Secret Cinema

It’s 6.15 on the Jubilee line tube and I’m not going to lie to you, I feel like a bit of a tit. I am wearing a bright orange mini skirt, a neon pink top, copious amounts of black eyeliner and I have a pair of swimming goggles on the top of my head (anyone wondering why I own these hideous items of clothing, please see my previous report on the British Soap Awards).

I get off the tube at Canary Wharf, surrounded by suits and wondering what exactly I’m doing here on a school night. This isn’t helped by the fact that my brother is 20 minutes late and I have to stand waiting for him looking like something out of the Tweenies.

Slowly however, fellow weirdly dressed folks begin to filter through the gates, all wearing goggles, nodding their acknowledgment to me as they pass. The surrounding suits are confused.

Welcome to Secret Cinema. Now approaching its second year in London, the underground film night has grown – partly thanks to a sponsorship deal with Windows Phone – into a monthly extravaganza of the surreal. For the uninitiated, here’s how it works: you sign up on the website, pay for your tickets and receive clues and teasers about the film they’ll be showing. A few days before the event you get an email telling you where to go and what to wear. And that’s it. You don’t know the exact location, or what the film will be until you actually get there – where you’ll be faced with an intricately created world based around the chosen film, complete with costumed actors in character and live entertainment.

My brother finally arrives and a doll-like air hostess shows us to the queue, from which we’re herded into a bus taking us to the ‘new world’. En route, we’re intercepted by a plain clothes officer, who abruptly jumps on board and starts grilling random passengers with questions designed to test their emotional responses, and isolate any ‘replicants’ who may have found their way on board. We’re then discharged into a huge dark warehouse where we turn the corner to be greeted by a girl in a gold bikini holding a giant snake.

In case you hadn’t already guessed, this is Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, Secret Cinema style. Over the next two hours, we have our eyes analysed by a very serious man in a lab coat, feast on booze and oriental food, have a shoulder massage, pose in an army truck, watch a live band in sequined jumpsuits and frequently dive out of the way as visored police wrestle black suited ‘replicants’ to the ground. This is not just a film screening, it’s like waking up in a film geek’s ultimate fantasy.

The film itself, when it finally kicks off in a chilly warehouse lined with mannequins, is greeted with a huge cheer. The rooftop finale is accompanied by a wall projection of the apocalyptic cityscape against which trapeze artists perform their interpretation of the final struggle. Walking out into the night afterwards, surrounded by the futuristic high-rises of Canary Wharf, you’d be forgiven for expecting Pris to backflip out of the pile of rubbish on the side of the road.On the tube, I realise I’ve still got my goggles on.

Toto, I don’t think we’re in the Odeon anymore.

Register for the next Secret Cinema at: www.secretcinema.org