CINEMA BIZARRO Book Release Celebration + WARNING FROM SPACE Screening!

From the creators of Giant Bug Cinema - A Monster Kid’s Guide and Giant Beast Cinema - A Monstrous Movie Guide, both of which were Top Ten Bestsellers on Amazon for Horror Movie Books, comes Cinema Bizarro - The Weird Kid’s Guide to Particularly Odd Horror and Sci-Fi Movies!

Join four of its contributors in-person — Dan Madigan, Tracy Mercer, Phoef Sutton, and Steven Peros (also one of the book’s Editors) — as they take you on a very unsafe tour bus through a terrifying terrain filled with sight-stealing triffids, alien gorillas in diving helmets, and the vampires ’n’ dinosaurs that vexed the wild west. After their presentation, we’ll screen the alien invasion film, WARNING FROM SPACE (1956) - Japan's very first full color science fiction, special effects film! Stanley Kubrick biographer John Baxter specified Warning from Space as an influence on Kubrick in the visual development of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The movie has the pedigree of screenwriter Hideo Oguni, who wrote the screenplays for Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Seven Samurai, as well as direction by Koji Shima, whose previous film was in competition for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Today, this gorgeous-looking film is probably best remembered for its bizarro aliens and their unique design — the work of avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto — featuring a star-shaped costume with a single giant eye in the center (a design that would be outright cribbed four years later by DC Comics when they introduced Justice League nemesis Starro and the Star Conquerors in the pages of The Brave and the Bold #28), brought to life with eye-popping SFX from the Daiei Studios team who’d bring GAMERA to life a decade later.

As Japan is rocked by UFO sightings and large one-eyed, starfish-y aliens attempting contact, scientists band together to investigate. However, one of the aliens has already assumed human form and is about to deliver a very important message.

Dir. Kôji Shima, 1956, 87 mins, Japan, Unrated (Suitable For All Audiences), Japanese w/ English Subtitles, Color, Digital.

Special thanks to Bret Berg of American Genre Film Archive

DAN MADIGAN has worked in everything your parents warned about - horror movies, professional wrestling, and rock & roll, the triumvirate of taboo and trouble. While creating the horror franchise See No Evil for Lionsgate Films and the WWE, Madigan was also instrumental behind the camera in writing, producing and directing RAW and Smackdown, the WWE’s weekly wrestling shows. Madigan wrote the critically acclaimed book Mondo Lucha A Go-Go for HarperCollins, the definitive tome on Mexican wrestling, and there have been several documentaries created based his book.

TRACY MERCER is an Emmy-nominated TV and film executive-turned-producer who has worked on projects, including Ang Lee’s Hulk, Aeon Flux, Invictus, Five Flights Up, the CBS hit series, Madam Secretary, and Brad Anderson’s low-fi sci-fi thriller, Worldbreaker. She is also a co-host of the irreverent film buff comedy podcast, My Favorite Shtty Movie, which can be watched on both its Facebook and Twitter show pages, with the audio version available for downloading anywhere you find your podcasts.

PHOEF SUTTON is a screenwriter and NY Times bestselling novelist who was born in Washington D.C. He won two Emmys and a Golden Globe for the TV series Cheers. He also wrote for Boston Legal and the cult hit Terriers. He produced Darrow & Darrow and Chesapeake Shores for the Hallmark Channel. His novels include Fifteen Minutes to Live, Crush, Heart Attack and Vine, Colorado Boulevard, and From Away. He lives in South Pasadena, California and Vinalhaven, Maine.

STEVEN PEROS is an award-winning filmmaker, playwright, and comic-book writer whose debut Rondo Award-nominated graphic novel, Stoker & Wells, is being developed for TV by the former President of Marvel Studios at his company, Amasia. Steven wrote Peter Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow, starring Kirsten Dunst, was a writer on Disney’s Around the World in 80 Days, starring Jackie Chan, and wrote A Country Christmas Story, featuring Dolly Parton. Steven is also a film historian who wrote chapters for Giant Bug Cinema, Giant Beast Cinema, and articles for MovieMaker, Village Voice, Scr(i)pt, and others.

Following the screening, co-authors Dan Madigan, Tracy Mercer, Phoef Sutton, and Steven Peros will all be be available to sign copies of Cinema Bizarro.

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

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Host or Publisher The Philosophical Research Society