Shu Hin, Ryu Hin in Panda Diary (top); Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews in Hot Rods to Hell (middle); ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction (bottom)
Los Angeles Film Festival, Saturday, June 27, highlights:
- A second screening of Sophie Barthes' Cold Souls (The Regent, 1:30 pm), starring Paul Giamatti as a man whose soul is smuggled into Russia.
- Narrated by the panda Shu Hin, Tadashi Mori's documentary Panda Story (Landmark 8, 2 pm) follows the narrator and her twin brother, Ryu Hin, as they are moved from their homeland to some strange place, far, far away.
- A second screening of Blayne Weaver's Weather Girl (Landmark 4, 4:30 pm), a romantic comedy about a weather girl with a high-pressure love life.
- John Brahm's 1967 biker thriller Hot Rods to Hell (Billy Wilder Theater, 4:30 pm) is no masterpiece — nor was it ever meant to be. This way over-the-top melo about family values vs. biker kinks features 1940s Fox stars Jeanne Crain and Dana Andrews as a middle-class couple who have their placid bourgeois lives upended following an accidental road encounter with a group of wacko bikers. Mimsy Farmer plays a really bad teen. Too bad that Luis Buñuel didn't get a chance to direct this one.
- Starring Dennis Hopper, Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (Billy Wilder Theater, 7 pm) tells the story of a young man who falls in love with a woman who believes herself to be the descendent of them deadly sirens. Music by the excellent David Raksin.
- A second screening of Alexis de Santos' Unmade Beds (The Regent, 9:30 pm) about a group of young London East Siders.
- A second screening of Kevin Hamedani's ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction (Landmark 4, 10 pm), a depiction of what happens when zombies invade a small US town, where they are taken for (human) terrorists.