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Movies & TV

All hail the mole people

When the Toronto Underground Cinema opened its doors one year ago, no one really knew what to expect – including, I suspect, the guys who were running it.

I spoke to Alex Woodside, Nigel Agnew and Charlie Lawton a few days before they threw their doors open for their first night, and all they were sure of was that they wanted to turn the former Golden Classics Cinema – located beneath a shabby office building on Spadina just north of Queen – into something that celebrated the community of cult movies.

They planned on expanding beyond that, too, but first they had to establish their credibility. The opening night, featuring a free double-bill of Clue and Big Trouble In Little China, went a good ways to do that subsequent programs, including the Son Of Kung Fu Fridays series (programmed with the cooperation of TIFF Midnight Madness czar Colin Geddes) and the regular Exploitation Alley and Satanic Sinema evenings, cemented the theatre’s reputation as a rep cinema willing to screen fringe films to mass audiences. (And, of course, there are Andrew Parker’s Defending The Indefensible evenings, of which I’m delighted to be a part.)

This Sunday, the Underground will celebrate its first anniversary with another free double bill. They’re bringing back Clue at 7 pm – possibly in a print with a different ending than the one screened last year – and following it with a 9 pm showing of Jurassic Park, which brought Alex, Nigel and Charlie together at a Fringe shadowcast performance in 2009.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to visit the Underground, this will be a great chance to discover one of the city’s oddest and most endearing movie houses – and really, if you’ve only ever seen Jurassic Park on video, you’ll be amazed how well it plays at its intended scale.

And if you have been there before, you’ll appreciate the warmth and the eccentricity of the place, and how the theatre has sort of grown into itself in the year since it opened. I’m not sure the guys figured on becoming a part-time music venue, but bands hold launch parties (and the occasional secret show) there all the time the auditorium also hosts special events like 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment’s screening party that accompanied the launch of the Alien Anthology Blu-ray set last year.

Basically, the Toronto Underground Cinema has become a neighbourhood movie house that caters to the strange and unusual. And since so many Torontonians fancy themselves strange and unusual … well, that makes for a pretty big crowd.

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