Bizarre bazaar

The Mascara & Popcorn Festival pays tribute to the trashy with local genre flicks and cult classics

DEMONIC PROJECTION: Pierre Ayotte’s Satan, Jesus & Elvis

The bustling summer festival season is about to get a new addition: the Mascara & Popcorn festival of film, music, fashion and visual arts includes five film nights and takes place primarily at the MainLine Theatre. Inspired by a televised interview with John Waters, organizer Florence Touliatos and her partner Danika Bass set out to create a “trashy B-movie celebration with low-budg­et cult movies that included mondo-type horror, slasher flicks, cinema of transgression, cult favourites” and more.

Aside from the SPASM Festival and Fantasia’s annual Week-end Fantastique, Mascara & Popcorn promises to be another exciting platform for local filmmakers of a genre persuasion. After culling the sub­missions, the organizers came up with an epic two and a half-hour program of short films described by Touliatos as “a great combo of eroticism, horror, suspense, comedy, absurdity and good fun.” The witty, violent and poly-sexual films that form the short film program on Wednesday, July 6 include Pierre Ayotte’s quirky, jerky Super 8 works Massacrator 1 and 2 and Satan, Jesus & Elvis as well as the feath­ery pleasures of his Date With a Chicken, Mark Pariselli’s dark coming-of-age fantasy After, Adam Reider’s disturbingly funny Dogsitter, and shorts by Danny Malin, Patricia Chica, Éric Falardeau, Daniel Beresh and others. Izabel Grondin’s Aspiralux plays alongside her latest provocative award-winning short Fantasy, while fellow genre filmmaker Maude Michaud (who most recently launched her ongoing Bloody Breasts web series) screens Hollywood Skin and Complexe Modèle.

Local filmmaker Matthew Saliba gets his own six-film retrospective on Tuesday, July 5, followed by a cocktail and Q&A. “Matthew is well known on the festival circuit and has developed a style of his own,” says Touliatos, describing this style as “beauty meets bizarre sado-eroticism, role-play and horror.”

The accompanying repertory program includes an outdoor showing of Randall Kleiser’s 1978 cult hit Grease at Pigeon Hole Parc in Old Montreal. “There’s already a giant green screen painted on one side of the building entrenching the park,” explains Touliatos. “Benches…a fence made out of wood, a nifty paint-job and voilà: a brilliant urban renewal project that involves the sustainable development of a vacant lot and its transformation into a park and outdoor theatre in the summer.” ■

THE MASCARA & POPCORN FESTIVAL RUNS FROM JULY 4–11 AT VARIOUS LOCATIONS. FULL SCHEDULE AND DETAILS AT MASCARA-POPCORN.COM

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