New film festival celebrates the 40th birthday of the world’s oldest video shop

Who’d have predicted we’d be celebrating the 40th birthday of a video shop in 2022? Against all the odds, and thanks to a loyal customer base, Bristol institution 20th Century Flicks has been in business since 1982.

To this day, you can still rent DVDs or VHS tapes from the shop on Christmas Steps, or hire out either of its two bijou cinemas for private screenings.

This extraordinary achievement is to be marked with a brand new three-day film festival focussing on genre cinema from around the world. Forbidden Worlds runs from Friday 13 to Sunday 15 May at the former Bristol IMAX cinema in Bristol Aquarium. With seating for 340 people, it boasts a truly gargantuan 19m x 15m screen but hasn’t hosted regular public screenings since it closed its doors in April 2007, following a string of flops.

The Forbidden Worlds Film Festival Poster by Andy Janes

“To celebrate the unlikely event of our 40th birthday we wanted to do something special, so we are hosting a film festival for the whole city as a way to say thanks,” explains 20th Century Flicks’ co-owner David Taylor, whose programming team includes film archivist Tom Vincent, marketing manager Tessa Williams, Timon Singh of the Bristol Bad Film Club and Blu-ray producer Anthony Nield. “Bristol has such a vibrant film-loving community and it’s hard to imagine a shop like ours surviving this long anywhere else.

“Forbidden Worlds will complement the many film festivals that already operate in this city such as Slapstick and Cinema Rediscovered, tapping into the more disreputable type of cinema that video shops made such fertile territory of back in the early days. If the festival is successful, we hope to make this an annual event with a different theme and line-up each year. It’d be quite something if a video shop’s birthday party could bring the largest cinema in the south-west back into use for the city!”

The great (and not-so-great) films of 1982 go really big on Bristol’s former IMAX screen

Appropriately enough, the programme offers an opportunity to party like it’s 1982 with a particular focus on the great and, ahem, not so great but definitely cult movies released that year. But before that, the festival kicks off of Friday 13 with a legend. Celebrating what would have been Christopher Lee’s 100th birthday, there’s a screening of the enjoyably naff Dracula AD 1972, in which Lee’s vampire count gets groovy with victims in hot pants. That’s followed by ace sequel Mad Max 2 and a secret late night movie to be confirmed.

Christopher Lee averts his eyes from an unwanted distraction in ‘Dracula AD1972’

Saturday 14’s programme kicks off with kids’ treat The Secret of NIMH, includes the under-appreciated John Frankenheimer thriller The Challenge and concludes with a couple of 1982’s great scary classics: the original Tobe Hooper Poltergeist and Frank Henenlotter’s VHS rental perennial Basket Case. During the afternoon local film archivist Tom Vincent presents what promises to be a hugely entertaining history of 3D. Specs will be provided.

Roger Corman’s ‘Forbidden World’: a pleasingly gory Alien knock-off

Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal opens Sunday’s selection, which also includes the final cut of 1982’s greatest film: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The involvement of Bristol Bad Film Club’s Ti Singh in the programming is evident from a couple of the other selections: bizarre Taiwanese fantasy adventure Thrilling Bloody Sword (” . . .plays out like the weird love child of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Masters of the Universe“) and Roger Corman’s gory Alien rip-off Forbidden World. The festival concludes with a late night screening of a secret horror classic, to be unveiled nearer the time

Mel goes walkies in ‘Mad Max 2’

All films will be projected from DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) on a professionally installed Christie digital cinema projector. Although these won’t fill the entire former Bristol IMAX screen, we’re assured that the projected image size will still be very big indeed.

‘Thrilling Bloody Sword’: not especially thrilling special effects

Tickets for individual screenings will be available soon on the Forbidden Worlds website. Bargain early bird weekend passes sold out in just four hours, but you can still snaffle full-price ones for £75.

All images supplied by Forbidden Worlds Festival.

Read more: 20th Century Flicks get its own flick