 "Photo: Caleb Miller")
Two males - one uncomfortable, the other drunk - stand at the front of a room inside the Alamo Drafthouse. The screen is blank, all eyes are on them. They are standing face to face, and the space between them is extremely small. Lodged firmly between each of their legs is a two-headed rubber penis, a tangible shout-out to homoeroticism. The purpose of the artificial phallus is to serve as a tug of war rope, with the lucky winner being the man who can firmly and absolutely gain control of the "double-dong," as it is affectionately called.
The crowd hoots and hollers as the participants throw all inhibitions aside and duke it out for absolute supremacy. The winner basks in triumphant glory, while two other combatants compete. When that is finished, the two winners face off in an ultimate showdown. The twist? This time the tugging is done with the participants' mouths. It's uncomfortable. It's vile. It's offensive. And it's only the pre-show.
Welcome to Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Festival at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz.
Started in 1990 by Craig "Spike" Decker and the late Mike Gribble, the festival serves as a repository of adult animation and is the birthplace of such classic shows as "Beavis & Butthead" and "Happy Tree Friends." For Henri Mazza, creative director of the Drafthouse and host of several showings of the festival, it represents a nod to a pre-digital age of raunchy entertainment.
"It was the first place that adult animations started being collected and shown to mass audiences back in the pre-Internet, pre-Adult Swim days," Mazza said. "Spike and Mike had this P.T. Barnum sense of showmanship that makes it all so great. It's still a dirty cartoon show, but there's also an atmosphere that makes it special."
The topics and presentations of the animations shown at Spike & Mike's vary from piece to piece, be it a stop-action war scene using LEGO men or a Ren & Stimpy-style tale about a cocaine-addicted rat (no, not Amy Winehouse) who becomes pregnant and then subsequently eats her children to avoid having to share her drugs with them.
The show is filled with gross-out humor, graphic violence and enough sex to make a porn star blush, but there's something communal about watching the show with a group of like-minded individuals who are there for the same reason - to enjoy racy cartoons and pretend like they're not extremely uncomfortable.
"It's the same thing like at a really good horror movie when you're with a crowd of people jumping at the scary parts, and you realize you jumped and hit the person next to you. Then they realize they hit you and there's a nervous laugh, and that energy just goes through the crowd and feeds it," Mazza said. "At Spike & Mike's, it's the same thing, and everybody is just shocked together."
With masturbation references abound, there are points in the show when the crowd seems to be overwhelmed, glancing around nervously at the people next to them, smiling awkwardly and turning back to the screen just in time to catch a glimpse of a giant penis smashing a cinnamon bun. But it's all part of the fun, part of an event that says it's ok to enjoy politically incorrect entertainment in places outside of the privacy of your home.
"Whether they admit it or not, everybody likes this stuff and they want to be able to enjoy it openly," Mazza said. "We give them that opportunity. There's some sort of chemical or biological reaction that makes us have more fun when a crowd is there, and that's exactly what you get."
Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation 2008 is playing at the Alamo Ritz through Feb. 10.
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