Film fest celebrates William Shatner

A film festival in London, Ont. is boldly going where no film festival has gone before by showcasing the work of William Shatner.

But contrary to what you might expect, the festival dubbed the First Annual Mini Shatner Fest will not feature any movies with the Canadian performer in his most famous role, Captain Kirk.

Instead, it will highlight more obscure films, ones that came out both before and after Shatner's three-season run on television's Star Trek.

"Shatner surely is not obscure, but I think that some of his lesser-known stuff from the '60s and '70s is," says Skot Deeming, the festival's organizer.

The centerpiece of the event will be a triple bill consisting of 1962's The Intruder, 1974's Impulse, and 1977's Kingdom of the Spiders.

In between movies, Deeming will play selections from Shatner's first album, The Transformed Man, on an old record player.

One of Deeming's friends plans to bake cookies in the shape of a Starfleet insignia, and there will also be a Shatner trivia contest.

According to Deeming, Shatner made sense as the subject for a film festival because he is "probably one of the most popular human beings in the world."

"He's just one of those strange camp, cult figures that everybody knows and he hams it up," Deeming explains. "He always seems to be so magnanimous, but it always seems so ridiculous at the same time. It's the cult of celebrity elevated to the point of absurdity."

Deeming picked The Intruder, in which Shatner plays a white supremacist who incites a race riot in a small town, because it is "one of the few things he's been attached to that has a lot of critical acclaim." Roger Corman directed the film.

Impulse has Shatner in the role of a serial killer. Deeming, who collects odd films on videotape, says the movie is "totally obscure and bizarre. It's really obtuse."

Kingdom of the Spiders was part of the cycle of disaster pictures that came out of Hollywood in the 1970s. In it, Shatner plays a veterinarian who discovers a colony of tarantulas who take over a small town by operating with a hive mind.

The film shines a spotlight on a period in Shatner's life when the Montreal-born performer was having difficulty finding work. This may be hard to believe today, considering the number of Shatner projects that are in the works.

On Oct. 5 he released Has Been, the Ben Folds-produced follow-up to The Transformed Man. He is making a reality show for Spike TV and also stars on the ABC drama Boston Legal. There have also been rumours floating around the internet about a possible guest appearance on Enterprise.

The festival, which is partly designed to demystify film festivals by offering an opportunity for a "wacky, good fun time," also offers an intriguing glimpse into a career that might have been.

As Deeming points out, Shatner was known primarily for doing Shakespeare and some of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone before his television career took off.

"He had a real integrity to him. And then Star Trek put him in this position where in some ways he became a caricature of himself," he says.

The free festival takes place Oct. 23 in the basement of L.A. Mood, a downtown London comic-book store. If it's a success, it may become an annual event.

One of the most sought-after prizes in the trivia contest may be a "slash" zine, the fan-made periodicals put out in the 1970s that were devoted to fiction about sexual encounters between Captain Kirk and his Vulcan subordinate, Mr. Spock.

Deeming calls it "the Holy Grail of the Shatner prizes we have."

The response to the festival has so far been enthusiastic. One person even sent Deeming an e-mail asking if he could bring alcohol.

Deeming's answer: "Maybe you should bring some alcohol. It's five-and-a-half hours of 1970s Shatner films. You might need a little bit of that."