5/29: WARM BLOOD with live performance by Wipes (LV Cinema Club)

Wednesday, May 29, 2024 at 7:00pm
Emmaus Theatre
19 South 4th Street, Emmaus, PA 18049

Warm Blood, dir. Rick Charnoski, 2022, US, 86 mins, DCP

followed by Q&A with filmmaker Rick Charnoski
and live performance by Wipes

Tickets: $10, via Emmaus Theatre

Inhabiting the fringes of Modesto, California in the toxic haze of the 1980’s, Warm Blood is a politically subversive, searing collage of sound, narrative, documentary and trash B movie meta-narratives, hand stitched by filmmaker Rick Charnoski in his debut feature. We are overjoyed to welcome the filmmaker for a Q&A in his hometown of Emmaus, PA, part of Warm Blood's cross-country tour. 

Red is a driven young runaway who returns to her hometown to track down her wayward father. As she wanders the streets selling stolen drugs to finance her next mission, she reflects on her early teen life through reading a journal that she finds in her old bedroom. Tom, a young drifter—possibly a figment of Red's imagination—continues to reappear in his '73 Duster and scoop her up after she runs away over and over again. There may be an ominous conspiracy about a chemical induced sickness that threatens their entire town. Is this a dream or is this just what a town full of corruption and dishonesty looks like when you leave and come home two years later and two years older?

Shot on 16mm film by renowned cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt (First Cow, Emma, Night Moves) and nine years in the making, Warm Blood weaves jagged textures of old photos, scrawled letters found in the trash, interviews done in the midnight gloom under bridges, fake news broadcasts and random audio samples together like a freaky quilt. Warm Blood is an inverted vision of two lost souls shot in the same town as George Lucas‘s American Graffiti; a distress flare of a film shot into the night sky... a kaleidoscopic hitchhiker's guide to the underbelly of America.

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Wipes is a noise-rock trio from the Lehigh Valley comprised of Michael Dumoff, Ben Roysdon and Ray Gurz, former members of Tile, Bad American and Gods & Queens. In a recent review, Hex Records says, "They can take a very simple riff and then just beat it to death through tons of distortion and feedback to the point where you're just as honked off as they are." Just off a short tour of the Pacific Northwest and with a new cassette release on Avarice Records, WIPES represent the best of Emmaus, Pennsylvania's forward-thinking, skateboard-influenced punk music scene.