Click Here for the Complete Weekend Schedule of Films & Events


SPECIAL EVENTS & NOTEWORTHY ATTRACTIONS ALWAYS INCLUDE:   

* MOVIE, MOVIES and more MOVIES! We cram in as many classic Drive-In movies, independent films and shorts as we can pack into a weekend. You’ll find movies and shorts on real 16mm film in our 200 seat “Film Room” and all kinds of indy films, shorts, and guest related features in our smaller, 100+ seat “DVD projection Room” all weekend long.

* Q&A Sessions, Live Movie Commentaries, Guest Talks and Movie Introductions... Our guests are always willing to interact with attending fans, and we’ve come up with all kinds of fun stuff for them to do over the years. Let’s see what we come up with for the next show shall we?

* SURPRISES and MORE SURPRISES! With most of the shows we run, things fall together a few weeks before show time. Be sure to check back as the show draws closer to see if we may have a surprise guest addition, extra film screening, or special event added to the weekend schedule.

* EVERY CINEMA WASTELAND MOVIE AND MEMORABILIA EXPO offers attending fans over 60 Hours worth of Movies and Programming over the course of three days. And it’s all 100% Free with the price of admission. It can be a bit overwhelming, so be sure to check over the complete Weekend Schedule of Films and Events before you arrive so you can plot out your weekend early. The Weekend Schedule is usually posted 3 or 4 weeks before any given show.

AND WHAT ABOUT THE MOVIES YOU ASK?...
You can't have a "Movie Convention" without them, can you? ABSOLUTELY NOT! And we plan on showing plenty of films on both 16mm Film and Video at Cinema Wasteland - Many of which may be hosted by the Stars and Directors appearing as Guests at the show. Our evening film show is Free to all attendees and hotel guests.


Here are the movies we are showing on 16mm film: 
 

CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN (1955) After gangster Frank Buchanan was deported back to Italy, he meets scientist Wilhem Steigg, who has perfected a method of reanimating the dead and controlling their behavior using oral commands. Buchanan bankrolls Steigg’s experiments and uses his technology to wreak revenge on his enemies. Unfortunately, radioactive poisoning is a by-product of Steigg’s process, so authorities are able to use Geiger counters to pinpoint the source of the sinister plot in this Edward Cahn directed sci-fi thriller.

CUJO (1983) Suburban housewife Donna Trenton’s (Dee Wallace) life is tossed into a bit of a turmoil after her husband (Daniel Hugh Kelly) learns about her having an affair. Brett Chamber is a local boy whose only companion is a Saint Bernard named “Cujo”, who’s bitten by a rabid bat. Donna’s husband, who’s been thinking about his marital troubles of late, heads out of town on business. Donna and her 5-year-old son Tad (Danny Pintauro) take her car to Brett Chamber’s dad’s car shop to have it repaired. The car fails, and normally friendly Cujo conducts a reign of terror on the locals, including Donna and Tad.

HONOR THY FATHER (1973) The Bonannos were one of the “Five Families” of organized crime. Headed by Joe Bonanno (Raf Vallone), who mysteriously disappears from the streets of New York City in 1964. His son, Salvatore (Joseph Bologna), takes leadership of the family business, and following a family feud, the family splits into two fractions. A bloody war breaks out, and Salvatore and his family faces threats from former friends and allies in the struggle for pawer. It’s a made-for-TV story of New York’s underworld and the real life Bonanno family. Originally aired on March 1st, 1973, Honor Thy Father is our made-for-TV movie pick of the show the time around.

HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP (1980) The owners of a cannery accidentally release genetically altered salmon into the ocean. Those salmon are in turn eaten by larger predator fish and before you know it, the sleepy little fishing village near the cannery is swarmed with mutant fish monsters. And not just any kind of mutant fish monsters mind you, but fish monsters that kill men and rape women as they look to spawn! Fisherman Jim Hill (Doug McClure), native-American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), and scientist Susan Drake (Ann Turkey) find our Horney humanoids holding up in a network of caves and attempt to warn the townsfolk with little success. The town is set to celebrate their 93rd Annual Salmon Festival and the show must go on. That marks breeding time for horny mutant monsters who crash the party. Director Barbara Peters was hoping to make a horror film that put a spotlight on ecology or some shit. Thankfully producer Roger Corman felt the film need more sex and sleaze and turned Humanoids From the Deep into the masterpiece it is today. CW Guest Cindy Weintraub stars as “Carol Hill.”

I SAW WHAT YOU DID (1965) Mid-teen Libby Mannering, her friend Kit, and Libby’s little sister Tess are all alone for the night in the Mannerings’ isolated country home when mom and dad head out for the night. Struggling to find something to do, the girls turn to making prank phone calls to people randomly chosen from the phone book. After a few calls, they settle on a script, telling random strangers, “I saw what you did and I know who you you are” which receives any number of responses. Then they call Steve Marak, who just so happened to kill his wife and dump her body in a shallow grave. Fearing that the called actually did see something, Steve sets out to discover who the caller is and how to dispose of her. This little horror thriller from director William Castle wasn’t one of his popular “gimmick” films of the times, but it was much better than some of his non-gimmick 1960s films.

SATURDAY MORNING CARTOON HOUR -Resident horror host, Son of Ghoul, will once again put together an hour’s worth of original cartoons to kick off Saturday morning. We give him free reign to screen any cartoons he’d like, so you never know what he’ll dig up. To give fans somewhere to go while waiting for the Vendor and Guest Room to open, cartoons kick off at 9:30am on Saturday mornings in MOVIE ROOM 1. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and stop in and see what’s in store this time around.

TERRIFIED (1962) A black masked killer is terrorizing a small town. He buries escaped loony Joey alive, and attempts to cause many a traffic accident. Eventually, locals David, Ken, and waitress Marge discover local town drunk Crazy Bill impaired on the graveyard gate. David and Marge go to fetch the police while Ken sets out to search the nearby western ghost town for the killer. It’s a game of cat and mouse as our killer attempts to get the upper hand on Ken. When the killer finally gets the drop on Ken and attempts to bury him alive in a grave, with David and Marge arrive in time to save him?

THE THREE STOOGES GO AROUND THE WORLD IN A DAZE (1963) Phileas Fogg III, the great grandson of the original Phileas Fogg, accepts a bet from Randolph Stuart III, the descendant of the original Fogg’s nemesis to duplicate his great grandfather’s famous around the world trip. Unbeknownst to anyone, “Stuart” is actually con man Victor Cavendish, who made the bet in order to cover up his robbing the Bank of England by framing Fogg for the crime. This makes for quite a dangerous journey for Fogg and his servants - The Three Stooges - along with Amelia Carter (Joan Freeman), who joins them after they rescue her from some thugs during a train robbery. Can they make it back to England in time to win the bet and clear their name?… When The Stooges are involved, one never knows. We’ve been presenting some Golden Age Comedy collections on 16mm film the last few shows. This time around, we’ve decided to add on to the usual Three Stooges Hour on Saturday by pulling out one of their lesser known feature films, featuring Moe, Larry, and new member of the trio, Curly Joe DeRita.

THE THREE STOOGES HOUR - It’s been a tradition since the very first Cinema Wasteland Show to screen Three Stooges shorts on Saturday morning. Resident horror host, Son of Ghoul, took over the job of sorting out which Stooge shorts to run when he mentioned that he owned every short on 16mm film. Stooge hour moved from early mornings to Noon on Saturday and the rest, as they say, is Wasteland history.

VOODOO TIGER (1952)  It’s another installment of “Stock Footage Action Theater” when Johnny Weissmuller returns as juggle guide and all around tough guy, “Jungle Jim” in VOODOO TIGER. This time around, we find Jungle Jim assigned to track down a former Nazi SS Officer who knows the location of an art collection stolen during World War II by the Nazis. To make matters worse, there are also a trio of crooks who want to know where the paintings are hidden. The SS Officer, fleeing U.S. Army agents, commandeer an airplane carrying nightclub entertainer Phyllis Bruce and her trained tiger. When the plane creases in the jungle exactly where a tribe of voodoo tiger-worshipping natives live, Jungle Jim swings into action to track down the crooks… or what’s left of them after the tiger-worshipers get through with them, in this classic… or not-so-classic thrill-packed action adventure.

WASTELAND INTERMISSION REELS - Brand new intermission reels will once again screen between our Friday and Saturday night double features (and again on Sunday) between the 16mm film screenings at our next show. Chock full of assorted movie trailers, cartoons, old intermission and snack bar spots and public service announcements, these twenty minute reels are bound to bring back memories of drive-in days gone by.

Here are the movies we are showing on DVD Projection:

BABEZILLA VS THE CYBER SKANKS: RISE OF MECHABABEZILLA (2024) Buxom Babezilla is back! After defeating a zombie invasion in the first film, she tries her hand at making adult films. Meanwhile, a couple of evil baddies are out for revenge by creating cyborgs they call cyber-skanks to take on Babezilla. The cyber-skanks attack during a meet and great and defeat Babezilla with the help of Mechababezilla. To defeat the foursome of evil, Babezilla needs to search out the mysterious Master Beta and learn the art of cunt-fu.

BLOOD GORGE (2024) A group of friends plan on heading outside of Detroit for Halloween to party in the woods. Once at their destination, they decide to leave their phones in the car and enjoy the night… Sadly, before night even arrives, their phones go missing, they find a body in the trunk of the car, and a masked killer begins hunting them down in the woods.

CURTAINS (1983) Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Eggar) assumes that she has the lead in full-of-himself film director Jonathan Stryker’s (John Vernon) latest film, “Audra”. She’s even committed to an asylum (as the title character is a former psychiatric patient) to do background research for the role. Unfortunately for Samantha, Stryker sort of leaves her in the asylum and invites six actresses to his secluded house to audition for the role. Samantha manages to escape, and heads to Stryker’s house. One of the six invited to audition never even makes it to the place before she’s murdered, and the other five ladies (including CW guests Lynne Griffin as “Patti” and Lesley Donaldson as “Christie”) are soon stalked and murdered by a killer wearing an old hag’s mask in this Canadian entry in the 80s slasher film boom of the 1980s. Not a giant gore fest like some slashers were, Curtains still has its moments. If you catch the film at the show and enjoy it, then you can find the DVD and Blu-ray on the Synapse tables and pick one up for your collection.

CURTAINS FOR CHRISTMAS (2024) Instead of spending Xmas with his wife Holly and family, Howard has plans to spend it with his buddies at a cabin on the beach. Holiday loving Holly snaps, kills Howard, and is visited by an imaginary rat named Dominic who offers some advice and support. When she heads out shopping for new curtains to replace the blood-stained ones she splattered when killing Howard, she meets Jay, a guy who loves Xmas as much as she does. Holly is bound and determined to make things turn out like a mushy Christmas movie, but goes about it in all the wrong ways in this little indie horror comedy that’s well worth a watch.

THE FRIDAY NIGHT SHORT FILM BLOCK -

AMY (2024) Police detective Ada sets out for revenge against Leonard, a twisted rapist and murderer that killed her sister Amy. Things don’t quite work out as planned when Leonard’s wife Ellen joins in on the action.

FAM-ILLI (2024) Talentless white rapper Karny Jay and his sidekick Hatchet try like hell to break into the business with little luck. Eventually frustration leads to murder.

THE TIES THAT BIND (2023) When Judy Hamilton disappears while hiking, her friend Jennifer files a missing persons report. Detectives looking into her disappearance uncover a family secret that not only strike close to home, but was never meant to be revealed.

Gunga Jim Presents: FRANKENSTEIN’S DAUGHTER (1958) Oliver Frank, grandson of Victor Frankenstein, is assisting Dr. Carter Morton (Felix Locher) with his experiments. Unbeknownst to Dr. Morton, Oliver is conducting his own experiments by attempting to follow the family business of creating a human being from body parts. He creates a female using the head of Trudy Morton’s (Sandra Knight) friend Suzy (Sally Todd) who Oliver killed in a jealous rage. The results are, well, hilarious in the 1950s monster movie vein.
And stay tuned for a few announcements from ol’ Gunga about his paranormal podcast, new online ordering, and some show announcements that he will fill you in on during his show (and all weekend long if you stop by his table in the Vendor Room.)

THE HARDCORE WRESTLING HOUR - Always a popular way to kick off Saturday mornings, the original Hardcore Wrestling Hour expanded to a couple of hours several years back and moved to opening the show on Friday. This time around, we will once again venture back to the days of Japanese death match wrestling of the 1990s when barbed wire ruled, and bloodshed filled the ring. Don’t miss it!

I DRINK YOUR BLOOD (1971) A group of Satanist hippies move into a small town that has basically been evacuated except for a handful of locals and construction workers. The hippies hold up in the now rat infested hotel. After they are confronted by irate Grandpa (Richard Bowler), they dose him with acid and beat the old man up. His grandson gets back at them by injecting a dozen meat pies with rabies from a dead dog to make them sick. Unfortunately, it turns the band of hippies into a band of homicidal maniacs hell bent on destroying and on contaminating anyone and anything that crosses their path. David Durston’s cult horror film was the first film to garner an X rating from the MPAA based on violence alone. Look for CW Guests Lynn Lowry and Rhonda Fultz as members of the Satanist hippies, and Elizabeth Marner-Brooks as shop owned Mildred Nash.  I Drink Your Blood is available on DVD and Blu-ray from our friends at Grindhouse Releasing.

JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012) There’s a new drug on the streets called “Soy Sauce” that promises an out-of-body experience like no other. It lets you see beyond reality as its users drift across time and dimensions. But there are side effects. Some who come down off the drug come back no longer human. John and David, a pair of college dropouts that can barely hold down a job set out to stop the oncoming horror in this hard to describe and weird as fuck horror fantasy film from director Don Coscarelli. Look for CW Guest Brett Wagner as a reanimated dead guy.

LEECH (2024) Ah, yes. Posers and their YouTube channels. All thinking they’re somebody in a world over run with nobodies. Rarely are they entertaining. Most are talentless and boring. You might even know one. We do. And he’s about as boring, lazy, and utterly talentless as it gets. This is the story of The Dark Lord of Loves Park, one of “those guys” with his own subscriber channel. He spends his days complaining about how he has no money, how people watching should send him some cash, and doing stupid shit for a couple of bucks rather than getting off his ass and finding a real job. The Dark Lord is at least amusing. He drinks too much, has no actual musical ability, and will eat gross shit for a buck. Good, bad, or indifferent, this is his life. Meanwhile, another content creator runs a channel called Content Corner screens clips from guys like The Dark Lord and adds his commentary to their clips. This actually helps drive people to The Dark Lord’s channel but he gets it in his head that the guy is stealing his hard earned monies from him and sets out to teach him a lesson he’ll never forget. This little indie production was actually quite original and entertaining. Very real in its approach to all of the internet posers and their over bloated view of their “celebrity”… or lack of as the case may be.

MEAT MACHINE (2024) Crackpot Dr. Calypso is tasked with the job of trying to save Reedsville, TX from nuclear destruction. Once you meet the residents of Reedsville, it may be best to just let them drop the bomb. irrelevant indie comedy at its… most, well, irrelevant.

The Mummy and The Monkey Present: THE DEVIL BAT (1940) The Mummy and Monkey are bummed out that they will have to miss the April Show, but we’ve pulled out an old episode of their show so we can keep their spirit alive this time around. This episode features Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist in THE DEVIL BAT. Feeling betrayed by his employers when they become rich as a result of products he devised, he gets his revenge by electrically enlarging bats and sending them out to attack anyone wearing a particular perfume that he’s developed. Segments were filmed at the Monster Bash oldies show in Pittsburgh, the only convention other than the CW Show that has never strayed from what it was when it started.

THE PROWLER (1981) On the night of her graduating dance in 1945, Rosemary and her date are brutally murdered by thought to be a kilted soldier returning home from the war. They never discovered who the killer was, but thirty years later, they decide to once again hold the dance for the first time since the murders occurred.  Unfortunately for the teens looking forward to having a good time, something else returns to the dance. Something that begins to take the lives of the towns teen population. Look for CW guest Cindy Weintraub, who meets her demise thanks to effects maestro Tom Savini.

PSYCHO APE 2: THE WRATH OF KONG (2024) More monkey business as we take a look at the crimes of Psycho Ape via movie parodies and camp silliness that seems to be made up as we go along.




RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD: PART 2 (1987) In what is basically just a remake of the original film, we find a barrel with a rotting zombie inside of it falls off a truck and is discovered by some kids. Of course, they open it. And when they do, toxic fumes are unleashed. They get sick and start to crave brains. If that isn’t bad enough, zombies begin to crawl from their graves with the same lust fresh human brains. Return of the Living Dead 2 is actually sillier than the first film was, but it does feature James Karen and Thom Matthews returning as different characters than they played in the first film. CW Guest William Perry did stunts and stunt work on the film. 

SHIVERS (1975) After a scientist living in a modern apartment complex kills a girl and uses acid to destroy her internal organs before taking his own life, the apartment complex doctor investigates. He discovers that the scientist was doing experiments on genetically-engineered parasites that could be used as organ transplants. Before long, other residents of the complex start to show signs of carrying the parasites… and whatever is happening to them is spreading fast! One of director David Cronenberg’s first feature films, Shivers (aka They Came From Within) still packs a punch 50 years later. Look for CW Guests Lynn Lowry as “Nurse Forsythe”, and Alan Kolman as cheating husband “Nicolas Tudor”.

TORTURE THE FLESH (2024) A string of grisly mutilation murders has police scrambling to find the killer. Meat plant butcher, Daniel, comes home one day to find his wife and daughter were the killers latest victims. Detective Stevens is on the case, but just can’t find a lead. As the body count continues to rise, we find grieving Daniel attempting to cope with his loss. Soon, detective Stevens ex-wife (CW guest Lynn Lowrey) finds herself the killers next victim. Then his partners grandma is murdered… Eventually, things come to a conclusion in a nice twist that we’re certainly not going to give away. This gory and sadistic indie thriller will grab you and keep you in your seat.

UNEARTHED (2024) Indie horror anthology that centers around hidden secrets and murder. In LOOK TOWARDS THE SKIES, we find Frank missing for three days before he suddenly appears in his back yard in a weird blue flash of light. He has no recollection of how long he’s been gone, but he does remember the experiments that were performed on him. In CLEAN HOUSE, we find a woman all alone in her house when she begins to experience strange occurrences. This prompts her to contact an expert paranormal investigator for help. HIGHWAY RIVALRY finds Teri hitching a ride with Halsey. They’re soon caught in a twisted tale of murder and mayhem when making a rest stop. Lastly, THE TIES THAT BIND is part of the anthology, but it was submitted as a stand along short. We’ll leave it in the short film block, but it’s certainly enjoyable to sit through again here.