The American Genre Film Archive – AGFA to its friends – was founded by the Alamo Drafthouse in 2009 with a mission to find and preserve the obscure and arcane ephemera of international cinema. Just as importantly, the nonprofit also gets these films back into cinemas, sometimes serving as theatrical distribution for boutique physical media labels. With 1,386 titles saved from the (sometimes literal) dustbin, this year five AGFA restorations will screen as part of Alamo’s annual Fantastic Fest. AGFA Creative Director Joseph A. Ziemba unspools this year’s selections.
Fantastic Fest 2023, Sept. 21-28. Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, 1120 S. Lamar. fantasticfest.com.
Find out more about the American Genre Film Archive at americangenrefilm.com.
The Cult of AGFA Trailer Show
D: Joseph A. Ziemba & Bret Berg, USA, 2023, 77 min.World premiere of 35mm restoration
“There’s nothing dreamier than the moment when you go to see a movie in the theatre and the lights first go down and the show begins, because you’re so excited about what’s going to happen. So we wanted to capture that feeling for 77 minutes straight.
“We did the AGFA Horror Trailer Show, and that came out on Blu-ray in 2020, but we felt like we barely scraped the surface of the AGFA trailer archive. The horror trailer show was like the drive-in from Dimension X, but this feels more like you’re at the mall multiplex in the middle of the night on some far-off planet, watching these really wild things.”
Messiah of Evil
D: Gloria Katz & Willard Huyck, USA, 1974, 90 min.World premiere of the new 35mm restoration with Radiance Films
“Everybody at AGFA loves this movie so much. It has never been properly presented. It’s been in this public domain vortex where, in the DVD era, it was part of these 50-packs from horrendous fourth-generation tape masters, and every single print of it is unprojectable, completely red. But we love it so much and we feel that it’s such an important missing chapter of Seventies independent horror. Not to mention the fact that it was made by Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, who were responsible of course for Howard the Duck and wrote many screenplays, including American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. So we thought, ‘Let’s strike a print and get it out there.'”
The Nest
D: Terence H. Winkless, USA, 1988, 89 min.Presented with Shout! Factory
“This is a favorite of [AGFA Director of Theatrical] Bret Berg. It’s part of the Roger Corman library, which Shout! Factory now owns. The Nest is such a fun movie, because I think it’s a movie that fell through the cracks. It’s really a soap opera that just happens to have these giant flesh-ripping bugs.”
Centipede Horror
D: Keith Li, Hong Kong, 1982, 94 min.Presented with Error 4444
“For many years, we had the only known 35mm print, and it was only available on DVD and VHS bootlegs, so we scanned it back in 2019 and it premiered at the Dismember the Alamo events across the country, and people really dug it. It doesn’t go quite as far as you think it’s going to go, but it goes far enough, and I think people gravitate to it because of that. It doesn’t have the animal cruelty or the kind of content that would turn you off from watching it. It’s just a pure, gross-out, fun experience.”
Bugged!
D: Ronald K. Armstrong, USA, 1996, 82 min.Presented with Troma
“There’s a lot of Troma films in the catalog that they picked up and didn’t actually produce, and Bugged! to me is one of the gems that falls into that area. It’s very Ghostbusters, in a way. It’s not a comedy, it’s definitely a horror movie, but it’s really fun and joyful. It’s also one of the few indie horror movies from the Nineties that was made by a Black filmmaker. So for historical reasons it’s very important, but it very much delivers as a viewing experience. There’s so much fun, so many weird practical effects, and so much joy behind the camera.”
This article appears in September 22 • 2023.
