The 100th screening by the Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society is scheduled for March 21 at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art.
With March 14’s sold-out screening of the locally lensed gore-metal flick Blood Sick Psychosis at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art (PhilaMOCA), the now six-year-old Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society is coming out louder and stronger than ever.
“The Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society has been a wealth of pure greatness when it comes to cult and underground film,” says New Jersey native Bruce Longo, the director and writer of Blood Sick Psychosis, and a Claymation artist who has shown his work at PhilaMOCA in the past.
“I’ve been going since it first started and it’s incredibly rare that I’ve even heard of the movie shown prior to the screening. Everyone takes turns selecting their favorite underground or offbeat movie so I’ve discovered so many great things I never could have without this group. Sometimes there are standing ovations for crowd pleasers like Surfer: Teen Confronts Fear with the most outlandish acting I’ve ever seen and sometimes there’s a mass exodus mid film by a screaming audience offended by The Gustapo’s Last Orgy. You never know what you’ll see until you get there but you know it’ll be something wild.”
Going on to call his favorite horror films, those “widely distributed movies made by people with no budget, no professional crew, and no studio backing; friends getting together with maybe a couple thousand bucks and filming in their backyard or guerrilla-style on location,” certainly defines the lo-fi, VHS-stylized blood-fests that help define that which PhilaMOCA’s executive artistic director and curator Eric Bresler was up to when he founded The Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society in 2016.
“Psychotronic members have certainly screened a few shot-on-video horror films over the years, and a bunch of splatter-filled horror too, so Bruce’s movie certainly fits into that mold,” says Bresler. “I remember Bruce himself screened PREMUTOS: THE FALLEN ANGEL as part of Psychotronic some years back, a film so brutal that it ends with an on-screen tally of the number of deaths in it, the crowd went wild.”
Bresler founded The Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society in 2016, first, as a casual bi-monthly screening series concentrating on cult/exploitation/outsider film where the members take turns choosing what is screened so everyone gets a chance to be a programmer.
“It’s proven to be quite popular, with over 200 members since June of 2016,” says the PhilaMOCA man.
And now, in the ultimate show of democratization, The Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society will mark its 100th film screened as part of the group on March 21, with film, that night, being chosen by PPFS member Alex Rudolph, a former Schlockademy Award-winner.
“The Schlockademy Awards are our annual award show where we vote on the films we watched over the previous year in goofy categories, and Rudolph won for his 2017 selection of FINAL FLESH, a film that is as psychotronic as it gets (a filmmaker wrote an incomprehensible sci-fi script and then paid different groups of homemade porn creators to film different portions of it, it’s hilarious). With that, I have high hopes for his selection on March 21st.”
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