Blips, Demonoids and Ju-Ju Cults with George and Mike Kuchar
Friday, 9:30 pm, McCormack Observatory
In the mid-1970s, George Kuchar saw his first UFO. Over the years, he would see several more. Blips inaugurated a six-film series on the subject of UFO encounters. This film focuses less on UFOs and aliens themselves and more on the people they affect, often in unexpectedly intimate ways. Kuchar has written of the film as “an enigmatic movie that’s like an enigmatic enema,” while Jack Stevenson of Bright Lights Film Journal describes it as “impressionistic soap opera, equal parts Phantom from Outer Space and Waiting for Godot.”
Armed with a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kuchar would end his UFO series with the (by his standards) big-budget epic Ascension of the Demonoids. The result would be one of his most elaborate films, with vivid color, superimposed imagery, and plenty of special effects. But Kuchar’s predilection for tangents and digressions leads him, midway through the film, to abandon his tale of alien mystery and pursue a set of seemingly unrelated obsessions. In a 1988 interview, two years after completing Demonoids, Kuchar stated that the film “goes to Hawaii and examines the scenery, forgetting about what had previously happened or what the picture was about. That was my intention. I wanted to get off the subject.”
Death Quest of the Juju Cults is the creation of brother Mike Kuchar, whose films over the past four decades have combined elements of camp, beefcake, and gay sexuality with an avant-garde sensibility and a painter’s eye for color and composition. Plus, there will be Juju cults. On a death quest.
