This weekend, Neo Kino A.D. celebrated two years of bringing unheard of cult movies to theatres in Amsterdam. I went along to enjoy the label’s latest double-bill – and found an event which was about much more than just snickering at other artists’ failures.
Federico Petrini is an Italian-Brazilian who has been living in Amsterdam for the past five years. In his own words, he is “an actor, editor and a huge film enthusiast” – and since June 2022, he has been hosting a label of events called Neo Kino A.D., screening forgotten or overlooked cult movies to a growing audience of loyal revellers.
“I really go for movies that are ignored, even by the art-house and cinema circuit,” Petrini explains. “I want to bring some representation to this kind of cinema, beyond the obvious. I noticed a lot of people in Amsterdam screen movies that already have notoriety, like The Evil Dead. My objective is to bring out the movies that are not easy to find, on streaming services or even on torrenting sites.”
Petrini initially hosted the screenings in the Vondelbunker– an old nuclear shelter from the late 1940s, repurposed over several generations, to now stand as a free-to-use “autonomous cultural centre” run by volunteers who believe “space is a political concept”. But noble as the goals of that locale’s volunteers are, winter screenings in the bunker are not for the faint of heart. In mid-2023, Filmhuis Cavia– another alternative venue curated by generations of Amsterdam’s squatters and punks – offered Neo Kino A.D. a new home. One with heating and insulation.
The label’s own trajectory is not a million miles removed from the goals of the filmmakers who it champions, then. Against all the odds, the passion of Petrini and his collaborators has enabled Neo Kino A.D. events to reach film-lovers across Amsterdam – including one of its best turnouts on this, its second anniversary screening.
Perhaps that’s why Petrini clearly has such a reverence for the filmmakers he is showcasing. Because as much as he concedes there is “laughter” at screenings, and plenty of fare for those who are looking for some niche so-bad-it’s-good viewing, every piece of work he shows has been made with blood, sweat and tears, by people who really wanted to tell stories; to speak to other people, and leave them feeling better for it.
“One of our main objectives is to bring people together in front of the cinema screen, to have some fun without pretences,” Petrini notes. “But there is more to it than that. A lot of times these filmmakers really fight against the odds to bring their own unique vision to life. No matter what their background or economic situation was. Some people are more successful than others. The ones who fail are more numerous than the ones who succeed. But I feel kinship with all of them all; a sense of solidarity. I do have my own ideas of what I want to bring to life one day – but I’m not in a rush.”
Petrini – like many of his cult cinema contemporaries – wears a lot of hats. Editor, actor, events organiser. He has even procured a DJ for today’s event, to host an after-party for the surviving audience. But he also has a distinct kind of self-awareness and patience that isn’t always present among filmmakers.
When I suggest it’s probably for the best he isn’t “in a rush” to make his opus, because the artists who do that not only tend to fail brutally, and have a miserable time in the process, he responds, “Yeah, my name is not Tommy Wiseau!”
And two years of slow-but-steady growth with Neo Kino A.D. suggests he isn’t just saying ‘the right thing’ for the sake of it. When the time does come to make his own movie – having spent several years evaluating what works and what doesn’t from the passion-heavy, achievement-light films he is showcasing – I really hope it comes Indy Film Library’s way!
At Dawn They Sleep
In the meantime, the first of a two-year-anniversary double-bill is about to kick off. Up first is 2000’s At Dawn They Sleep, possibly the perfect illustration of what Neo Kino A.D. has to offer.
The story centres on a pair of Masshole drug dealers, who unwittingly become vampires following a night of passion and eye-popping practical effects with two mysterious women. The two guests – who are later revealed to be angels turning humans into vampires out of spite for God handing “talking monkeys” the keys to the planet – conspicuously note they “never eat” and “don’t drink”, something which would have been a red-flag if our protagonists had ever seen Gary Oldman camp it up in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But the warning goes unheeded, and the following scene sees both of them given ‘hickeys’ which fester beneath their skin in a way that oddly doesn’t worry them too much.
As carnage ensues following their corruption, the audience is treated to a showcase in DIY special effects. A rival drug-dealer attempts to kill them off, by driving his car through the side of their house – an impressively convincing, if slightly wobbly, façade they constructed to plough through – before he is stabbed directly in the brain in the resulting battle. Then, an American Werewolf in London-inspired transformation sees the pair finally succumb to their wounds; writhing in pain under a full-moon, before building cocoons from their spit and vomit, emerging from the next day, fangs-and-all.
Writer-director-star Brian Paulin is the archetypical cult filmmaker, in that he has some genuinely interesting ideas and some brilliantly innovative ways of getting round budgetary limitations – but whose talent is ultimately still outweighed by his ambition. As wonderfully as the team did building sets to destroy, as brilliantly as they applied make-up to make it seem like someone had suffered a fatal head-wound, that scene is undermined by the victim then delivering the protagonists a defiant middle-finger. In the transformation scene, meanwhile, the production gets the hard stuff right – but nobody bothered to figure out how they could film the moon above in focus; leaving us a painful reminder that however gross things get, it’s still amateur hour.
Even so, At Dawn They Sleep still has buckets of charm that make it easier to forgive and forget its shortcomings. Sometimes, it is legitimately funny. There are moments which could only have been included as jokes, which are so pleasantly surprising that they have the audience in belly-laughs. Those moments include a miserly priest, who counts out money for an orphanage before flippantly declaring “Nah, they don’t need that much” and pocketing half the envelope. They also include a John Woo-inspired shootout in a box factory (where else?) where one of our vampires realises that they don’t need guns to win, but the other smiles back “I know, but isn’t it fun?”
Even between those moments, when things get awkward or slow, they are funny because one of the key aspects of comedy is the need for aspiration. Seeing someone who takes themselves too seriously, getting egg on their face. And as much as Paulin and his friend Rich George want to present themselves as cool, sexy vampires like members of WWE’s The Brood, they look more like Meatloaf and Al Pacino dusted with talcum powder.
The first movie is a riotous success with the audience, who have filled up Cavia’s theatre. In the break between the films, I get an impression of the kind of steady success the Neo Kino A.D. project is building. There are, of course, a number of people who have attended to support Petrini from his social circle. But there are several newcomers – including an American who he banters with about the vampires’ broad Bostonian brogues drawl – and, most importantly, return viewers.
One such glutton for punishment is Alexia, who says she has been attending Neo Kino A.D. screenings for a while now – and even remembers the cold evenings in the bunker. Even more demonstrative of her commitment to cult cinema, Alexia admits she knew what she was “getting into” by attending, having actually seen other Brian Paulin films before! So, what keeps her coming back?
“This is just so out-there,” she says. “There is nothing like these movies that you are going to see anywhere else. This is really the only place you can see them – and I’ve tried my best online, and I just can’t find them. But it’s also a much better experience to see them with an audience, anyway. I like to hear people’s laughter during the screening. It gives you a sense of community.”
I agree – it’s been something of a running theme in cult movie/B-movie articles that watching alone can be a miserable experience. Being able to vent about infuriating plot-holes to someone, anyone, as well as to laugh at intentional or unintentional moments of comedy helps shoulder the burden. It’s almost like sitting through a football match surrounded by strangers, but sharing in the agony and ecstasy of the match you are each powerless to affect.
So, Petrini’s goal of “bringing people together” is something Neo Kino A.D. is already achieving. But more than that, Alexia suggests it might also be succeeding in celebrating the films in their own right.
She adds, “I think as big a deal for me is what got the movie made in the first place. The director’s community – their friends or whoever – coming together and doing something just with whatever resources they had. I find that quite inspiring actually; I’d love to do that myself one day!”
Mutation
As the second film gets underway, Alexia is one of the guests who manages to survive both movies. The audience is still large, but it has shrunk from the earlier screening – and that might be just as well, because while the first film was very beginner-friendly, Mutation is definitely not an entry-level ‘cult movie’.
Filmed in 1999 by German auteurs Timo Rose and Marc Fehse, Mutation is a film which Petrini introduces as having been made “with lots of passion”, but not so much ability. Few people would probably be as charitable with their own description of the film – which quickly turns into an amorphous mess of seemingly irrelevant plot strands. A collection of disparate organs and muscles, with no skeleton to hang it on, no connective tissue to propel it forward.
“Who the fuck was that?” shouts one disgruntled viewer at a scene where one man is granted multiple close-ups, as if we should recognise him. We follow him through a deserted train station, before he is suddenly disembowelled by a zombie – seemingly to no consequence for the plot.
A lot of the film is very dull. In what is supposed to be the film’s action-driven climax, two men who have never been formally introduced to us rampage down endless corridors of an abandoned housing block, gunning down the undead. It is my least favourite excess of the zombie sub-genre – in cult cinema and beyond – because it is so transparently unambitious, trying to inflate run-time on a budget by ‘ratcheting up tension’ by filming prolonged sequences where nothing actually happens in the cheapest possible venue. In this case, that becomes even more painful, because whenever the film is without ambition, its failures are much, much more tedious.
With that being said, I can’t say that Mutation is generally any more tedious than Netflix’s Black Summer. And I can’t say that it’s determination to explain a zombie outbreak as the result of a genetic experiment is any sillier than any of the plots of the Resident Evil series. If anything, Mutation is just as accomplished as those stories, but on a fraction of the budget.
There are still some serious plus-points, too. Rose and Fehse commence their film with a genuinely excellent pseudo-documentary, the kind you perpetually find on the History Channel, telling the story of a Nazi scientist who believed he had created a virus that could unlock the true powers of the ‘master race’. There is something in this format – if not the exact story – that begs further exploration, and I am sure someone could produce an effective and innovative horror short purely presented as a backwater-TV-station paranormal documentary show. But Rose and Fehse aren’t interested in this – and dive two-footed into delivering a schlocky House of the Dead romp instead.
Even in this second, less interesting format, however, there are flashes of potential. Highlights include the man who gets hold of the Nazi zombie virus microdosing it to gradually become ‘more powerful’ – something shown not by him becoming more muscular, or doing anything impressive (for all his efforts, he remains as noodle-armed and flat-chested as I am), but twitching, screaming, and growing some flimsy-looking antlers from his shoulders. Lowe, he has become the underwhelming mensch.
Elsewhere, another disconnected break away almost takes on the form of a comedy routine. A couple are enjoying a candle-lit dinner where the man proposes. The woman calls him crazy, and begins to detail various pieces of drama in a scene that threatens to drag before, just as she accepts his offer, the happy moment is interrupted by the undead horde, springing from nowhere to tear the lovers to scraps. It’s a blue-print for a recurring comedy skit that would have played very well on an early 2000s sketch-show.
This still isn’t quite enough to justify the second 90-minute-beating I’ve subjected my frontal lobe to this evening. By the time the it was all a dream – or was it ending has ushered in the credits, I’ve had my fill. I politely decline offers to remain at the after-party, or to join an expedition to another late-night event promoting cult cinema in another part of town. I’ll need a month or so to recover from this. But once I have, this community will inevitably draw me back for more.
Not just for the laughs – though there will be plenty – but to appreciate the art of the cult movie, and to celebrate the people brave or crazy enough to enter into it. To bare their souls through projects which will probably never live up to their hopes and dreams – in the belief that intentionally or otherwise, their work could touch people they have never met, to communicate with them, and make them happy. To that end, the most beautiful part of Neo Kino A.D.’s project is that it allows films that redemption arc. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons, these once-forgotten films will make your weekend. It might not be the fame the filmmakers dreamed of, but it’s got to be worth something.