By Josh Coates
Images courtesy of Bruno Castro
About a year ago, the three Button Mashers sat around and discussed what makes a cinema fun. Being big fans of going it alone to the cinema, we wondered about how best to turn the act of seeing a movie on the big screen into a really social thing. How can we make it feel like a gig? Or a concert? A space where there’s an open invite to make noise, take pictures mid screening, a way to reflect the current trend of documenting every night out you go on.
Sitting around a table in a pub we chatted about The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the water pistols given to audiences and the rules of engagement presented to an audience that makes it a right laugh. Now, doing Rocky Horror can be an epic task, we’re very DIY and the cost of putting on such a show would be too much. After a few more rounds, we talked about experiences we had during lockdown, when we were isolated from each other and had to create our own games online to keep us social. One highlight was when we encountered artist and educator Paolo Pedercini interactive film night hosted on twitch by LIKELIKE. Sat around our laptops, Paolo talked us through the history of Interactive films, the choose-your-own adventures through time. From the first ever choose-your-own film of Kinoautomat(1967) to the more recent youtube versions such as The Immoral Ms. Conduct (2011). It was a blast, hovering over the decisions the characters could make on twitch and seeing the chaos unfold.
This led the Button Masher team down a rabbit hole. What would it feel like to recreate what we experienced online, in person?
Cut to hours upon hours of looking through ebay listings for hidden gems of choose-your-own adventure films, Interactive DVD’s and FMV video games. We then stumbled upon the first ever choose-your-own martial arts film. Advanced Warriors (2003) was created by Andrew Dymond and features Star Trek’s Chase Masterson and the OG Boba Fett Jeremy Bulloch. This was made on a pretty low budget with the provocation of what new DVD technology could provide audiences at home.
This was our first screening. 50 people in a tiny room in Liverpool shouting at a screen to help the decisions of the Advanced Warriors. The film runs a smooth 40 minutes but with the countless accidental deaths of the characters by the rulings of the audiences, an hour and a half later, the Advanced Warriors had achieved their aim of…well, just getting to the end of the film. The film was halted mid production due to the onset of foot and mouth disease and leaves the audience with the promise of a sadly never completed Advanced Warriors 2.
It was a hoot. We delivered a night of pure chaos which didn’t feel like any film night we had been to before. Videos from the night before popped up on our insta feed, letterboxd reviews coming in, we knew this could be something special.
From then, we dug deeper and deeper into the world of interactive, gimmick cinema. Unraveling the shock gimmicks of William Castle, the dvd exclusives of mid 00’s horror films, more and more bizarre choose-your-own adventure films that have never been screened to the public before. Our dvd collection was no longer a flick through the criterion channel, more an archive of what DVD’s can actually achieve.
Cut to this month, we screened Monsters Crash The Pajama Party at Cultplex thanks to our friends at Something Weird. The film, an experiment put on during the decline of the Spook Show, a traveling night of tricks and treats where magicians would bring the dead to life in front of your very eyes (…or just blokes in cheap Dracula costumes). When the Spook Show was at threat of the masses moving towards the cheaper alternative of the picturehouses instead of the expensive and old fashioned theatres. Monsters Crash The Pajama Party was an experiment in merging the new it thing of Cinema with the traditions of the Spook Show. Midway through the programme, tucked in between seances and a meet and greet with Frankenstein, the projector spurred to life and audiences were immersed in the world of Monsters Crash The Pajama Party where a group of teenage girls spend the night in an old dark mansion as an initiation into a college sorority. What they don’t know is that the building is actually the headquarters for a mad scientist and his hunchbacked assistant, who are experimenting with turning humans into gorillas! Spooky stuff. Midway through the film, a gang of gorillas are unleashed onto the audience, kidnapping keen viewers and taking them backstage where they would be transformed into gorillas.
This is all fun and games and we will be trying to recreate this to the best of our ability. It’s part of the fun. It’s part of the chaos. However, over the year of Button Mashers existence, this is no longer just us putting on a fun night. This has turned into an act of preservation.
Cinema gimmicks are pretty much non-existent now. I guess you could call IMAX a gimmick but I imagine a lot of people would debate that. No longer will your local cinema invest in video game controllers in each seat to decide the paths of movies, it’s just too expensive. The William Castles of the world are no longer touring the country to install flying skeletons on zip wires to spook audiences. Button Masher recreating these, albeit on a tight budget, is about capturing this history and presenting it to a modern audience. We can afford to take these risks for one night, we don’t have to invest in altering the makeup of a cinema for a long run of a risky idea. We can just recreate it. It’s a version of historical reenactment which cinema doesn’t have the opportunity to do.
It’s important to learn from this history of what made cinema such a go to experience for so many people.
It’s worth adding that there are some contemporary film makers also experimenting with the gimmicks of years past. Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover is a recent example where audiences are given Scratch n Sniff cards to sniff sling during the screening. Similar to John Waters Polyester and Rugrats Go Wild, which the filmmakers created as a homage to John Waters.
Being Liverpool based means we’re in good company. A DIY scene that supports each other to take risks. From People Versus TV’s short film programme of the wild and experimental to Paraphysis bringing the transgressive side of cinema to the city, we’re in good company. Liverpool will also be bringing back Scalarama in October for the first time in a few years. Have a gander on the website to see what’s in store. We’ll be presenting a few films during Scalarama, including Dead Lover. Come, it’ll stink.
Here is Button Masher’s Instagram, and their tickets for upcoming screenings are available here now.
Josh Coates is a community organiser and artist based in Liverpool. He coordinates the interactive cinema night Button Masher and Anfield People’s Cinema.
