Capital Celluloid - Day 258: Saturday September 17

Pink Flamingos (Waters, 1972) & Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)

Both films are showing as part of Scala Cinema Day (2-8pm) at the Cinema Museum in Kennington which will include screenings, discussions and reminiscences about the legendary King's Cross picturehouse.

This is part of the Scala Forever season, a programme of 111 films and events at 26 venues through to October 2 that will celebrate the wonderful Scala cinema at King's Cross which closed in 1993. Here is an article I wrote in the Guardian on the history of the cinema and the season and here are the details of all the movies and special events on offer, via the Scala Forever website.

The Scala Forever webiste preview: The day will start with Michael Clifford's documentary on the Scala (30mins) before a panel discussion with Scala staff members Jane Giles and Stephen Woolley on the legacy of the cinema. A short break allows a chance to view old Scala programmes and other items from the museum's archive, before a discussion of the legacy of the Scala and the future of repertory cinema in the UK with Jane Giles joined by Danny Leigh of the Guardian, Michael Pierce of Midnight Movies, Phil Wood of Roxy Bar and Screen and Shira Macleod of Riverside Studios. The event will finish with a specially selected tribute double-bill of wild-haired ladies courtesy of John Waters' midnight movie classic Pink Flamingos and James Whale's horror classic Bride of Frankenstein.

Time Out review of Pink Flamingos:

'Waters' exercise in deliberately appalling taste is not for the sensitive, needless to say, offering a series of more or less disgusting gags (a messy copulation involving the killing of a chicken, loads of scatological references, a close-up of a scrawny youth spectacularly flexing his anus) deployed around a plot in which a villainous couple attempt to wrest from Divine 'her' claim to be the most disgusting person alive. The cast camp it up as if auditioning for some long-gone Warhol project. Waters raids de Sade in pursuit of extremes, but the difference between him and Warhol (or that other arch-exponent of extreme disgust, Otto Muehl) is that Waters' grotesquerie is decidedly trivial.' Verina Glaessner


Here is the trailer for Pink Flamingos

Chicago Reader review of Bride of Frankenstein:



'James Whale's quirky, ironic 1935 self-parody is, by common consent, superior to his earlier Frankenstein (1931). Whale added an element of playful sexuality to this version, casting the proceedings in a bizarre visual framework that makes this film a good deal more surreal than the original. Elsa Lanchester is the reluctant bride; Boris Karloff returns as the love-starved monster. Weird and funny.' Don Druker


Here is a short extract from Bride of Frankenstein

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