Midnight Marauders at Showroom Cinema
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
Midnight movies are a longstanding phenomena for a reason. Some films aren’t made for daytime viewing, they make more sense when accompanied by the anonymity of the night, watched alongside a crowd of likeminded film freaks looking for a fix of something weird, something transgressive. From Night of the Living Dead, to El Topo, to Eraserhead, the classic midnight movies are dark and illicit, cult objects to be experienced after the sun has left the sky and decent folk have gone to bed.
Sheffield’s Showroom Cinema knows this, which is why they’ve introduced Midnight Marauders, a series of monthly late night screenings that commence on Friday nights at 11:30pm. Stretching into the woozy early in-between hours of Saturday morning where possibilities can seem stretched, the films scheduled all feature some combination of excessive violence, tawdry sex, sleaze, or other crowd-pleasing filth that befit the late hour.
From Clint Eastwood’s probably-fascist cop blowing people away with a little too much gusto in Dirty Harry (Fri 30 May), to Wesley Snipes slicing up vampires to a techno soundtrack while sprinklers rain blood in Blade (Fri 26 Sept), these are films full of unforgettable imagery and questionable moral compasses.
There’s opportunity to see Walter Hill’s larger than life street gang classic The Warriors (Fri 27 Jun) which is set across one dark night in a dystopian vision of New York City. While showings of David Cronenberg’s sticky body horror masterpiece The Fly (Fri 25 July), alongside the Pope of Trash himself — John Waters’ — still shocking 1972 film Pink Flamingos (about the “filthiest people alive” on Fri 29 Aug) confirm that Showroom’s programmer’s are fully in tune with the spirit of the midnight movie.
