Cult Films: Taboo and Transgression looks at nine decades of cult films history within American culture. By highlighting three films per decade including a brief summary of the decade's identity and sensibility, the book investigates the quality, ironies, and spirit of cult film evolution. The twenty-seven films selected for this study are analyzed for story content and in their respective transgressions regarding social, aesthetic, and political codes. Characteristic of this book is the notion that many exciting genres make up cult films-including horror, sci-fi, fantasy, film noir, and black comedy. Further, the book reaches out to several foreign film directors over the decades in order to view cult films as an intentional art form. Political and ideological controversies are covered; arresting back-story details that lend perspective on a film fill out the analysis and the historic framework for many film titles. The book, by emphasizing the condensed survey over decades and by choosing outstanding titles, differs from other general studies on cult films.

Cult Films: Taboo and Transgression

Humor & Entertainment

Havis, Allan

Movies

University Press of America

This collection contains three full-length plays : Morocco, Hospitality, and Mink Sonata. A common thread linking the three plays is the move away from naturalistic theater and American realism. THese plays don't require a decorative approach with encroaching set design and ambient activities. He worte these works from a distilled, elliptical perspective, and he would hope they would be interpreted accordingly.

Plays by Allan Havis

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Sun Moon Pr

In the Garden of Eden and crosscutting to New York, the enactment and re-enactment of Adam, Lilith, and Eve take the stage as the two women confront one another and the very identify of metaphysical woman. A love triangle which defies the heavens, supernatural Lilith will not willingly disappear from this world.“Before there was Eve there was Lilith. In his new play, LILITH, Allan Havis has placed Adam’s legendary first wife at the center of a parable about marriage. Springing Lilith loose in our age, the play is as devious as it is diabolical. The first act is in biblical times, the second in present-day New York, but the distinction is not intended to be clear-cut … Mr Havis weaves an intricate web of lustfulness and deceit … The sardonic language could have been written by a contemporary counterpart of the Swedish playwright [Strindberg] … As in his earlier plays, MINK SONATA and MOROCCO, Mr Havis shows a mordant wit, used this time to ask the question, who is Lilith and what is her fatal attraction.” —Mel Gussow, The New York Times

Lilith

Allan Havis

Broadway Play Publishing, Incorporated

this collection contains three full-length plays: A DARING BRIDE, THE LADIES OF FISHER COVE, &amp; SAINTE SIMONE

Plays by Allan Havis, Vol. 2

Broadway Play Publishing

A fabulist comedy-drama of a future city-state made up of Tijuana and San Diego after a great California earthquake. The world greets the first Mexican Pope who leads the region back into recovery. "The year is 2028. A massive earthquake has reconfigured Southern California, wiping out Los Angeles and Orange County. The whole region has to be reconceived. In a controversial move, a new city-state has been proposed, combining San Diego and Tijuana into one cross-cultural community known as Nuevo California. This imaginary world is at the center of a new play premiering at the San Diego Repertory Theater. So the wall is coming down and there's a Mexican-American pope who comes to the region to bless its demolition. What follows is a wild mix of fantasy and reality - chaos and crisis, murder, mystery and a budding bicultural romance - all played out by Mexicans, Anglos, Asians, blacks, Jews, Muslims and Kumi Indians." -Robert Siegel, All Things Considered, N P R News

Nuevo California

Solano, Bernardo

A factual dramatic account of the advancing history of the Brown v. Wade Supreme Court decision in counterpoint with the personal drama of Senator Strom Thurmond's unacknowledged mixed race daughter, Essie Mae Williams Washington.

The Haunting Of Jim Crow

A fantasy drama on clairvoyance and supernatural events surrounding the life of an African American PhD candidate who is researching folklore and ghost communication within immigrant communities in California. She is bothered by the contact with her father and with the arrest of a serial killer of young children. "An amazing, intriguing ghost tale that reinvests energy and wit throughout the contemporary San Diego/Tijuana landscape you'll never think of pre-school institutions and federal prisons in the same way again. This original, lyrical retelling of children's campfire boogeyman should haunt you beyond words." -Arthur Kopit

Restless Spirits

A kinky, deranged comedy built on the sale of a vintage Ford Mustang and an unidentified body in the car. Two women meet and against their better judgment cross the border into Mexico for an unusual resort weekend. "Allan Havis, who co-directs the playwriting program at U C S D, earned his reputation for mordant wit and chilling dramatic climaxes everywhere but San Diego. Now, finally, one of his weird dramas has opened here - the creepy and highly entertaining PRIVATE PARTIES ... Billed as a Thelma and Louise kind of show, it is that, but with layers and a jaunty, laid-back So-Cal tome that'll curl your painted toenails ... the fun and provocation of this 80-minute two-hander. The gals live and breathe in the writing ... You may not want to know them better, but you come away feeling that however fantastical their trip, they're the real thing." -Anne Marie Welsh, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Private Parties

An urban family of three is faced with a medical crisis upon a second financial crisis. Structured as a memory play, this story for four actors highlights the surfacing identify of a young man caught between filial loyalty and freedom. As the mother attends to both men, a domineering father is in free fall. "One young man's experience of grief and loss. A fraught father-son relationship, a tight mother-son bond. Nathan is lost and confused, trying to revisit and understand himself and the last twelve months of his life. His mother was erroneously diagnosed with cervical cancer. Heartache Number One. Then his successful, entrepreneurial father, being hounded by the I R S, is in peril of imprisonment. During the traumatic process, Dad suffers a life-threatening heart attack and later, a stroke. Nathan's safe, self-involved little world - his parents at a geographical distance, his girlfriend kept at an emotional distance, his academic life far away from the family business - spirals out of control. He has to be forced to remember, look back, process the whole series of events, by an other-worldly muse of memory ... There's a poetic and ethereal quality ... There's a deep and moving family story here, a parable for our times. As a new work, it shows considerable potential." -Pat Launer, San Diego News Network

Arrow To The Heart

Offbeat drama of a mother, father, and adult daughter living together inside an upscale Manhattan apartment. Daughter plays a cello and has a personality disorder. Her alter ego seduces her father who is a political media guru. Mother is conflicted in how to stop this awful charade.“The family under observation in Allan Havis’s MINK SONATA has affluence and political influence … [In] this intriguing new play … the dialog is literate and often amusing. Mr Havis has an ability to make artificial language sound in character. He has captured the jargon of people for whom solipsism may be an incurable disease …” —Mel Gussow, The New York Times

Mink Sonata

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Books by Havis, Allan