Fest Opens With Gorilla Warfare

The American Cinematheque’s first Festival of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction opens tonight at the Egyptian at 7 with a brand-new 35mm print of “Planet of the Apes” (1968),directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston in the timeless post-apocalyptic adventure involving a bold and powerful parable of evolution. A discussion with Heston will follow.

Screening at 10:15 p.m. is the U.S. theatrical premiere of another venturesome and persuasive stunner, Anders Ronnow-Klarlund’s relentlessly tense and suspenseful “Possessed” (“Besat”). Ole Lemmeke stars as a dedicated young Copenhagen virologist whose investigation of an Ebola-like virus sends him off to Romania, where mystery and danger escalate swiftly.

Meanwhile, Udo Kier plays an intense--as only he can--renegade priest equally concerned with the virus from a different perspective. “Possessed” has the energy, speed and shoot-from-the-hip style typical of a film from Lars von Trier’s Zentropa Productions, and its imaginative meld of science, religion and astrology chillingly suggests that evil may in fact be a virus.

The Japanese cinema can always be counted on to go to extremes, and the festival offers a double feature Friday that is decidedly not for the faint of heart. At 7 p.m. Nobuo Nakagawa’s “Hell” (“Jigoku”), a 1960 horror classic, features a couple of reckless students involved in the hit-and-run death of a yakuza who ends up in a hell said to resemble Disneyland as designed by the Marquis de Sade.

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No one under 18 will be admitted for the Los Angeles theatrical premiere at 9:15 p.m. of Takashi Miike’s 1996 “Fudoh: The New Generations,” in which Miike takes an increasingly tragic view of rampant violence and depravity. The key figure is a suave 18-year-old high school student (Shosuke Tanihara), who 10 years earlier had witnessed his own yakuza father slay his overreaching older brother to stave off an underworld war. When the father now wants to join forces with another yakuza clan, Tanihara’s vengeful Ricki Fudoh unleashes his ranks of schoolboy assassins, wiping out the council of the other clan.

Once again the elder Fudoh is commanded by the yakuza hierarchy to assassinate a son--and this time he has yet another son, the ferocious offspring of one of his mistresses, lined up to do the job. With mordant humor and bravura style, Miike and writer Toshiyuki Morioka project a corrosive vision of human behavior that’s relentlessly savage and kinky--and pathetic and sad.

Saturday’s programming begins at 5 p.m. with a screening of a rare Technicolor print of Joseph Newman’s “This Island Earth” (1955). Newman, who was working at the Egyptian the day it opened in 1922, will appear following his film. Saturday evening spotlights two Italian horror maestros. “Cemetery Man” director Michele Soavi’s 1987 debut feature, “Stagefright” (“Deliria”) screens at 7:30 p.m., followed by Dario Argento’s 1987 classic, “Opera.” And this is just the start of the festival, which runs through Sept. 10.

The Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen offering, Tom Sawyer’s “The Strange Case of Senor Computer” (Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.) fits right in with the spirit of the ongoing festival. It is an ambitious and creepy tale about a nerdy young UCLA artificial intelligence researcher (Rick Ziegler) who lives in his late parents’ home, a handsome Mediterranean-style villa, with a robot of his own creation, who soon feels as neglected as the researcher must have while growing up.

If the film is highly imaginative and bleakly amusing, it is also arid and static, making it hard to watch. Information: (323) 466-FILM.

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The second annual WinFemme Film Festival, sponsored by the Women’s Image Network, opens today at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, where 40 films of varying length screen through Sunday.

The festival’s first feature presentation, at 7:40 p.m., New Zealand filmmaker Christine Parker’s “Channeling Baby,” has a plot so thick with tragedy that it might daunt even Aeschylus or Euripides. Set in the Vietnam War era, it turns upon a beautiful hippie (Danielle Cormack) who goes blind and falls in love with a traumatized soldier (Kevin Smith). When their marriage starts coming apart, their baby mysteriously disappears. Clearly Parker wants to drive home the terrible toll exacted by the Vietnam War, but tragedy at its most stark is way beyond the abilities of her and her cast.

“Channeling Baby” will be followed at 10 p.m. by Esther Bell’s “Godass,” which rambles wildly in its opening sequences in South Carolina but begins to come into focus once it moves to New York. When teen-age Teri (Nika Feldman), who runs a punkzine, Skid Marks, with a couple of pals, heads for Manhattan to interview a rock musician, she finds herself confronted with her biological father, a gay man she really doesn’t know and mistakenly feels has abandoned her.

Ragged in the utmost, “Godass” reveals an edgy sensibility and is charged with genuine emotion. The challenge for Bell will be to bring more shape to her work without losing its honest rawness.

Tamara Olson’s “Fashionably L.A.” is a terrific sleeper, an exceedingly well-realized first film, laced with confidence and rueful wit, that follows the fortunes of five beautiful local fashion models, caught up in a profession full of pitfalls and heartache. The key figure is Kassidy (played expertly by Olson, a model herself), for whom modeling is becoming increasingly disenchanting but who’s getting nowhere fast in her attempt to launch an acting career.

This is a sharp, funny account told with admirable detachment by an insider. ‘Fashionably L.A.” deserves theatrical distribution accompanied by a promotional campaign as sophisticated as it is. Women’s Image Network: (310) 914-9691; Music Hall: (310) 274-6869.

Note: A program of 14 recently restored Warner Bros. musical shorts will screen Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Information: (310) 247-3600.