The Sivads of March
This four-day event celebrates the life and work of Watson Davis, better known as "Sivad," the legendary WHBQ-TV horror host of the 1960s and early 1970s. Highlights of the weekend include films, an art show, and live music at venues around midtown.
Thursday, March 25
6 – 7:30pm | Monster Martini Meet & Greet
Enjoy drinks from the cash bar while you mix and mingle with Sivad friends and colleagues.
8pm | Fantastic Feature: Night of the Demon (95 mins)
Horror/noir specialist Jacques Tourneur (Cat People) directed this 1958 masterpiece that was the inspiration for Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell. Dana Andrews stars as a skeptical scientist who makes a dangerous enemy: a demonologist! This is the uncut 95-minute British version, unseen in America for decades. Sivad screened this shocker (in its shorter U.S. incarnation, known as Curse of the Demon) three times between 1968 and 1971. One of the great horror movies!
Tickets are $8 for general admission, and available at the door.*
Friday, March 26
3pm | Fantastic Feature: A Bucket of Blood (66 mins)
B-movie legend Roger Corman – who this year received an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement – directed this ingenious $50,000-budget, five-day-shooting-schedule 1959 horror spoof of beatnik-coffeehouse culture, starring Dick Miller as a wannabe-scenester schlemiel who becomes a critical sensation when he discovers dead bodies make lively sculptures. An appropriate screening for the Brooks: This is the rare horror movie that’s actually about art. Big daddy-O Sivad laid this gem on the hipsters five times, from 1966 to 1970. The gore the merrier!
Tickets are $5 for general admission, and available at the door.*
Saturday, March 27
Admission: Cash only
12:30 pm | Fantastic Feature: I Was a Teenage Werewolf (76 mins)
Before he was Little Joe or traveling the “Highway to Heaven,” Michael Landon was a juvenile delinquent with more than hairy palms in this infamous 1957 drive-in classic with the instantly notorious title. Call it “Rebel without a Cause, but with Claws,” or “Gee, Adolescence Sure Makes Hair Grow in Funny Places...” Sivad gave fans a reason to howl when he screened Werewolf five times between 1965 and 1970.
2 pm | Lil’ Film Fest: Beware the Sivads of March
See Live from Memphis' website for further details.
Tickets are $5 for general admission, and available at the door.*
Sunday, March 28
1 pm | Panel with Sivad colleagues and experts
The Most (Unintentionally) Hilarious Movie Monsters in History
The “Sivads of March” concludes with a kid-friendly double feature of old-fashioned laugh-a-minute monster mayhem! Fun for the entire family! (Especially the Addams Family.)
2 pm | Fantastic Feature: The Giant Claw (75 mins)
The U.S. Army has egg on its face when an overgrown buzzard from outer space attempts to make the Earth into its nest! Jeff Morrow is the square-jawed radar scientist who battles the big bird with the help of Mara Corday, a mathematician whose favorite numbers must be 36-24-36. Who needs the jokesters of “Mystery Science Theater” when you’ve got a monster as entertaining as this one? Even Sivad was embarrassed: He served this literal turkey from 1957 only twice, in 1969 and 1970.
3:30 pm | Fantastic Feature: From Hell It Came (73 mins)
Tiiiiimber! Make way for Tabonga, the Trunk of Terror, in a 1957 camp classic about a South Seas monster worth rooting for: a walking tree! Blame it on the voodoo or the atomic fallout – either way, you’ll fall out of your seat when you see Tabonga waddle after his hapless victims! Sivad shared this horror tree-t with viewers in 1963 and 1965.
Tickets are $5 for general admission, and available at the door.*
(*All film events for the Sivads of March are free with a VIP Film Pass.)
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