CWRU Film Society

Tickets go on sale Friday, January 21, at 6pm. Admission is $20.

8:00pm
eXistenZ (1999)
Rated R (97 min.) Director: David Cronenberg
With Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe

Allegra Geller, the leading game designer in the world, is testing her new virtual reality game, eXistenZ with a focus group. As they begin, she is attacked by a fanatic assassin employing a bizarre organic gun. She flees with a young marketing trainee, Ted Pikul,who is suddenly assigned as her bodyguard. Unfortunately, her pod, an organic gaming device that contains the only copy of the eXistenZ game program, is damaged. To inspect it, she talks Ted into accepting a gameport in his own body so he can play the game with her. The events leading up to this, and the resulting game lead the pair on a strange adventure where reality and their actions are impossible to determine from either their own or the game's perspective.

9:50pm
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Rated PG-13 (107 min.) Directors: George Miller, George Ogilvie
With Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Bruce Spence

Thunderdome is a city on the edge of a desert that has managed to retain some technology if no civilization. Max has his supplies stolen and must seek shelter there in a post apocalypse world where all machines have begun to break down and barbarians hold what is left. He becomes involved in a power struggle in this third Mad Max film where he must first survive the town, survive the desert and then rescue the innocent children he has discovered.

12 midnight
Surprise I

2:30am
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969)
Rated G (97 min.) Director: Robert Parrish
With Roy Thinnes, Ian Hendry, Patrick Wymark

A planet is discovered in the same orbit as Earth's but is located on the exact opposite side of the sun, making it not visible from Earth. The European Space Exploration Council decide to send American astronaut Glenn Ross and British scientist John Kane via spaceship to explore the other planet. After a disastrous crash-landing Ross awakes to learn that Kane lies near death and that they apparently have returned to Earth, as evidenced by the presence of the Council director and his staff. Released to the custody of his wife, he soon learns things are not as they seem.

4:00am
Frankenhooker (1990)
Rated R (85 min.) Director: Frank Henenlotter
With James Lorinz

A medical school dropout loses his fianc�e in a tragic lawnmower incident, and decides to bring her back. Unfortunately, he was only able to save her head, so he goes to the red light district in the city and lures prostitutes into a hotel room so he can get parts for his girlfriend.

6:00am
Fantastic Voyage (1966)
No rating (100 min.) Director: Richard Fleischer
With Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmund O'Brien

A diplomat is nearly assassinated. In order to save him, a submarine is shrunken to microscopic size and injected into his blood stream with a small crew. They have just begun their voyage when it becomes clear there is a saboteur on board.

8:00am
Scanners (1981)
Rated R (103 min.) Director: David Cronenberg
With Jennifer O'Neil, Patrick McGoohan, Michael Ironsides

Darryl Revok is the most powerful of all the scanners, and is the head of the underground scanner movement for world domination. Scanners have great psychic power, strong enough to control minds; they can inflict enormous pain/damage on their victims. Doctor Paul Ruth finds a scanner that Revok hasn't, and converts him to their cause - to destroy the underground movement.

10:00am
First Men in the Moon (1964)
No rating (103 min.) Director: Nathan Juran
With Edward Judd, Martha Hyer, Lionel Jeffries

Based on the HG Wells story. The world is delighted when a space craft containing a crew made up of the world's astronauts lands on the moon, they think for the first time. But the delight turns to shock when the astronauts discover an old British flag and a document declaring that the moon is taken for Queen Victoria proving that the astronauts were not the first men on the moon. On Earth, an investigation team finds the last of the Victorian crew - a now aged Arnold Bedford and he tells them the story of how he and his girlfriend, Katherine Callender, meet up with a inventor, Joseph Cavor, in 1899. Cavor has invented Cavorite, a paste that will allow anything to deflect gravity and he created a sphere that will actually take them to the moon. Taking Arnold and accidently taking Katherine they fly to the moon where, to their total amazement, they discover a bee-like insect population who take a unhealthy interest in their Earthly visitors...

11:30am
Things to Come (1936)
No rating (100 min.) Director: William Cameron Menzies
With Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Ralph Richardson

In the year 1936 a global war begins. This war drags out over many decades until most of the people still alive (mostly those born after the war started) do not even know who started it or why. Nothing is being manufactured at all any more and society has broken down into primative localized communities. In 1966 a great plague wipes out most of what people are left but small numbers still survive. One day a strange aircraft lands at one of these communities and its pilot tells of an organisation which is rebuilding civilization and slowly moving across the world re-civilizing these groups of survivors. Great reconstruction take place over the next few decades and society is once again great and strong. The world's population is now living in underground cities. In the year 2035, on the eve of man's first flight to the moon, a popular uprising against progress (which some people claim has caused the wars of the past) gains support and becomes violent.

1:30pm
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993)
No Rating (60 min.) Director: Dave Borthwick
With Nick Upton, Deborah Collar, Frank Passingham

A boy born the size of a small doll is kidnapped by a genetic lab and must find a way back to his father in this inventive adventure filmed using stop motion animation techniques. Tom meets a variety of strange creatures and eventually discovers a race of miniature humans like himself.

2:30pm
Alien (1979)
Rated R (117 min.) Director: Ridley Scott
With Tom Skerrit, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright

When commercial towing vehicle Nostromo, heading back to Earth, intercepts an SOS signal from a nearby planet, the crew are under obligation to investigate. After a bad landing on the planet, some crew members leave the ship to explore the area. At the same time as they discover a hive colony of some unknown creature, the ship's computer deciphers the message to be a warning, not a call for help. When one of the eggs is disturbed, the crew do not know the danger they are in until it is too late.

4:30pm
Surprise II

6:30pm
Silent Running (1971)
Rated G (89 min.) Director: Douglas Trumbull
With Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin

Lowell Freeman looks after plants in giant space greenhouses. Back on earth, all the trees have long vanished, so Lowell puts a lot of heart into his work. When orders from earth are received to destroy the greenhouses, Lowell can't go through with it, and cannot persuade his three colleagues to help him save the plants, so he makes other "arrangements".

8:00pm
Wing Commander (1999)
Rated PG-13 (100 min.) Director: Chris Roberts
With Freddie Prinze Jr., Saffron Burrows, Matthew Lillard

In the mid-27th century, the Terran Confederation is at war with the felinoid Kilrathi Empire. After destroying a Terran base, the Kilrathi have seized a NAVCOM unit with the hyperspace jump coordinates to Earth. With Terran reinforcements scheduled to arrive two hours after the Kilrathi hit Earth, it falls upon the starfighter carrier TCS Tiger Claw to keep the Kilrathi busy.

9:45pm
Trekkies (1997)
Rated PG (86 min.) Director: Roger Nygard
With Frank D'Amico, William Shatner, Denise Crosby

From a TV series that barely lasted three seasons in the 1960s, "Star Trek" has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry involving several spin-off series, numerous movies, and countless merchandise items. This phenomenon is due to the show's legions of rabidly devoted fans, popularly known as "Trekkies." "Star Trek" actress Denise Crosby provides an affectionate and humorous look at some of these people, who demonstrate how "Star Trek" has affected and even shaped their lives. Several members of the show's cast and creative team also describe what the series and its fans mean to them.

11:30pm
The Matrix (1999)
Rated R (144 min.) Directors: Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
With Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburn, Carrie-Anne Moss

What if all life on Earth was nothing more than an elaborate facade created by a malevolent cyber-intelligence, for the purpose of placating us while our life essence is "farmed" to fuel a campaign of domination in the "real" world? Our hero Neo (Reeves) joins like-minded Rebel warriors Morpheus (Fishburne) and Trinity (Moss) in their struggle to overthrow the Matrix in this sci-fi thriller.