Last Midnight Plans: The Perfect Time to Watch Dead/Alive
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on May 25, 2012 8:40PM
A movie playing at midnight is not the same thing as a midnight movie. There's more to the "midnight movie" epithet than its screening time. Ben Barenholtz, the man generally credited with creating the concept as we know it, grasped this instinctively. When he saw Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo playing at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969 and was inspired to show it at midnight, every night, at the 600-seat Elgin theater, it was because the movie was (to put it mildly) a little bit different.
That is what makes a great midnight movie: a uniqueness which justifies screening a film as an event outside of the "regular" time slots of "regular" movies and which inspires fierce attachment among its devotees. Barenholtz's midnight showings of El Topo to packed, smoky houses and generated word-of-mouth to die for and became runaway successes, in part because the audience felt like it was part of the phenomenon rather than just the consumer. He performed the same alchemy again and again, as when he single-handedly transformed David Lynch from film student to cult auteur through sheer, dogged repeat showings of Eraserhead.
The most successful midnight movies, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to The Room, foster a community among their audience. Midnight is the time to watch only movies that you really want to watch, and just being with a crowd of people at the witching hour makes the screening an event, if not a party. This phenomenon spills over into wide release movies that open at midnight to accommodate fans too eager to wait until Friday night, allowing the studios to prime the box office pump and build a bit of buzz. It doesn't always work: MIB 3 played on 2,233 screens at midnight last night, but didn't make one tenth of what The Avengers raked in earlier this month or what the reigning 2012 midnight champ The Hunger Games earned ($18.7 million).
Midnight showings of big budget films can be a lot of fun even if the biggest event seem to be the sort of
"audience-proof" fare that often disappoints us. We could easily be talked into next month's Prometheus 3D debut, if the right provisions—coffee, purse beer, flask, etc.—and willing companions materialize. But our heart is with the trippy, the spooky, the cherished, and the cult, the true midnight movies that generally play on Friday and Saturday.
The Music Box takes justifiable pride in its midnight movie calendar, and tonight's screening of Peter Jackson's Dead/Alive, a comedic splatter-fest of the first order, is as good as it gets. The movie is smart, weird, hilarious and unforgettable, the kind of flick you take your uninitiated friend to just so you can peek over and watch their face during your favorite bits. With Jackson's ascension as box office titan, lots of people forget he was once known for these inventively pulpy, self-aware cult favorites. Given the hordes that are sure to line up for the midnight opening of The Hobbit later this year, Jackson now seems to have both flavors of midnight movie offering on lock-down.
Dead/Alive plays tonight and tomorrow at Midnight at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.