Enclosed, please find your cordial invitation to watch a melting radioactive cannibal eat people’s faces off, at one of the world’s great movie meccas this Saturday, for free.

Yours truly hits the Scarecrow Video Screening Room at 8:00 p.m. that evening to co-host Reel to Real Dementia Movie Night with veteran podcaster and festival programmer Steven J. Holetz. It should be a humdinger of an evening, beginning with a handful of great comedy-horror short films handpicked from Holetz’s 2014 Bonebat Comedy of Horrors Film Festival.

We’ll be following the shorts with one of the most warped drive-in movies of the 1970s. The 1977 grade-B horror epic The Incredible Melting Man is a wonderfully absurd and nasty little time capsule from the golden age of grindhouse cinema, in which radiation from a trip around Saturn’s rings turns an astronaut into a gradually-melting, super-strong puddle of goo with a serious jones for human flesh. It’s got everything you could want from a trash-film experience, replete with gratuitous gore and nudity, some of the most rib-tickling dialogue you’ll hear (“Oh, God—It’s his EAR!!”), and a refreshing dearth of good taste. Like a mutant red-haired (melting?) relative in the attic, it’s inspired a strange, abiding affection in me ever since I saw it at age 10 in a movie theater (to date I’ve seen it more times than Lawrence of Arabia, La Dolce Vita, and Vertigo combined, God help me), and I’m excited to share it with a roomful of like-minded crazies.

It’s also beyond exciting to be unleashing this delirium at Scarecrow Video’s Screening Room. The beloved store’s just launched a Kickstarter campaign to reinvent itself as a non-profit (check it out and donate, here), which means they’ll be able to take steps to preserve and expand their treasury of over 100,000 VHS tapes, DVDs, and Blu-Rays. That’s great news for film buffs.

Beer, soft drinks, and snacks will be on sale, but the melting radioactive cannibal mayhem is on me.