Theater of the absurd

Since the birth of cinema, film distributors and theater owners have been devising new, attention-grabbing ways to hook audiences – everything from Smell-O-Vision to IMAX 3-D to those seats that move and shake in sync with what’s happening on the screen. Producer-director William Castle, the P.T. Barnum of movie marketing, even went so far as to wire random theater seats to jolt viewers during his 1959 horror cheapie “The Tingler.” It’s a practice as old as the art form.

Over the next week, the Bing Crosby Theater is screening two wildly dissimilar films – the cult comedy “This Is Spinal Tap” and the Oscar-winning thriller “The Silence of the Lambs” – in similarly nontraditional ways: The gimmicks aren’t nearly as hacky as Castle’s, but don’t expect to pay your money and then sit quietly for a couple hours.

For “Spinal Tap,” come prepared for a costume contest and a trivia competition sponsored by KYRS Community Radio, as well as live Spinal Tap covers from a band that might look curiously like Spokane rock quartet the Camaros. And for “Silence of the Lambs,” come prepared to laugh – yes, laugh – as a group of local comedians riff on the movie “Mystery Science Theater 3000”-style.

Released in 1984, “This Is Spinal Tap” is the first in a long string of faux-documentaries from the same stable of comic improvisers that would later create “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show.” In the film, documentarian Marty DiBergi (played by director Rob Reiner) is chronicling the latest North American tour of fading British heavy metal band Spinal Tap, which has gone through as many name changes as it has drummers.

The band’s core members – David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) – are the least self-aware rock stars you can imagine, wearing their (possibly self-imposed) status as “England’s loudest band” like a badge of honor. Some of their greatest hits (actually written and performed by the actors) have such lurid titles as “Big Bottom” and “Sex Farm,” and they sound uncannily like the glossy, gloriously vulgar hair metal of the era.

The movie is only 84 minutes long, but it’s filled with classic comic set pieces: The album cover design that’s too offensive to be printed, the Stonehenge stage prop with embarrassingly diminutive dimensions, the embarrassing stop through airport metal detectors, the guitar amps with volume knobs that go all the way up to 11 (for “that extra push over the cliff”).

While “This Is Spinal Tap” remains the funniest “mockumentary” ever made, it might seem odd that Jonathan Demme’s 1991 horror masterpiece “The Silence of the Lambs” is playing at the Bing on April Fool’s Day. But, like Friday’s “Spinal Tap” screening, this isn’t going to be your average moviegoing experience: You’ll be watching the movie along with a group of area comedians – Nicky J. Cavasier, Will Gilman, Jason Komm, Tom Meisjford and Harry J. Riley – as they provide a comic audio commentary.

Based on Thomas Harris’ best-selling novel, Demme’s film follows FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) as she tracks an elusive serial killer who has been targeting young women. She seeks the counsel of imprisoned psychiatrist and murderer Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), who agrees to provide insight into the mind of a killer and ends up profiling Starling as she cowers on the other side of Lecter’s Plexiglas enclosure.

Lecter is only on-screen for about 25 minutes, and yet Hopkins makes an indelible impression on us the second he shows up. He’s debonair and almost effortlessly charming, and the fact that he possesses intelligence as well as the capacity for indescribable evil makes him all the more imposing. He set the bar that all future movie villains would be measured against.

“The Silence of the Lambs” is a disturbing, violent film, but Demme and his cast bring an artistry to the material, and it went on to sweep the five top categories at the Academy Awards (one of only three films to ever do so, and the only horror movie to win Best Picture). You wouldn’t think that such a dark and brutal thriller would serve as a source for comic material, but you can’t poke fun at something unless it’s taking itself absolutely seriously.

We go to the movies to live vicariously through characters or to be wrapped up in imaginary worlds, but every once in awhile you need a William Castle-style jokester to break the spell. Just imagine how he might have marketed “The Silence of the Lambs” – a mystery meat taste test, anyone?