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The second annual Chicago Underground Film Festival was held in 1995, at multiple locations in the city, from Thursday, July 20 to Sunday, July 23.

The festival opened on July 20th at the International Cinema Museum with the film What About Me?, directed by Rachel Amodeo. Other highlights included a retrospective of the work of Kenneth Anger, who attended the fest and screened Fireworks (1947), Scorpio Rising (1963) and Kkk (Kustom Kar Kommandos) (1965) at the Congress Hotel, 520 S. Michigan, on Friday, July 21. Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin also attended and screened films on July 23; while the Reverend Ivan Stang of the Church of Subgenius screened films on July 22.

Also, Charles Pinion screened the world premiere of his feature film Red Spirit Lake, which was preceded by the short film The Operation, directed by Jacob Pander and Marne Lucas. Other short films that screened were Desktop and a preview of Monday 9:02 am, both directed by Tyler Hubby.

Red Spirit Lake is psychotronic filmmaker Charles Pinion’s second feature film, shot entirely on video in the early ’90s and featuring several superstars of the Cinema of Transgression movement, such as Richard Kern and Tessa Hughes-Freeland.

The film — available on DVD from the filmmaker — is a wildly evolutionary step up from Pinion’s first feature, the raucous skater punk horror flick Twisted Issues. Below, we discuss Red Spirit Lake‘s production.

Underground Film Journal: Not to get ahead of ourselves, but it sounds like a lot of Killbillies eventually got transformed into We Await.

However, you must have been so soured on the Killbillies experience at the time that you wanted to move onto something completely different. But also, I would suppose that having been involved in at least attempting to mount a major production inspired you to make Red Spirit Lake more — well, it’s hard to find the right word for it,...

(Charles Pinion‘s Killbillies, which you’ll discover all about below, is one of the great unfinished underground movies. It’s complex, uncompleted production involved a multitude of talents, not least of which was Joey Ramone whose involvement got a write-up in the infamous Page Six gossip column. The scan of that article that you see here was provided to the Underground Film Journal by Killbillies co-producer and actress Marina Lutz. But, this is Charles’s story… and his on-set pictures. Click the article and all pictures to embiggen.)

Underground Film Journal: Ok, so Madball is done and you’re moving into another film project, Killbillies? What’s the story behind that?

Charles Pinion: Killbillies‘ basic notion came from my friend George Cavano, an artist/musician in Gainesville, Florida. (His piece, “A Violent Release of a Large Body of Water” plays over the opening titles of Red Spirit Lake.

(In Part One of this interview, we discussed the making of Charles Pinion’s first feature film on video, the skater punk rock splatter movie Twisted Issues. In Part Two below, the Underground Film Journal attempted to discuss his second feature video, Red Spirit Lake, but get diverted into Pinion’s brief foray into film.)

Underground Film Journal: It seems like you had a really good reaction to Twisted Issues that I’m sure helped inspire you to make another video feature. How did the release of Red Spirit Lake compare to the release of your first film?

Charles Pinion: Funny, it’s only through retrospect and in reading the comments of others that I had any notion that Twisted Issues was a “seminal work of the shot-on-video movement” (a pull-quote I used for some time from Timothy Thompsen, who did a zine called Lunatic Fringe). My goals, then and now,...

Charles Pinion exists at a unique transection of the modern underground film scene.

A pioneer of the Analog Video Feature Film movement. (That never materialized.) Interaction with the Cinema of Transgression, but not a part of it. Screened back-to-back features at the then-nascent Chicago Underground Film Festival.

He’s been there. He’s done that.

To date, he’s made just three feature films. (Although, hard at work on finishing up his fourth.) And all three — Twisted Issues, Red Spirit Lake and We Await — deserve to be freshly rediscovered and recontextualized. These films put out vibes that stretch out and can be felt in work by makers such as Calvin Lee Reeder, Bob Moricz, Waylon Bacon and others, whether they were specifically influenced by them or not.

All of Pinion’s films can be purchased on DVD from the filmmaker’s website. Gross. Surreal. Unsettling. If that’s your bag...

Director Stephen Hadden just dropped us a line to let us know his grisly post-apocalyptic themed horror film Bio-dead will have its world premiere via nationwide video-on-demand on Thursday August 6, 2009 through Time Warner, Bright House and Charter digital cable providers.

Synopsis:

Set in the not-too-distant future, “Bio-dead” takes place during the aftermath of a bioterrorist attack that has killed twelve million people and rendered Southern California uninhabitable. The once thriving mecca has now become a contaminated wasteland known as “The Zone”. Hazmat teams are dispatched into “The Zone” to search for survivors and document all casualties.

When a lone hazmat team enters a seemingly abandoned building after dark, the men begin to experience terrifying hallucinations and soon realize that they are not alone. Trapped inside the compound with no escape, the terrified team finds themselves locked in a struggle for survival against a vicious predator… and each other.

The cast...