The Secret Cinema

An early film by Bartel, putty-faced schoolmaster (and comic) of the Roger Corman stable (he made Death Race 2000), which exudes an amiable naïveté. A mad secret society, of uncertain membership and dubious morality, runs a 'secret cinema' in which they screen ciné-vérité films of the characters in this film losing their marbles. Some of it is hilarious; all of it is fresh enough; but none of it is avant-garde: the camp sensibility of the New York underground now increasingly looks like irony updated. Remade by Bartel in 1985 as an episode of TV series Amazing Stories.