The Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville will host Cult-O-Rama: Japan-O-Rama! on March 6, a week before the start of its annual Pittsburgh Japanese Film Festival. Japan-O-Rama! will feature 1975's Wolf Guy (ウルフガイ 燃えろ狼男) and 1968's The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (蛇娘と白髪魔).
Your Cult-O-Rama hosts are priming you for the upcoming 10th Annual Japanese Film Festival with the first-ever all foreign language double feature! In the history of this program, we’ve never asked you to read; now there’s subtitles, but the same amount of wild stuff happening on the screen above it.
Wolf Guy (1975) – The legendary Sonny Chiba plays a private detective who gets mixed up in gritty city yakuza nonsense. This could be a lot more challenging if he wasn’t also the last-remaining descendant in a long line of lycanthropes who can use his paranormal powers to solve crimes and do other neat stuff (like use his mind to remove his own disembowelment). But will he be able to stop the CIA from harvesting his blood to steal his werewolf juice? You’re just gonna have to watch to find out! (Please note that Wolf Guy contains a scene of sexual assault.)
The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968) – While American audiences were distracted by Romero’s introduction of zombies and what was going on with Rosemary’s kid, Japanese horror was firing on all cylinders. One of their offerings was this weird tale of a girl who gets reunited with her family after living at an orphanage for most of her life! It sounds heartwarming, right? It could be, but her mom seems to have a bad case of the forgets and her sister seems… reptilian.
The double-feature starts at 9:00 pm and runs for 200 minutes. Tickets are available online. The Row House Cinema is a single-screen theater located at 4115 Butler St. in Lawrenceville (map)
