film quite like the Mormons! Mike Miller is a good boy with a thoughtful and anxious mother who is none too pleased that he's going out driving with bad boys Hal and Blaine. They love "wild" girls, fast cars and drinking beer; and everywhere they go, crazy New Orleans jazz underscores their every move. Will Mike be able to hold his own with their wild ways, even turn them around to his square way of thinking or will he be pressured into drinking and necking the night away? The interior monologues will leave you speechless with gems like "I wonder how come mothers know so much" and "I don't know much about wild girls... might be educational, though." Directed by Mormon-educational film pioneer Wetzel Whitaker, who worked as an animator for Di$ney for 20 years before becoming the director of the BYU Motion Picture Studio.
Consumer Education: Budgeting (Color, 1968)
Swinging sisters Ruth and Samantha recently graduated college and are settling into life on their own, with an apartment and shopping sprees. That also means they are going into debt. Fortunately, their worldly father stops by to offer advice before things get out of hand. Special guest star: their new roommate and proto-hipster, an Asian woman named ‘George’.
The Talking Car (Color, 1969)
Jimmy is supposed to go on a camping trip tomorrow, but while packing the station wagon he runs out into the street and almost gets hit by a car. Now his dad doesn’t think he’s responsible enough to go camping. Can the talking cars that visit Jimmy in his dreams teach him the ‘see and be seen traffic safety rules’ in time so he can go? Warning: do not do drugs before watching this film. These talking cars mean business.
Sniffy Escapes Poisoning (Color, 1965)
Absolutely twisted animation featuring a troll-like little boy with a massive head who drags his sick dog Sniffy to the medicine cabinet. Once opened, the pills and syrups begin to sing and dance as they cheerfully tell the little boy to KEEP HIS GRUBBY LITTLE PAWS OFF or risk a painful overdose and death.
The Hippie Temptation (Color, 1967, excerpt)
“These people are hippies. They occupy a piece of land in Golden Gate Park which has come to be called Hippie Hill.” So begins Harry Reasoner’s angry narration for this 1967 CBS TV documentary. Reasoner can barely contain his contempt while discussing their lifestyle and the use ofLSD, as he visits doctors and rehab centers to show the audience how destructive hippies are to society.
For the Early Birds
Marijuana (Color, 1968)
Sonny Bono graces the silver screen in gold lamé to set the facts straight about grass; that he appears utterly stoned himself should not denigrate his message one bit. He systematically counters all the usual arguments in favor of the evil weed (hilariously rattled off one by one by a group of teenagers being arrested).
Words of wisdom in stoner monotone: “Unlike alcohol, when you take too much at one time, you don’t pass out. You more than likely run the risk of an unpredictable – and unpleasant – bummer”.
Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.
Oddball films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.