When most venues might struggle with the summer heat in a nearly 100-year-old building without air conditioning, The Senate Theater on Michigan Avenue and Livernois will turn its sweltering interior into a defining feature. The venue recently launched another “Hot, Sweaty and Weird” series, a summer-long celebration of B-movies, cult classics, and community that’s built around the simple premise that discomfort can be part of the experience.
This Saturday, July 19th, at 8pm, the series will kick off with a “Terror de Mexico” double feature that showcases two Mexican horror films from the 1960s back-to-back – “100 Cries of Terror” which is an anthology of supernatural tales, and “The Curse of the Doll People,” which delivers scares when creepy dolls come to life. Both films are dubbed in English and will screen on actual 16-millimeter film thanks to Back Alley Cinema.
On July 26th, audiences can watch Alejandro Jodorowsky’s trippy cult classic “The Holy Mountain,” and the series will wrap up with its grand finale on August 9th with a free outdoor screening of “Las Momias de Guanajuato,” where the legendary luchador El Santo battles mummies in all his masked glory.
Nicholas Baldwin, who handles film programming and social media for the theater, remembers how the whole thing started. “Every time we had regular screenings in the summer, the audience was miserable,” he recalled. “They were expecting to come into air conditioning and get relaxed, and they weren’t getting any of that. We had to think of something else—how can we be transparent about the fact that it’s not going to be the most comfortable experience, but we can still enjoy something different?”
So they decided to stop fighting the heat and start celebrating it. “Hot, Sweaty and Weird” became a summer tradition in 2018 and continues to program genre films that lend itself to the, well, weirdness of its namesake. “The idea is that you come and you sit in the theater, and you get hot and sweaty, and you watch a B movie,” Baldwin explained. “You watch a weird movie, some sort of culty, classy movie that lends to the sweatiness, the weirdness, the hotness of it.”
The Senate chose these films with Southwest Detroit in mind. The theater usually programs one Spanish-language film per year, but Summer 2025 will showcase three Mexican titles. “The conversation at the theater and within the movie committee is often to further cater to our neighborhood, to try to bring to our neighborhood things that our neighbors would want to see,” Baldwin explained.
In dozens of B-movies throughout the 1960s and 70s, famed Mexican luchador El Santo (Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta) became a folk hero fighting supernatural threats (when he wasn’t body-slamming opponents in the ring).
“El Santo was so popular that they put him in movies where he’s a wrestling superhero fighting supernatural elements,” Baldwin explained. “There are dozens of these Santos versus different things—very silly B movies.” To build on last summer’s El Santo success, the theater decided to make it a tradition.
The partnership with Back Alley Cinema, a nonprofit organization that maintains an archive of 16-millimeter prints and presents them throughout Metro Detroit, shows how far the local film exhibition community will go to share these movies with audiences, especially since “Back Alley Cinema will only have those prints for some special period of time, and then they’ll have to send them back wherever they came from,” Baldwin noted.
The “Coney Lot” will host the series finale with a free outdoor screening of “Las Momias de Guanajuato,” a 1972 film featuring El Santo and Blue Demon fighting mummified remains from Guanajuato, Mexico. The gated “Coney Lot” once housed the Senate Coney Island before its destruction in a 1990 fire. Baldwin commissioned a mural during the pandemic on the theater’s west-facing wall that resembles a movie screen, adorned with billowing red curtains.
Like so many at The Senate, Baldwin found his way to the theater and stayed. He started volunteering in 2018 and has managed to keep his theater commitments going the entire time. “Everything everyone does at The Senate is volunteer-based,” Baldwin emphasized, which allows The Senate to take risks that most commercial theaters would usually avoid.
The theater operates through the Detroit Theater Organ Society (DTOS), an all-volunteer non-profit organization founded in 1989. The Senate continues DTOS’ mission “to preserve the art of theater pipe organ music by maintaining and showcasing the Mighty Wurlitzer at concerts, film screenings and events hosted at the theater”. However, The Senate has expanded far beyond its original organ-focused programming to embrace the needs of the community, including 2025’s iteration of the “Southwest Fest” music and art festival on August 23rd.
“When you go to the theater alone and see this weird movie, you’re not able to share in laughs with anyone else, or share in the horror with anyone else,” Baldwin reflected. “That’s not nearly as impactful as being able to share those heightened emotions with as many people as possible.” Those sweaty summer moments reveal what Baldwin calls a fundamental truth: “We are all humanistically connected in that way. We have no differences in that moment. We are there in the theater, and we all share in the joy or the terror or the laughter, and all differences are set aside.”
The Senate Theater’s “Hot, Sweaty, and Weird” series continues through August, with upcoming screenings July 19th (Terror de Mexico double feature, 8pm, $6), July 26th (The Holy Mountain, 8pm, $6), and August 9th (Las Momias de Guanajuato, 9pm, free outdoor screening). The theater is located at 6424 Michigan Avenue. For more information, visit senatetheater.com.
Michael D. Gutierrez is the Digital Content Manager for EL CENTRAL Hispanic News. He is a screenwriter and filmmaker with a decade of experience in the television and film industry, contributing to projects including THE HOLDOVERS and LETHAL WEAPON on Fox. He is an active member of the Writers Guild of America-West and its Latino Writers Committee.
This article was made possible thanks to a generous grant to EL CENTRAL Hispanic News by Press Forward, the national movement to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news. Learn more at www.pressforward.news.
