It came from outer space!

August 23, 2010 by Chad Martinez 

Sci-Fi Center brings horror classics to the big screen

With the rise of Netflix, Redbox and the Internet, the communal experience once centered around watching a film is a thing of the past.

Gone are the days of the drive-in theaters and double-feature creature flicks — when going to the movies didn’t mean paying $20 for tickets.

But there is one man trying to bring that experience back for science fiction and horror fans.

William Powell is the owner and visionary behind the Sci-Fi Center, a place for fans of off-beat horror movies.

The Center houses an underground room for screening classic cinematic terrors.

“Here you’re around other geeks,” Powell said. “You’re around like-minded people and you get to see it on the big screen and in surround sound.”

The Underground Screening Room shows a variety of flicks that you won’t find in Vegas on a big screen anytime soon, including “Nosferatu,” “Eraser Head,” Fritz Lang’s “M” and even Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” to name a few.

The Sci-Fi Center started off solely as a comic book store in 1994, but it has become much more than that.

Still unpacking after just moving into a larger 3,000 square foot space, located at 900 E. Karen Ave, the new Sci-Fi center still serves as a comic book store, but boasts additional rooms full of cinema history. Further in is a room with collectable toys and movie memorabilia, where the 10-year-old in anyone would be quickly drawn to the Darth Vader replica and giant model of the Millennium Falcon encased in glass.

The majority of the space is dedicated to the Underground Screening Room which seats 80 people in elevated theater-style seating. At the entrance of the screening room is a small lobby complete with a popcorn machine.

Powell said that the goal now is to sustain the new place and build on the community of movie buffs that regularly attend screenings.

“These are all movies you can get on DVD. We already know that almost 99.9 percent you can get on DVD, but you’re not going to get it in the way that we present it,”said Powell, who even involves patrons in the movie-selection process.

When I caught up with Powell, he was getting ready to show “Human Centipede,” a movie about a man who surgically attaches humans together to make… a human centipede. While the movie isn’t currently on DVD or being screened anywhere else in Vegas, the Underground Screening Room offers the chance to view such movies on the big screen.

Powell was able to obtain this obscure new movie through his connections in Los Angeles with the Independent Film Channel.

The exchange almost sounds like some clandestine meeting that would take place in the plot of one of the movies he shows.

“They send it in an air-sealed orange case. You sign for it and then you send it back in that same carrier. They come pick it up, put the two seals on it and take it back,” Powell said.

So maybe it is more convenient to subscribe to Netflix, but the Sci-Fi Center offers something more. You could say it’s a throwback to how we used to experience movies.

Rather than experience the simulated nostalgia of a Tarantino movie, movie buffs can finally join the sci-fi geeks and have an authentic taste of grindhouse culture.