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Rocket Sci-Fi Matinee: $2 admission

A man driving along a lonely back road at night is suddenly startled by what he sees, and is promptly killed by something that crashes through his windshield. The next day, in the nearby town of River Falls, teenagers Carol Flynn (June Kenney) and Mike Simpson (Gene Persson) decide to go looking for her father, who didn't get home last night. They find his wrecked truck and enter a nearby cave to begin searching for him. There they find his blood-covered hat and other signs of human remains and, as they go deeper inside, suddenly get trapped in a huge web -- then they spot its maker, a spider the size of a small house. They manage to escape and alert the county sheriff (Gene Roth), who doesn't take them seriously but does heed the warning of Mr. Kingman (Ed Kemmer), the science teacher at the local high school, to bring a pest-control crew along with his deputies, and a tanker loaded with DDT. They encounter the creature, and, after losing one of their men, dispatch it with the insecticide. Kingman persuades the sheriff to bring the carcass into town so that he can arrange to have it studied, leaving it in storage at the high school recreation room, for lack of anywhere bigger to keep it. As it turns out, the creature isn't dead, just stunned. As the local rock & roll band rehearses, the giant spider comes to bloodthirsty consciousness, breaking out of the building and ravaging the town. Bullets won't hurt it -- as Kingman says, you could punch holes in it all day without hitting a vital spot -- and the town is soon cut off when the telephone lines are knocked down.

Rocket Sci-Fi Matinee: $2 admission

"The atmosphere and pace are superbly handled, and the performances of the sinister, inhumanly intelligent 'children' never falter." Time Out

Something is seriously amiss in the tiny British village of Midwich. At 11 a.m. one morning, every village resident suddenly falls asleep -- and then, just as suddenly, everyone wakes up, completely unaffected by the phenomenon. Well, not completely: virtually every woman of childbearing years has become pregnant. All the babies are born on the same night, at precisely the same moment. All look the same, weigh the same, and even have the same curious cross-hatched hair and underdeveloped fingernails. Four years later, the children have all prematurely reached the age of nine or so -- and all behave in a weird, conspiratorial manner, comporting themselves more like adults than kids. Resident scientist George Sanders, one of the fathers, surmises that the bizarre manner of the children -- from their zombie-like movements to their cold, staring eyes -- is the result of radioactivity, possibly extraterrestrial in nature. One thing is certain: the children possess powers far beyond those of ordinary mortals. And they must be stopped. One of the most influential science fiction films of the 1960s, Village of the Damned was based on the equally eerie John Wyndham novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The more explicit 1995 remake was widely panned in comparison.

Rocket Sci-Fi Matinee: $2 admission

"This follow-up to 1960′s classic horror film Village of the Damned takes the original story’s essential concept — children with superhuman intelligence who pose a threat to humanity — and shifts it into an entirely different context. This time, the children (though still mysteriously born to virginal mothers) live in various countries around the world, look different (rather than wearing the same blonde wig, they’re a veritable multicultural crew), and aren’t posited as inherently evil or alien — indeed, they only band together once they realize that they’re about to be used as pawns by governments eager to exploit their extraordinary talents for military purposes. The second half of the film basically features a show-down between the children and British military forces, with additional drama generated through a quibbling pair of scientists (Ian Hendry and Alan Badel) who disagree about whether the children should be destroyed or protected." FilmFanatic.org