Summer Camp

As a curator of ignoble genre cinema of the ’60s and ’70s, William Lustig has his work cut out for him. Shedding light on obscure and frankly lowbrow films is an especially daunting task considering how hard it is not only to rescue many titles from distribution limbo, but to get audiences to take them seriously as more than retro junk. Nevertheless, Lustig fights an uphill battle on multiple fronts and with gusto, dedicated to preserving an aspect of our culture that many ungratefully take for granted. The director of the infamous indie slasher Maniac Cop, Lustig is also the founder of Blue Underground, a no-nonsense and surprisingly comprehensive DVD distributor of cult films. He returns to Anthology Film Archives Aug. 12 for the second time, curating the popular “[William Lustig Presents]” series.

When asked about how he programmed this year’s series, Lustig explains, “Number one: I wanted to pick films that had been languishing since their theatrical release. These are movies that—some of them have seen the light [of day] on VHS, none of them DVD. So for all intents and purposes, for the last 10 or 15 years [these films] have been unavailable. My second criterion is to try to showcase directors and actors who I feel have been forgotten or neglected.”

One of those directors is Henri Verneuil, a contemporary of Jean-Pierre Melville whose style of shooting action scenes is reminiscent of Melville’s, but who is distinctly more light-hearted in his approach. Verneuil’s The Sicilian Clan features Melville regulars Lino Ventura and Alain Delon, as well as Jean Gabin, as a violent escaped convict (Delon) leads a wealthy Italian mobster (Gabin) to a big payoff. With a bouncy score by Ennio Morricone, The Sicilian Clan shows signs of a filmmaker that, like Melville, takes great pleasure in forcing his viewer to scrutinize his actors’ body language in the hopes of anticipating what they’re scheming to do next. The opening scene where Delon escapes the police from the inside of an armored car is especially taut.

Lustig’s series also celebrates B-movies that wouldn’t otherwise get the attention they deserve because they can’t be linked to an instantly recognizable star or director. Rod Taylor is the biggest name involved with Dark of the Sun (aka Mercenaries), a bleeding heart actioner that both celebrates and tsk-tsks the exploitative amorality of soldiers of fortune. The film is a bit schizophrenic in that it highlights Taylor’s character’s violent, testosterone-driven nature, but then shows you how he inevitably learns to channel that anger toward the kind of compromised greater good we’ve come to expect from macho antiheroes with no name.

While Lustig is saving many worthy titles from obscurity, some of the films just seem to belong on VHS, where they can be discovered by a bewildered and soon-to-be devoted audience that looks at them as artifacts from a bygone era of lurid but memorable cheesefests. The Town That Dreaded Sundown is a post-Texas Chainsaw Massacre faux-verité horror flick about a real-life masked Texarkana serial killer who’s never been caught or identified. Sundown is a rubber-necker’s delight, especially recommended for anyone with an unclean affinity for the dramatic re-enactments from Unsolved Mysteries. It alternates between moronic sitcom humor and long, clumsy scenes in the woods, one of which climaxes when the killer attaches a switchblade to a trombone to form a makeshift bayonet. This movie isn’t likely to scare anyone anytime soon, but its third act’s Peckinpah-esque slow-motion action scenes, including a banjo-strummin’ car chase, is definitely not something you’re going to forget. > Aug. 12-20, Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave., 212-505-5181, [www.anthologyfilmarchives.org](http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/); $9.