Directed by Matthew Bright
102 minutes
In English

Director Matthew Bright was always a very strange kind of chap. Full of ideas and bursting with creativity and sharp insights—he also had a slippery past. He's the kind of guy that came from nowhere, made a splash in one scene, disappeared for decades, then appeared somewhere totally different, and kept popping up in the weirdest places that she would least expect. He collaborated with the off-the-wall blitzkrieg music flick Forbidden Zone by The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Later he wrote some crazy scripts that caught the eye of Oliver Stone who helped him raise money, so he could direct his own visionary movies. He made a few, and then gave up twenty years ago in utter disgust of how the movie industry functioned, and the widespread censorship in America that people aren't even aware of.

This flick by Bright is his best known, a cult film of almost mythic proportions. The premise is simple, and it's beautiful to watch how it unfolds - it is basically the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, updated to L.A. in the 1990s, with a young white-trash girl named Vanessa (Reese Witherspoon) battling psychotic serial killer Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland). But to sum the movie up like that is an injustice... what the film is really about are the unexpected twists and turns and powerful insights into how our society works. It is stuffed with an incredible sense of humor, but also an intelligence that's rarely seen these days. Director Mathew Bright is a perfect example of what a creative person can come up with if set free and not straightjacketed on every side by studios and financing. No wonder he didn't last long in the business. By the way, young Reese Witherspoon is phenomenal in this film—risky, brash and tough.

The so-called entertainment industry has been dumbing down audiences' intelligence steadily for the last 50 years. When everything is set at the same level of ignorance, then it creates a standard that starts feeling normal to most of the public. That's what makes this flick so wonderful... it takes all the tropes, stereotypes, cheap sentimental tricks and middle-class propaganda, and utterly smashes all of them by simply actually doing something original. And wow, does this flick take us on a journey... It literally howls.

There was an off-beat film critic here in Amsterdam, who loved cult cinema and was a regular at the underground cinemas for over a decade. Unfortunately he passed away some months ago. His name was Luuk van Huet, and I remember him complaining to me that this flick, which he considered a masterpiece, was refused distribution in Holland. So, with him in mind, we will grab this cult favorite flick out of the closet and unleash it on the screen.

This will be a high-definition screening.