Drafthouse keeps Wednesdays weird

If you come to the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown at around 11:45 p.m. on a Wednesday night, you'll find a long line of people waiting to see an awful film. This is Weird Wednesday, where the movies are free, usually bad, mostly entertaining, but always enlightening.

Behind the wheel of this series is Lars Nilsen, a man who has an encyclopedic knowledge of films - bad films, good films, all films. He knows the difference between, say, bad '70s soft-core pornography from the West Coast and bad '70s soft-core pornography from the East Coast. "I've been obsessed with these kinds of movies for 15 years," said Lars, who will celebrate five years of Weird Wednesday this week.

During last week's screening, Lars sometimes rose from his seat in the back of the auditorium and sat on the side railing, looking at the crowd reaction, surveying his work. Even in the dark, it's difficult to miss him - he cuts a memorable profile at 6 feet 4 inches tall, with a long black beard and unkempt, shoulder-length hair. But don't be scared because he's friendly, if anything, and he shows a deep concern for his audience. In that way he's very serious about what he does - he's attached to the ideal of bringing these forgotten films to light.

"I cherish them all," he said.

As a young man, Lars held a variety of jobs in New York City - taxi driver, late-night printer and bookstore clerk. Here he developed a voracious appetite for two things: literature (especially Shakespeare) and exploitation films. In Austin, he discovered Tim League, owner of the Alamo Downtown, who had bought a batch of 100 film prints on a whim, and Weird Wednesday was born.

Now the creative director and programmer of the series, Lars gets his prints (he always shows the actual film, never a DVD) from a variety of clearing houses and private collectors. Back in the 1970s, studios would often not bother with the return postage for films they sent to theaters, and so hundreds of prints would sit in warehouses, waiting for decades until some nut would come along and buy them up.

Lars describes his movies as the "film buff's guilty pleasure," but at the same time, he's quick to come to the defense of the filmmakers. "If you've ever made a movie - you can't really make a movie at all if you're an idiot," he said.

Last week, Lars screened a little gem called "Neither the Sea Nor the Sand," a film from 1972 that he bought for $40. Usually he watches the Weird Wednesday films on video before he screens them, but "Neither the Sea Nor the Sand" didn't have a video release. It's prohibitively expensive to hire a projectionist and watch the actual print, so Lars could only preview the first 10 minutes. But it had a romantic theme, and since it was close to Valentine's Day, he thought he'd take a chance on love.

The screening had a healthy turnout, an interesting mixture of college students, young professionals, local-music hipsters and homeless people. One man, who identified himself as "hippie," carried what seemed like half of his possessions into the show. An older woman, with a more conservative appearance, called out to Lars as she headed for the theater.

"What's this one about?" she asked, and he replied, "It's about people who have sex with corpses."

She turned around and went straight for the exit.

There's only one sex-with-a-corpse scene in "Neither the Sea Nor the Sand," which is the story of Anna, a married woman who falls in love with a lighthouse keeper named Hugh. Hugh dies tragically, but the next day he is alive again, wandering around like a zombie. Anna discovers that Hugh actually is a zombie, undead because he can't let go of his love.

Lars put the probability that another human being will ever watch this film at about .015, so why not give the ending away: after a painfully drawn-out walk to the lighthouse, Anna joins her rotting lover, and they stride hand in hand into the ocean and drown (well, Anna drowns, and Hugh goes on being dead).

To be sure, the movie was ridiculous, but there is a point near the end where, for about two minutes and against all odds, the film weirdly articulates a beautiful truth. Scared for her life, Anna latches the door against her dead boyfriend. At the same, she still loves him - his decaying body is a constant reminder of happier days. She is a woman who can't let go of an old love.

After the show, the audience was largely quiet. Two voices could be heard above the whispers: "Yeah, that movie stunk," and, "That was awful."

Lars described the movie as "kind of difficult," a conventional harlequin romance not typical of Weird Wednesday screenings. Most Weird films are exploitation movies with outrageous dialogue and gratuitous amounts of violence, sex, and bad language (and a good time is had by all). This movie wasn't as enjoyable as most, but he added, "With every movie there's something "worthwhile," and this one was no exception. In the end, he was proud to have shown it.

In an unexplainable way, "Neither the Sea Nor the Sand" was awe-inspiring. Watching a movie like this must be breaking some kind of unwritten rule: A rule that says you can only watch movies available at Blockbuster or Netflix, and they better have received 4 out of 5 stars.

So thank God for people like Lars Nilsen - without his kind we'd be doomed to rent "Driving Miss Daisy" and go to the theaters to see "Firewall."

Weird Wednesday happens every week at midnight at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, 409 Colorado St. Admission is free.