Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen

Q: ‘What film would you make if you had a million dollars?’
George Kuchar: ‘I couldn’t work under those conditions.’

The hungry beast that is the Hollywood film industry demands a constant turnover of huge budgets and big stars. Not so another American tradition. Trash films delight in low budgets and so-called ‘bad taste’. They are lurid, camp, transgressive, wild and DIY, made by friends and lovers who subvert received ideas about gender, sex and identity. Their history goes back to the carny sideshows of yore, breaking the fourth wall and revelling in audiences’ complicit inclusion in both the shocks and jokes. Shown at cheap drive-ins, alternative art spaces and midnight movie palaces, these queer, divine, eye-popping works challenge the limits of censorship whilst blurring the boundaries between art and exploitation, parody and homage, excess and play. Feeling fed-up? Join us for this special, wild showcase. And look out for the BFI National Archive’s brand-new print of Ed Wood’s glorious Plan 9 from Outer Space, made from original 35mm elements.

William Fowler and Justin Johnson, season curators

Events

Trash! Season Introduction: Some Films Are Trash, Some Have Trash-Ness Thrust Upon Them

Season curators Will Fowler and Justin Johnson talk trash with some very special guests.

Idol Worship – An Evening with Mink Stole and Peaches Christ

Mink Stole and Peaches Christ join forces for a fabulous cabaret evening celebrating her career to date.

Badge Cafe - Trash! edition

A free crafty hangout with Ben Walters, putting old books and mags to Trash! badgemaking use.

Transgression and Excess

Shock, weirdness and exploitative provocation stand as vital trash totems, in both its original and rediscovered forms.

Reefer Madness

This 1930s public information film, an extraordinary combination of paranoia and naivety, was later embraced as an underground classic.

Blood Feast

The original splatter movie from Herschell Gordon Lewis, the ‘Godfather of Gore’, was banned for many years.

Blood Feast + intro by writer Virginie Selavy

The original splatter movie from Herschell Gordon Lewis, the ‘Godfather of Gore’, was banned for many years.

Normal Love

Jack Smith’s sumptuous, high-camp, vivid and full-colour homage to B-movies screens from a rare 16mm print.

Normal Love + intro by Professor Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London

Jack Smith’s sumptuous, high-camp, vivid and full-colour homage to B-movies screens from a rare 16mm print.

Other Weird Worlds

Films by Edward D. Wood Jr and the Kuchar brothers highlight cinema’s capacity to conjure new realms of imaginative possibility, even new ways to live.

Plan 9 from Outer Space

Aliens threaten the world order while zombies stumble through graveyards in Ed Wood’s astonishing masterpiece, screening here from a new print made by the BFI National Archive.

Plan 9 from Outer Space + extended intro by BFI National Archive preservation and curatorial staff, and writer Ken Hollings

Aliens threaten the world order while zombies stumble through graveyards in Ed Wood’s astonishing masterpiece, screening here from a new print made by the BFI National Archive.

Sins of the Fleshapoids + George Kuchar: The Comedy of the Underground

Shot in a cramped apartment, soundtracked with a drop-needle orchestral score and featuring costumes made from paper, Mike Kuchar’s film makes the post-apocalyptic future look positively splendid.

Hold Me While I’m Naked, George Kuchar!

The essential George Kuchar works includes Orphans of the Cosmos, about which George said, ‘It’s really quite a ride and looks like a million bucks for the vision-impaired’.

Hold Me While I’m Naked, George Kuchar! + extended intro by Professor Juan A. Suárez, author of Experimental Film and Queer Materiality

The essential George Kuchar works includes Orphans of the Cosmos, about which George said, ‘It’s really quite a ride and looks like a million bucks for the vision-impaired’.

Dumb Hunks and Sexpots

The pouting male hunk is objectified, worshipped and even ridiculed, in a series of films about desire and desperation.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

A trio of go-go girls cross the desert, hungry for money and murder in Russ Meyer’s B-movie classic.

Trash

Savage 1970s New York sets the stage for Joe and Holly Woodlawn’s brutal day of hustle and bustle. Trash screens from an original UK distribution print.

Trash + intro by Jaye Hudson of TGirlsonFilm

Savage 1970s New York sets the stage for Joe and Holly Woodlawn’s brutal day of hustle and bustle. Trash screens from an original UK distribution print.

Thundercrack!

One dark and stormy night, a group of strangers take refuge in a remote house. What happens next guaranteed this film a place in cinema history.

Resistance and Rebellion

Resistance can take many forms, as these weird, cinematic missives ably attest.

Another Day, Another Man + Elevator Girls in Bondage

A sexploitation classic and a rare, queer underground film make for an unforgettable double-bill.

Another Day, Another Man + Elevator Girls in Bondage + intro by film scholar and critic Dr Elena Gorfinkel

A sexploitation classic and a rare, queer underground film make for an unforgettable double-bill.

Multiple Maniacs

Lady Divine’s sleazy show is a front for a group of unruly and violent criminals in John Waters’ trash cinema delight.

Pink Flamingos

What does it take to become ’the filthiest person alive’? This classic underground movie from John Waters, the Pope of Trash helps answer this burning question.

Outer Limits and Legacy

Punk and new perspectives transformed what we call trash, while still valorising its original strategies and practitioners.

Salvation! + Goodbye 42nd Street + pre-recorded intro by Beth B

Two works from the Cinema of Transgression movement highlight the hypocrisy and changes that flow through 1980s America society.

Super 8 1/2

A down-on-his luck porn director sees his chance to stage a comeback when he collaborates with a lesbian documentary filmmaker.

I Was a Teenage Serial Killer + A Family Finds Entertainment

Traditional gender roles and behaviours are challenged in two different, yet equally urgent moving image works.

Ed Wood

Tim Burton’s affectionate and beautifully made tribute to trash cinema icon Ed Wood features an Oscar-winning performance from Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi.

Want more?

See BFI Player’s collection of trash cinema titles.

See the BFI Reuben Library’s Collection Focus: Trash Cinema.