Philadelphia Weekly

When the Backseat Film Festival calls for submissions, they know what they’re looking for. This year’s request read: “Once again, we are looking for shorts, features, documentaries, animations, music videos and everything in between. Student films and local stuff welcome. We like all kinds of cool movies, just nothing too boring or pretentious please!”

That perception that film festivals must involve “FIN.” is one that the BFF has been trying to subvert for years. For example, see the faux-Godard trailer for Altamont Now!, one of the selections this year.

The film festival does its part by selecting a wide assortment of movies to screen, although they often have a common thread of the undead, sex, drugs or rock and roll¬—and always have the common thread of free PBR during screenings; Pabst has been a sponsor of the festival for years.

In addition to the film screenings, the BFF opening and closing ceremonies and after-parties are an interesting experience. The opening ceremonies always involve the ritual destruction of rejected submissions. Next Saturday’s after-party at the M Room, will involve Strip for Pain, which bills itself as “America’s Most Dangerous Gameshow!” True to the name, girls from sponsor website Burning Angel will strip based on the amount of pain a contestant is willing to endure.

Speaking of after-parties, this writer recalls watching nervously as the extremely tall, roller-skate-wearing emcee snapped a PBR can off another man’s head with a bullwhip after last year’s amazing screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark: the Adaptation. The movie is a complete shot-by-shot remake of the Indiana Jones movie begun by three 12-year-old boys in 1982 and finished in 1989; it got its Philly premiere at last year’s BFF and was so popular they had to have an emergency encore screening. The Indy-esque bullwhip was brought, as memory serves, by the film’s director.

That roller-skate-wearing man turned out to be Doug Sakmann, one of the three members of Backseat Conceptions, the organization responsible for the festival. Sakmann especially wants to get the news out this year that after years of preparation, this edition of the BFF also will mark the official grand opening of the festival’s main home. The 941 Theater in Northern Liberties will remain open as a full-time 130-seat venue for independent film; later this month they’ll be hosting the Found Film Festival, a compilation of footage from videos found at garage sales and thrift stores and in warehouses and dumpsters throughout the country.

Our recommendations:

Altamont Now!
Fri., March 6, 7pm. 941 Theater, 941 N. Front St. 215.235.1385.
A satire of the sort of film that talks  too much about The Man, Altamont Now! is set 30 years after the disastrous Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway (the one with the Hells Angels as security). The film follows a journalist who gets involved with narcissistic indie rock star Richard Havoc and his followers, the Cult of The Kids, who see themselves as the spiritual inheritors of the ’60s revolutionaries. So imagine the Revolution as led by indie-rock douchebags rather than hippies and mix in nuclear proliferation… yeah, it doesn’t end well.

Blood on the Highway
Fri., March 6, 9:30pm. 941 Theater, 941 N. Front St. 215.235.1385.
Three egocentric twenty-somethings on their way to a Burning Man cipher get stranded in Fate, Texas, a town of vampires. There’s a lot of spraying fake blood. What more fo you need?

Idiots and Angels
Sat., March 7, 7pm. 941 Theater, 941 N. Front St. 215.235.1385.
This animated feature, director Bill Plympton’s sixth, is a wordless story of a morally bankrupt man who wakes up one day to find he’s sprouted a set of wings. Plympton took a year to painstakingly draw each cel by hand, and it gives the film (which is having its premiere at the BFF) a feel not often found in modern animation: however great Pixar may be, it’s a neat feeling to watch something clearly made by a human being with an idea, not a team of people with computers.

Sex Galaxy
Fri., March 13, midnight. 941 Theater, 941 N. Front St. 215.235.1385.
Sex Galaxy tongue-in-cheekily bills itself as a 100% recycled green movie. It’s pieced together out of over 40 vintage public-domain films and redubbed a la What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, although the main source material is 1968’s Roger Corman-produced Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. And as you may observe here in the trailer, it features helmeted astronauts attempting to make out with shell-bikini-clad space babes.

Minghags: The Movie!
Sun., March 8, 9:30pm. 941 Theater, N. 941 Front St. 215.235.1385.
It’s a film produced by, financed by, directed by and starring West Chester native son Bam Margera of Jackass fame, and it’s about as coherent as one might expect of a man whose job was sustaining repeated head injuries for America’s entertainment. But do you really go see a movie by Bam Margera for the coherent plot? Here’s the trailer, which we feel has clear overtones of Repo Man.

The Backseat Film Festival runs from March 6 through March 16. Tickets are $8 per screening block, three Screenings for $20 and $50 for a festival pass that will get you access to the 21 screening blocks and all after parties and special events.