Society Satisfies a Taste for Tasteless Films By Lisa Dickey Washingtonpost.com Staff Writer Thursday, December 11, 1997

Psychotronic Film Society: Showing films your mother warned you about. (By Karen Mason Chaffraix/TWP)

About the film society To join: Show up for the weekly film screenings, every Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Lucky Bar, 1221 Connecticut Ave. NW. Membership fee: None. Donations are accepted at screenings. Membership requirements: A taste for films that are obscure, offbeat and/or tasteless. For screening information: See the society's Web page. Subscribe to the newsletter ($5 a year) by calling 202/736-1732.

A white convertible cruising along a sunny strip suddenly careers wildly out of its lane, trying to pass three hearselike black cars just ahead. The driver loses control, and the convertible jumps off the road and veers into a construction area, where a bundle of steel rods hangs suspended by a crane.

In the dark, cavernous back room at the Lucky Bar on Connecticut Avenue NW, a few dozen B-movie fans are gathered, sipping beers and staring at the TV screens showing the convertible's ride to oblivion. It's Tuesday night, and as it does every Tuesday, the Washington Psychotronic Film Society (WPFS) is showing the best of the worst: films that celebrate the obscure, the tasteless and the just plain weird. Like tonight's offering: Director Paul Verhoeven's "The Fourth Man."

As the convertible hurtles toward the steel rods, the audience savors the sweetly sickening sense of the inevitable. And then, splat! The convertible smashes into the rods, one of which impales the driver's head through his right eye. The audience gasps in horror and delight, but the best (meaning the worst) is yet to come: The camera pans to the rear, where eyeball residue drips languidly down the back of the car seat.

It is a classic "psychotronic" moment, as members of WPFS explain post-screening. "Construction material going through an eyeball could be in a mainstream film," says society regular Dorothy Hickson, 29, a technical writer from Columbia Heights. "But the shot of the back seat with the eyeball residue is what made it psychotronic."

Film fans in a psychotronic daze at the Lucky Bar. By Karen Mason Chaffraix/TWP

"It's called 'disoculation,' " adds board member Lori Walsh Van Wey, 26, helpfully. "Getting an eyeball poked out. It happens a lot in the movies we screen."

For nearly nine years, the film society has been slaking the thirst of Washington-area buffs of schlock film. The club was started in 1989 by a 26-year-old writer named Melanie Scott, who was then unemployed and spending lots of time watching cheesy movies. "You don't want to watch Bergman when you're depressed," notes Scott.

She realized it would be a lot more fun to watch the movies with other fans, so she put an ad in Washington's City Paper calling together other lovers of offbeat and obscure films. About 70 people responded and the Washington Psychotronic Film Society was born. Scott headed the society for eight years before moving last year to Philadelphia.

During those years, WPFS endured numerous venue changes, the theft of its TVs and VCRs, and even a close brush with the law when a police officer wandered into a planned screening of a movie that had been banned in this country, "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story." (The film was shown in its entirety, but society members made a run for it immediately afterward.)

Through it all, the society, which operates on a not-for-profit shoestring, has persevered.

WPFS takes its name from "The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film," a 1989 guide to B-movies written by Michael Weldon. But "psychotronic" is not a word you'll find in Webster's, and defining what falls into the category of "psychotronic films" is not, as it turns out, a simple thing.

Society president Carl Cephas, an affable Forrest Whitaker lookalike with sculpted sideburns and a goatee, says that psychotronic films should contain "something a little bit 'off.' Unbelievable plots, miscasting, bad directing."

Society president Carl Cephas, or "Dr. Schlock" to his friends. By Reginald A. Pearman/TWP

Perhaps partly in an attempt to define the term, a few years ago Cephas made a psychotronic film of his own: "Omnivore Snacks Etc.," a five-minute video showing a platter of Spam, cheese curls and olives, with suspenseful music playing in the background.

"I was going to make a sequel, but my cat kept eating the food," says the 37-year-old Cephas, who works as an assistant reference librarian at the Library of Congress.

"There are three categories of films," offers Hickson. "Films that suck. Films that are great. And films that are great because they suck. We're looking for the third kind."

And there are plenty of them, judging from the society's winter schedule, printed in a free newsletter, "Psychotronic Monitor." "Mesa of Lost Women" stars "huge friggin' telepathic spiders" and "indestructible women," according to the Monitor; "Butterfly" stars B-movie icon Pia Zadora in a "torrid tale of white-trash forbidden love"; and in "The Wicker Man," Britt Ekland does "a funky-butt dance."

A man and his Spam. By Reginald A. Pearman/TWP

Where does the society find such unusual fare? Many of the films are rented or bought from the Video Vault in Alexandria, a store Cephas calls "a treasure trove." About half the films come from mail-order catalogues such as "Shock Cinema," "Sinister Cinema" and "Rhino Video."

The Tuesday-night screenings employ a bit of marketing strategy: before each film, Cephas shows off the week's door prizes, which are awarded after the final credits fade. "That way," says Cephas, "people won't leave in the middle of the film, even if they don't like it. They want to win a prize."

Cephas and his compatriots try to choose door prizes that somehow tie in with the featured film. At the showing of "Blood Splattered Bride," for example, the main prize was a Barbie doll spattered with red paint.

It's all in the name of making sure there's an audience. And it seems to be working: anywhere from 20 to 70 viewers come to every Tuesday screening, Cephas says. The viewers, who are asked for donations to help pay for the free screenings, come from all age ranges and backgrounds, with different films attracting different audiences.

"For example," says Cephas, "Bette Davis and Joan Crawford films always get a lot of gay men." And to Cephas' surprise, a showing of the fabulously dreckish "Xanadu," a 1980 musical starring Olivia Newton-John, packed the house.