SCREENING: Monte Hellman's IGUANA

SCREENING: Monte Hellman's IGUANA

⌚️2023-06-09 06:00:00 – 2023-06-09 08:30:00
🏢2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057, USA

Mezzanine presents Monte Hellman’s IGUANA!

(1988, 88m, Italy/Spain, DCP)

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The uncompromising American existentialist Monte Hellman (1929-2021) was among the New Hollywood luminaries trained in Roger Corman’s B-movie factory before he directed several of the singular cult art films of the 1970s, including *Two-Lane Blacktop* and *Cockfighter*. Lesser-known is his 1988 masterpiece *Iguana*, a Herzogian pirate film that blends Gothic horror and a Joseph Conrad-esque nihilism into something haunting and unique.

Featuring a score by Joni Mitchell, *Iguana* follows a lone 19th-century sailor (Twin Peaks’ Everett McGill) with a monstrously deformed face who escapes persecution by his fellow mariners to become master of his own domain. Landing on an uninhabited island in the Galapagos, he transforms overnight into a vicious dictator, taking a love affair with an aristocratic Spanish libertine (Maru Valdivielso) while declaring revenge on a world that ostracized him. Hellman’s grim poetry, via elliptical editing and lush landscape photography, elevates Iguana to become something more than mere allegory; dedicated to Warren Oates, it remains exemplary of the unruly line between art and exploitation.

We will be screening the uncut version of the film.

“Iguana should have made Monte Hellman a household name." – Quentin Tarantino

Special thanks to Jesse Trussell and R. Emmet Sweeney.

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