ECCENTRIC CINEMA

A man escapes a freak show and discovers love and acceptance. Two down-on-their-luck loners travel across the country with plans to open their own car wash. A bounty hunter learns the robots he’s tracking are more human than human. Eccentric Cinema presents all that plus The Room this April!

The program begins April 5 with David Lynch’s Oscar-nominated 1980 hit, The Elephant Man. John Hurt stars as John Merrick, a severely disabled man in Victorian London who has been reduced to working in a sideshow. After catching one of Merrick’s performances, Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), a surgeon at the London Hospital, whisks the man away and begins to study him. He soon learns that beneath a façade that terrifies the public is a man of wit and intelligence. Though the film is shot in the same stark black and white cinematography as Lynch’s Eraserhead, he finds a tenderness to the story. While Victorian London might look as imposing and bleak as the industrial wasteland in the previous film, he allows hope to spring in the form of Merrick and Treves’s bond.

Our monthly screening of The Room takes place April 12. If you have not experienced The Room at the Drexel, you don’t know what you’re missing! The loyal fans have created their own live experience á la The Rocky Horror Picture Show and they’re always excited to indoctrinate newbies into the cult of Wiseau. A Drexel tradition for 15 years, The Room is true outside art.

In tribute to the recently departed Gene Hackman, we’re screening the little-seen 1973 film Scarecrow on April 19. Hackman stars alongside Al Pacino as two vagabonds who meet while hitchhiking. The ever-trusting Pacino accepts Hackman’s offer to co-run a car wash in Pittsburgh, but getting there won’t be easy, especially with Hackman’s hot-head temper getting them into trouble. Capturing the same ambling spirit as Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop, Scarecrow was ignored by audiences in the ’70s, despite both Pacino and Hackman considering it the best movie they ever appeared in. Now is your chance to see this unsung classic on the big screen.

The program closes out the month on April 26 with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: The Final Cut, the definitive 2007 edit of the cyberpunk classic. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a “blade runner,” a bounty hunter tasked with capturing or eliminating replicants that have hidden out in rainy Los Angeles. When a gang of fugitive replicants escape their work colony and return to Earth, Deckard is hired to track them down, only to learn that humanity is not easy to quantify. Alongside Ford is a stacked cast of greats that includes Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah, Brion James, Joanna Cassidy, M. Emmet Walsh, and James Hong. Scott’s edit includes additional scenes of violence, a new sound mix, more of the legendary “unicorn sequence,” and an ending that leaves everything on a more ambiguous note.