A ‘Bad Taste’ at Midnight: Cheesy Cinematic Perfection

The Nuart’s “Twisted Midnights”’ Friday midnight film series continues with Friday’s opening of Peter Jackson’s 1987 “Bad Taste,” made before “Dead Alive” and “Heavenly Creatures” put the audacious and imaginative New Zealand filmmaker on the map.

Happily, Jackson’s low-budget picture proves worthy of its nifty title, which you would have thought John Waters would have appropriated long ago. Through sheer cinematic panache, Jackson energizes the old creatures-from-outer-space sci-fi tale as a couple of blokes from the Alien Investigation and Defense Service descend upon a small seaside community from which everyone has vanished, having been snatched by aliens in search of human flesh to use as hamburgers in their intergalactic fast-food chain.

Drenched in cheapo entrails special effects, “Bad Taste” is hilariously, wonderfully--deliberately--cheesy, the perfect cockamamie midnight movie, screening also on March 1.

Written by Ben Simcoe and directed by Irving Lerner, “Murder by Contract” (1958), a sardonic film noir said to be an inspiration for “Taxi Driver,” screens at the Nuart Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m.

Vince Edwards has the best screen role of his career as a sexy, sullen hired killer, a man of iron discipline and perhaps a touch of madness, who’s been brought out to L.A. to knock off a gangster’s ex-girl friend before she can testify against him.

Ingenious plotting plays against the killer’s every move, steadily confronting him with vulnerabilities he never knew he possessed. This is a great, late example of unpretentious B-picture movie-making in the resourceful Edgar Ulmer tradition; Lucian Ballard did the terrific black-and-white cinematography and Perry Botkin contributed a spare, unsettling score.

Information: (310) 478-6379.

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Interplay: In bringing the late Ron Vawter’s two-part, one-man play “Roy Cohn/Jack Smith” (at the Sunset 5 Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m.) director Jill Godmilow was happily inspired to intercut between Vawter’s portrayal of influential underground filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith, best known for his “Flaming Creatures” (1962), as he envisions a new work and Vawter’s portrayal of controversial lawyer Roy Cohn delivering a profoundly homophobic speech to the American Society for the Protection of the Family in 1978.

This was a crucially effective decision on Godmilow’s part because Smith, dressed a la Maria Montez on the stage, rambles interminably as he lounges amid the thrift shop finery of his basement apartment before emerging as a figure of genuine camp pathos.

On the other hand, Cohn’s despicable hypocrisy--as a gay man he’s credited with a crucial role in stalling a gay and lesbian rights bill in Manhattan’s city council for 13 years--is hard to take in one long session.

The intercutting also serves to underline the extreme contrast between how two gay men of roughly the same age who died of AIDS dealt with their homosexuality.

Information: (213) 848-3500.

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Visionary: Filmforum concludes its three-part Leslie Thornton retrospective tonight at 8 at Glaxa Studios, 3707 Sunset Blvd. (near Lucille), with experimentalist Thornton’s “Peggy and Fred in Hell” cycle.

Best known for her evocations of the tempestuous life of turn-of-the-century adventuress Isabelle Eberhardt, Thornton is a true visionary.

Incorporating myriad bits of found footage--including even 1912 Thomas Edison storm footage--and sound bites with her own material, she creates a post-apocalyptic world in which two young children, brother and sister, cope innocently in a derelict Garden of Eden.

Information: (213) 466-4143.

Melodrama: The Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax Ave. is presenting on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Cecil B. DeMille’s “Something to Think About” (1920), significant as DeMille’s first film with a religious theme and as one of the six films he made with Gloria Swanson.

An extravagant melodrama written by DeMille’s perennial collaborator, Jeanie Macpherson, it casts Swanson as a blacksmith’s daughter who spurns wealthy cripple Elliot Dexter for handsome Monte Blue; fate, however, propels her back into Dexter’s life.

Information: (213) 653-2389.