Pleasure Dome: IT'S ALIVE (35mm) / GOD TOLD ME TO (16mm)

Horror and social satire, zeitgeist and gore: The analog-projected genre film series Pleasure Dome dedicates its next double feature to New York genre maverick Larry Cohen (1936–2019).

A genre auteur who moved effortlessly between the aesthetics of mainstream U.S. cinema and rougher exploitation films and helped reshape U.S. cinema from within in the 1970s: with guerrilla methods, clever screenplays, and a knack for paranoia and delirious comedy.

We start with Cohen’s great classic IT’S ALIVE (1974): That mean’s: in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Everything seems normal. Frank and Lenore Davis are expecting their second child. But what emerges from the delivery room is no ordinary infant. It is a monster. Claws. Fangs. Menacing primal instincts. The police take up the hunt for the anomaly, while the father wages a very different battle within himself: Does he love his child — despite everything?

We continue with lesser-known GOD TOLD ME TO (1976): Cohen’s hometown New York is in the grip of violence that seems completely random and senseless. A sniper is firing from a rooftop. A man goes on a rampage in a supermarket. Every act is carried out calmly — and is always justified in the same way: GOD TOLD ME TO. NYPD Detective Peter Nicholas, a devout Catholic, begins to investigate. On the path to “enlightenment,” the genre boundaries between police procedural, science fiction, and paranoia thriller blur. Who can stop God?

Limited tickets available via https://linktr.ee/zelluloid42

Poster by @roofpuke