Playing: Fri Oct 3 at 9:30 pm
Director: Robert Clouse
Stars: Bruce Lee, Bob Wall, Jim Kelly, Shih Kien
Things That Really Happen in This Movie: There’s the melancholy martial-arts master Lee (Bruce Lee) going to an island whose economy appears to be based on a martial-arts school, but turns out to be based on the production and export of drugs. There’s Lee competing with other martial-arts masters, one of whom turns out to be the man who murdered Lee’s sister. (Lee kills this man with a look on his face that’s so demented, so insane, so filled with the painful memory of his sister’s death that it’s impossible to forget it, and impossible not to think that he loved his sister a little too much.) There’s Lee fighting with just about everyone on the island. And, finally, there’s Lee fighting with the villain, whose left hand is a metal claw, in a room of mirrors.
Why You Should See It at the Egyptian: You realize Bruce Lee is buried in Seattle, less than two miles from the Egyptian, right? CHARLES MUDEDE
Playing: Fri Oct 3 at 11:55 pm
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Stars: No one you’ve heard of
Things That Really Happen in This Movie: A pregnant widow marries an army captain in Franco’s Spain, somehow oblivious to the fact that he is a sadistic nightmare-person. Her weird daughter Ofelia gets up in the middle of the night to follow a stick insect out the window because she is convinced it’s a fairy. Ofelia meets a huge goat-man who tells her she’s actually the long-lost princess of a magical underground kingdom, to which he can help her return and claim her throne… if she completes three mysterious tasks. Because she has never seen an after-school special, Ofelia agrees happily. One of the tasks involves an exploding toad-monster. War happens. Ofelia’s mother is still too busy trying to not die of pregnancy to notice literally anything. A pale, horrifying humanoid creature sits surrounded by a feast, his eyeballs resting on a plate. Ofelia obtains magical chalk.
Why You Should See It at the Egyptian: As this is a midnight screening, the odds of any children being present are refreshingly low. This is a good thing, as the fairy-tale elements seem to give some people the impression this is a movie for children. IT IS NOT. There is torture. KATIE ALLISON
Playing: Sat Oct 4 at 6 pm
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Stars: George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, John Goodman
Things That Really Happen in This Movie: Three prisoners escape from prison. They search for treasure. They encounter sirens. They meet a sort of Cyclops in the form of a blind gas-station owner. They encounter a bluesman at a crossroads. They see some burning crosses. And most famously, George Clooney leads them in singing a hit record.
Why You Should See It at the Egyptian: The mythic themes in this film are at home with the theater’s mysterious-looking details and its deep and dark Masonic history. CHARLES MUDEDE
Playing: Sat Oct 4 at 9 pm
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Stars: John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmet Walsh
Things That Really Happen in This Movie: The dad from Clueless hires a hit man to whack his wife, another man attempts to sop up a pool of blood with a windbreaker, light shines through bullet holes, and the Coen brothers prove they can make a cinema classic with zero dollars.
Why You Should See It at the Egyptian: Everyone has a different Best Coen Brothers Film, but this 1984 debut should always be part of the discussion. The most understated work in the Coen brothers oeuvre, Blood Simple concerns an adulterous love triangle and the shady private investigator determined to exploit the situation. The cast—led by an impossibly young Frances McDormand and spiked with the wickedly weird M. Emmett Walsh—is perfect. The stark, simple cinematography is ingenious. And the plot is so quietly twisty, you have to closely watch every fucking second of this movie or it’ll slip out of your fingers. DAVID SCHMADER
Playing: Sat Oct 4 at 11:55 pm
Director: Paul Brickman
Stars: Um
Things That Really Happen in This Movie: Spoiled rich kid Joel (Tom Cruise) wears a letterman’s jacket and boat shoes in masturbation/anxiety dream sequence. Parents are going on vacation, friends want to party at the house, and white dad’s priority is that Joel does not turn up the blackness bass on the stereo. Tom Cruise becomes famous sex symbol by dancing in Oxford shirt and underpants. Friend orders Joel a prostitute; she arrives at the door big, black, and transgender. A replacement is ordered, but when Joel places the order on the phone, he wears a catcher’s mask over his face. The neon sign in Joel’s bedroom window flashes “cashed” and then “checks.” Prostitute and Joel have such sexy sex that the doors of the house blow open. She is a thief and has a pimp named Guido. She is a prostitute like all her friends; prostitutes like to get high and go out for ice cream, they do not like to be asked why they are not in school. She and Joel hatch a plan to make money (he has wrecked his father’s Porsche and needs to pay for repairs) and meanwhile to get him a good grade in his capitalist pig free enterprisers club; his friends are rich and sex-starved, hers are happy hookers. They throw a huge sex party. Joel makes the prostitute promise she is his girlfriend and not his prostitute for the night. He wears dark sunglasses and tells other kids his age to “walk like a man.” During the party, a Princeton admissions interviewer arrives for a scheduled appointment that Joel forgot, and it goes badly. Princeton admissions guy goes back out into party and eventually leaves with his own prostitute. In order to have sex in private on a moving subway train to a Phil Collins soundtrack, Joel and the prostitute who promises she is a girlfriend drag a homeless man off the train. Orgasm happens when the train sends off a fountain of electric sparks on the tracks. When Joel’s parents return, the father is about to scold him when he lets Joel know instead that Princeton wants Joel, and Joel smiles, knowing that Princeton had a good time with his prostitute.
Why You Should See It at the Egyptian: To remember what evil is. JEN GRAVES
Playing: Sun Oct 5 at 9:30 pm
Director: Sally Porter
Stars: Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, John Wood
Based on a Novel By: Virginia Woolf
Things That Really Happen in This Movie: Before Queen Elizabeth dies, she says strange things to a striking man named Orlando (“Do not grow old”) and leaves him with a lot of money and land. Orlando doesn’t grow old, and, as if that weren’t strange enough, one day he just turns into a woman, a very striking woman. There is no explanation for this transformation, nor as to why he/she is living forever. This is an art-house film, if ever there was one, and it’s terribly beautiful, wonderfully decadent. But best of all, it has one scene that features the only gay hero of my youth, Jimmy Somerville, singing and flying like the angel he is.
Why You Should See It at the Egyptian: Because the ridiculous opulence of the movie matches the ridiculous opulence of the movie theater—pillars, big curtains, flying balconies. CHARLES MUDEDE
Playing: Fri Oct 10 at 11:55 pm
Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Stars: John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt
Things That Really Happen in This Movie: An unscrupulous babysitter masturbates a teenage boy in the bathtub, the wall of a trailer home transforms into a light-lined stage, a harrowing psychodrama about a kaleidoscopically traumatized transgender singer from East Berlin is successfully dressed up as a crowd-pleasing glam-rock thrill ride.
Why You Should See It at the Egyptian: Seeing Hedwig at the Egyptian in 2001 is something I’ll never forget (am I just imagining that “Wig in a Box” got a standing ovation?). For this sing-along showing, they encourage dressing up and they’ll be giving out “free tambourines and gummy bears for all.” DAVID SCHMADER
Playing: Fri Oct 17 at 11:55 pm
Director: James Gunn
Stars: Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks
Things That Really Happen in This Movie: A car salesman named Grant Grant becomes the host for a slithering, wormlike alien. Grant Grant impregnates a human woman with seemingly thousands of baby alien worms. Nathan Fillion, back in his slender pre-Castle days, plays a small-town police chief. An attractive woman, improbably, is named “Starla.” A whole bunch of people are mind-controlled by alien slugs. A pair of film nerds in the audience complains about how the whole thing is a rip-off of the 1986 film Night of the Creeps. A man in a trench coat sitting behind the film nerds shushes them ostentatiously. This being Seattle, everybody sitting around the film nerds and the shusher tries to ignore the confrontation. Everyone else in the theater enjoys Slither for what it is: a hilarious B-movie with great gross-out effects that pays homage to every Body Snatchers–esque creature feature that came before. The film nerds and the shusher go on to live unremarkable lives and die, alone and unloved, in a nursing home many decades from now.
Why You Should See It at the Egyptian: Midnight movies at the Egyptian are the absolute best way to enjoy garbage horror cinema. PAUL CONSTANT
Playing: Sat Oct 25 at 11:55 pm
Director: Drew Goddard
Stars: Chris Hemsworth, Kristen Connolly, Fran Kranz, Anna Hutchison, Jesse Williams
Things That Really Happen in This Movie: In classic Friday the 13th style, four ridiculously attractive (and REALLY FRICKIN’ HORNY) twentysomethings (plus one REALLY STONED STONER who looks like Owen Wilson’s bastard younger brother) venture out into the woods for some sexy-sex, but instead get picked off, one-by-one, by inexplicable evil. To get there, the five ride in a very Race with the Devil–esque motor home. Upon arrival, as any horror movie fan worth their blood (or salt) realizes, the cabin is an exact replica of the one in The Evil Dead. The Cabin in the Woods is actually a horror-comedy about EVERY HORROR MOVIE EVER MADE. The sarcasm runs deep, but somehow Cabin is also scary.
Why You Should See It at the Egyptian: It’s the best midnight horror movie, because it’s EVERY horror movie. Take a cue from fake Owen Wilson, and smoke a joint beforehand. Also, never trust a fucking unicorn. KELLY O 