After a soft-opening last weekend with Hobo With a Shotgun and The Room, downtown Mesa’s new cinema The Royale officially gets rolling July 15 with vampires, ninjas, trolls and Conan O’Brien.
Here’s the full run-down courtesy impresaria extraordinaire Andrea Beesley-Brown:
Stake Land (2010) | Friday July 15 – Thursday 21
In a fierce, alternative vision of America’s bleak future, a young boy is about to learn how cruel the world can be. Martin was a normal teenage boy before the country collapsed in an empty pit of economic and political disaster. And from the ashes rose a new breed of terror. A vampire epidemic has swept across what is left of the nation’s abandoned towns and cities, and it’s up to Mister, a death dealing, rogue vampire hunter, to get Martin safely north to Canada, the continent’s New Eden.
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Strike Commando (1987) | Friday July 15 9pm
Presented by Video Dungeon, STRIKE COMMANDO is a 1987 action film, starring Reb Brown, Christopher Connelly and Alex Vitale. The film, directed by Bruno Mattei, was shot on the Philippines due to low budget. The movie is a unique blend of Rambo: First Blood Part II, Predator and Commando. Presented on VHS in our main auditorium and introduced by Video Dungeon programmer Justin Edwards & sponsored by Bookmans.
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Enter the Ninja (1981) w/MuVChat | Thursday July 21 7pm
Franco Nero stars as a Westerner mastering the art of Ninjutsu. After passing the training, he heads down to the Philippines to visit an old war buddy that sent an urgent message. Nero roughs up the black mailing thugs and then it gets deadly and it becomes an all out ninja war between Nero and rival ninja Sho Kosugi. Presented with MuVChat, where patrons text their and the comments are displayed on the screen along with the movie. Think of MST3K but crowd sourced from the audience.
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Troll Hunter (2010) | Friday July 22 – Thursday 28
Shot in a vérité style, TROLLHUNTER is the story of a group of Norwegian film students that set out to capture real-life trolls on camera after learning their existence has been covered up for years by a government conspiracy. A thrilling and wildly entertaining film, TROLLHUNTER delivers truly fantastic images of giant trolls wreaking havoc on the countryside, with darkly funny adherence to the original Norwegian folklore.
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Army of Darkness (1992) | Friday July 22 9pm
In this sequel to the Evil Dead films, a discount-store employee is time-warped to a medieval castle beset by monstrous forces. Initially mistaken for an enemy, he is soon revealed as the prophesized savior who can quest for the Necronomicon, a book which can dispel the evil. Unfortunately, he screws up the magic words while collecting the tome, and releases an army of skeletons, led by his own Deadite counterpart. What follows is a thrilling, yet tongue-in-cheek battle between Ash’s 20th Century tactics and the minions of darkness.
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Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (2011) | Friday July 29 – Thursday August 4
After a much-publicized departure from hosting NBC’s Tonight Show – O’Brien hit the road with a 32-city music-and-comedy show to exercise his performing chops. The “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour” was O’Brien’s answer to a contractual stipulation that banned his appearance on television, radio and the Internet for six months following his last show. Filmmaker Rodman Flender’s resulting documentary, CONAN O’BRIEN CAN’T STOP, is an intimate portrait of an artist trained in improvisation, captured at the most improvisational time of his career. It offers a window into the private writers room and rehearsal halls as O’Brien’s “half-assed show” (his words) is almost instantly assembled and mounted to an adoring fan base.
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Get full showtimes and more information at The Royale’s website.
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