UPCOMING EVENTS
UPCOMING EVENTS
Why Are You Being Weird With Me Presents…
An American Werewolf in London
(1981, UK/USA, Dir. John Landis, 137 mins)
From an early age, perhaps 9 or 10, I was determined to watch An American Werewolf in London. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I knew enough to understand that this was one of the greatest films of the 1980s, but I had never seen a horror film, the kind that forces you to look away from the screen and burns images into your imagination that haunt you until you ‘ve seen too much and the fears are gone. But, oh my chris, what images director John Landis created.
So I got my wish, I watched my first horror film. And I have never stopped watching it.
Runtime: 150 mins. Certificate: 15
£10 Members
£12 Non-members
Venue
The Mildmay Club,
33-34 Newington Green, London N16 9PR
Tuesday 29/10/26
Door 7pm
Film/Intro 7.40pm
Digital
Past Screenings
Why Are You Being Weird With Me Presents…
TV PARTY, TONIGHT! PRESENTS A EVENING WITH BRUCE BICKFORD
(1988, USA, Bruce Bickford)
Bruce Bickford (1947–2019) forged his way through the American animation world like a comet traveling at one frame a minute. A visionary outsider artist, Bickford’s work gained wider attention through his collaborations with Frank Zappa in the late 1970s, most notably in the Claymation promo Baby Snakes (1979), which introduced his uncompromising vision to an international audience. Working largely in isolation over several decades, Bickford created epic, hallucinatory worlds filled with endlessly mutating bodies, mythic combat, and apocalyptic landscapes. His painstaking frame-by-frame process—often advancing mere millimeters at a time—resulted in films of extraordinary density, violence, and dark humour.
• Feats of Clay (2 min)
A blast of raw Bickford energy—clay in constant revolt.
• Beatnik Poet (5 min)
A newly scanned experiment in hand-drawn chaos and kinetic forms.
• Attila (2.5 min)
A miniature epic of war and transformation, dense and mesmerizing.
• Cas'l' (2011, 48min)
Bruce Bickford's stop-motion Claymation magnum opus, twenty years in the making. Cas’l is a masterpiece of violent, exuberant and brilliant cartoonish invention.
Courtesy of the Bickford Estate
Runtime: 95 minsCertificate: 18
Venue
The Nickel Cinema, 117-119 Clerkenwell Rd, London
Tuesday 03/02
Bar 8.30pm
Film 9pm
Digital
Why Are You Being Weird With Me Presents…
Rio Feminist Film Group: Female Perversions (4K Restoration, UK Premiere) + Q&A
Dir.Susan Streitfeld, USA, 1996
Cast. Tilda Swinton, Amy Madigan, Karen Sillas, Frances Fisher, Laila Robins and Clancy Brown
In her provocative US film debut, dyke feminist icon and Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton is a revelation as a tightly armoured power dressed bi-sexual lawyer on the edge of professional breakthrough, personal breakdown and sexual awakening in this riveting and thought-provoking erotic psychological drama. Based on the 1991 feminist psychoanalytic text, ‘Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary’ by Louise J Kaplan, Female Perversions is an inspired amalgamation of erotic drama and psychological thriller, distinctly scored by the multi award-winning composer Debbie Wiseman, set within the cutthroat environs of the LA justice system.
Eve Stephens (Swinton) an ambitious and successful trial lawyer in Los Angeles, is up for appointment as a judge while juggling her proclivity for meaningless sex and her relationship with her kleptomaniac sister Maddie (Amy Madigan, the creepy clownish aunt in Weapons). As she navigates intimate relationships with female and male partners, Eve finds fantasy and reality converging leading to a tense climax that will decide her professional and personal fate.
A contender for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, and long unavailable in the cinema, Female Perversions marks the debut of painter-turned-agent-turned director Susan Streitfeld. The 90s marked the proliferation the New Queer Cinema movement (interestingly Bound, The Watermelon Woman and Set It Off were all released in 1996); in parallel with B. Ruby Rich’s theorisation of the ‘lethal lesbian’, a ‘new cinematic vogue for murderous women’ (see Michael Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss). Female Perversions sits restless in between: sexy, glamorous, almost vampish, Swinton encapsulates the power, erotics and performance of identities as well as the insecurities that professional American women embodied in that era. Following Female Perversions, Swinton went onto collaborate with American artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson.
A restoration by Vinegar Syndrome / Cinématographe
A Hope Runs High release. Presented by Why Are You Being Weird With Me.
The Rio Feminist Film Programming group is Sarah Chorley, Helen de Witt and Selina Robertson. Inspired by the passionate feminist programming work that took place at the Rio in the late 1970s and 1980s, we have reinstated feminist film screenings and events that link the Rio’s feminist past with current feminist urgencies. All are welcome!
"Female Perversions is honoured to be invited by the Rio Feminist Programming group to the Rio ~ such an illustrious group and such a great old cinema...in this day and age of iPhone and home viewing it is truly exciting to have an audience view the film in the way it was imagined...as a provocative and sensuous pleasure"
Susan Streitfeld
Venue
The Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, London E8 2PB
Date & Time
Saturday 13th December - 13:45
The Incredibly Weird Video Show Presents…
Very Metal II
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
&
Pantera’s Vulgar Video: A Home Movie
plus
DJ Set from Terry King
playing classic Thrash/Doom/Black/Death/Heavy Metal
Live Music from Molten Slag
A very special screening of the legendary US Heavy Metal Docs…
Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986) 22mins
+
Pantera: Vulgar Tour Video (1991) 40mins
Live Music from Molten Slag
Make Your Own Air Guitar workshop
&
Metal-aoke!
Live on Stage with our official Headbangers Air Guitar Contest!
All films from original VHS bootlegs.
Doors 8pm. Films from 8pm – Closes 2am.
Tickets: £10 advance, £11.50 on the door.
Get your tickets!
While the rest of the United States was in the grips of Satanic Panic, aspiring filmmakers Jeff Krulik and John Heyn had a different approach to understanding the cultural avalanche of heavy metal in the mid 1980s. They found the humour and fun in a very innocent world of music fandom. The fear that heavy metal contained lyrics which encouraged people to do bad things was never the more prevalent a year prior to the filming, in 1985 when 20-year old James Vance tried to sue Judas Priest. After a night of partying, Vance and his friend, 18-year Raymond Belknap, headed for a local playground and shot themselves. Belknap wouldn’t survive the incident, but Vance would and go on to file a lawsuit against Judas Priest as he claimed the subliminal messaging within their Stained Glass album drove him to the act. Ultimately, the band and their record label would avoid any legal responsibility for the tragedy, but not even empirical evidence was enough to convince concerned parents and moral campaigners that subliminal messages promoting suicide and devil-worship weren’t possessing the heavy metal records kids were listening to.
In 1985, a committee known as the Parents Music Resource Center, spearheaded by Tipper Gore, made up a playlist of songs they deemed inappropriate. The list, dubbed “The Filthy 15”, was used to serve as a template for proposed legislation regarding how albums should be rated, suggesting that they should come with extra warnings if the content pertained to sex, violence, drugs/alcohol or the occult. Of the fifteen songs, nine were metal, including: Judas Priest’s “Eat Me Alive,”.
Heavy Metal Parking Lot is regarded as one the greatest rock documentaries ever, and this praise is truly justified. It's a definitive cultural touchstone for the 1980s metal scene. For me, and I think many others, it's also one of the funniest art-films ever produced. The time is 1986, the place, a parking lot outside the Capital Centre arena in Landover, Maryland, USA. The subjects are metal fans getting "waisted" before a Judas Priest concerts.
Venue
The Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 42-46 Pollard Row, London E2 6NB
Date & Time
Friday 21st November 2025. Doors 8pm
The Incredibly Weird Video Show Presents…
The Cramps: Stay Sick!
A very special screening of…
The Cramps: Live at Napa State Mental Hospital (1978)
+
At Home with The Cramps + Live on The Tube (1986)
Introduction from Joe Coles, and author and musician who has been studying The Cramps for over 25 years.
Plus Cramps-aoke
Join up for our Cramps Karaoke live on stage
DJ set from Songs The Cramps Taught Us.
All films are from original VHS bootlegs
Doors 7pm. Films from 7.45pm – Closes 11pm
Tickets: £9 advance, £10.50 on the door
Venue
The Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 42-46 Pollard Row, London E2 6NB
Date & Time
Thursday 23rd October 2025. Doors 7.30pm
The Incredibly Weird Video Show Presents…
The Pee Wee Herman Show!
A very special screening of the legendary early live comedy concert of Peewee Herman.
Pee Wee Herman Live at The Roxy (1981) 50mins
With an introduction from the UK Peewee Herman Society
In the summer of 1980, a group of the most talented people in Los Angeles came together to create a fake kids TV pilot for a live audience at The Groundlings School. By 1981 The Pee Wee Herman Show was such a hit it had to find a bigger home. The Roxy on Sunset Strip - at that point in time a punk rock venue for LA's music scene which included bands such as X and The Germs - took a chance on the show and something incredible was born. The original show was for adults, formed by that same punk scene and mushroom cloud of weed smoke.
All films are from original VHS bootlegs
Doors 7pm. Films from 7.45pm – Closes 11pm
Tickets: Pay what you can £5, £3, or Free.
Venue
Farr’s Dalston, 17 - 19 Dalston Ln, London, E8 3D
Date & Time
Tuesday 21st October 2025. Doors 7pm
Free Launch Event
The Incredibly Weird Video Show Presents…
Very Metal: British Edition – Teenage Diaries.
A very special screening of the legendary UK Heavy Metal Docs...
In Bed with Chris Needham (1992) 40mins
+
New Wave of British Heavy Metal (1981) 22mins
Plus
Make Your Own Air Guitar workshop
&
Metal-aoke!
Live on Stage with our Official Air Guitar Contest!
All films from original VHS bootlegs.
Doors 7pm. Films from 7.30pm – Closes 11.30pm. Tickets: Free!
Venue
Farr’s Dalston, 17 - 19 Dalston Ln, London, E8 3DF
Date & Time
Tuesday 30th September 2025. Doors 7.00pm