Posts filed under 'Cult movies'
November 5th, 2008
A while ago, I wrote about some of my favorite movie books — but I forgot to mention the single book that, more than anything else, shaped my tastes in film: Michael J. Weldon’s classic volumne on cult movies, THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM.
Thankfully, Rob Gonsalves didn’t forget, and he posted a nice write-up of this seminal volume here. As he says…
“Other movie books handled the mainstream stuff, the Mighty Films of Cinema, the ones you felt duty-bound to watch at least once. Weldon, with the help of Ballantine Books, legitimized the low, the weird, the obscure, the greasers and sluts and punks of celluloid. He made it okay for budding movie buffs to bundle in some Eurotrash sexploitation and teenagers-with-mutations flicks along with our Kurosawa and Bergman.”
I remember buying this one as a college freshman, way back in 1985, and actually felt a bit weird about doing so. Did I really want a volume extolling the virtues of INVASION OF THE BLOOD FARMERS and A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD sitting on my bookshelf, so close to my pure-hearted copy of LEONARD MALTIN’S VIDEO GUIDE?
Yes, it turns out I did. Because without Weldon’s book, I never would’ve heard of most of the great, offbeat movies that frankly, make it worthwhile to be a die-hard movie fan. I never would’ve gone to all those midnight movies in college, and I never would’ve collected hundreds of videotapes (followed, of course, by hundreds of DVDs). I probably never would’ve started writing my own video reviews at his paper back in the mid 1990s, which means I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog right now.
Weldon’s book (and its even-bigger follow-up, THE PSYCHOTRONIC VIDEO GUIDE) embrace all movies, from forgotten silents to modern straight-to-video shockers. Sure, he loves weird movies, but above all, Weldon loves movies — and that’s apparent on every page. If you’ve never seen THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM, I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy. It just might change your life.
Heck, it sure changed mine.
November 4th, 2008
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There are plenty of lists on the Web today naming great political films, and they mostly stick to the usual suspects — MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, CITIZEN KANE, THE CANDIDATE, ELECTION and other well-known movies. Those are all fine films (especially ELECTION, a movie that looks sharper and smarter every time I see it), but there’s one political film that always seems to get forgotten in the effort to be serious.
I’m talking about WILD IN THE STREETS, a Roger Corman-produced slice of teensploitation from the far off year of 1968 (when, not entirely coincidentally, politics did get genuinely wild in the streets at the Chicago Democratic convention). Christopher Jones plays Max Frost, a rock star who tumbles into the White House on a tidal wave of youth voting. Once he tastes that power, Max wants more of it, and before you know it, he’s forcing everyone over the age 0f 30 into prison camps where they’re forcibly dosed with LSD. (I did say it was made in 1968, remember?)
Like the name implies, it’s a pretty wild film, and while everything doesn’t work, it’s strange and fast-paced enough to make you forget the slow spots. Jones is great as Max, bringing a real sense of menace to the role, and Richard Pryor has an early role as Max’s comrade, Stanley X (!) Hal Holbrook, Shelley Winters and Ed Begley Sr. fill out the grown-up roles, and be sure to watch for Barry Williams — aka Greg Brady — playing the young version of Max. There’s a big, would-be-profound plot twist at the end that you’ll see coming a mile away (what do you expect when you appeal to ever-younger youth?), but it actually works in a twisted, see-how-bad-the-’60s-could-get kind of way.
The best part of the movie is the genuinely solid soundtrack. The song “Shape of Things to Come” became a garage rock staple, and the rest ain’t bad either. The movie is available on DVD, paired with with Corman’s post-apocapyptic hippie epic GAS-S-S-S!, which, believe it or not, is even stranger.
Here’s the original trailer for WILD IN THE STREETS:
October 24th, 2008
I’ve been hearing about this 1962 cult movie for years, but never managed to actually see it — mostly because, as far as I can tell, it’s never been released (legally at least) in videotape or DVD. But tonight (OK, technically speaking, Saturday morning) at 1 a.m., Turner Classic Movies is going to air this rare bit of early ’60s insanity as part of its wonderful, weekly TCM Underground series.
I have no idea if SINNER is any good. it could be brilliant or terrible. But it’s bound to be interesting.
 THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER is the creation of Timothy Carey, a character actor best known for small roles in two early Stanley Kubrick classics, THE KILLING and PATHS OF GLORY. Carey was a character in real life, too, and singlehandedly brought this story of an ex-insurance salesman turned rock star turned cult leader to cinema life. He wrote it, he directed it, and he stars in it.
Like I said, I can’t really recommend this one way or another, but you can bet I’ll have my DVR set to capture every oddball frame of this forgotten film. If you like offbeat cinema, I’d suggest you do the same.
Here’s a clip to give you just a taste of the film’s crazed energy…
October 23rd, 2008
This week, the Onion’s New Cult Canon series looks at a true modern classic, Mike Judge’s OFFICE SPACE. And what’s more, writer Scott Tobias manages to nail why so many of us office drones would eagerly watch — over and over — a Hollywood recreation of our daily drudgery:
“In actuality, it’s as much a fantasy as Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, but more relatable, because Peter puts the daydreams of many into action. Few people can imagine themselves embarking on a globetrotting adventure, but there are legions of workaday types who dream of unshackling themselves from their desks, sleeping until 3:30 in the afternoon, and doing absolutely nothing with their oceans of free time.”
Read the whole article here.
By the way, OFFICE SPACE hit theaters in 1999, the same year as FIGHT CLUB, THE MATRIX and AMERICAN BEAUTY — three other movies where shirt-and-tie office drones finally broke out of their cubicles.
September 18th, 2008
The Onion AV Club’s excellent New Cult Canon finally works its way around to David Fincher’s 1999 masterpiece about office drones, broken bones and DIY explosives, FIGHT CLUB. Writer Scott Tobias delivers a smart defense of the film, and the peanut gallery chimes in with hundreds of comments (some smart, some less so).
When FIGHT CLUB hit theaters nine years ago, many mainstream critics — most of them baby boomers — called it irresponsible, fascist and downright dangerous. These were some of the same writers who praised earlier controversial films, such as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and STRAW DOGS, but having the message aimed at a younger generation apparently upped the fascism factor. Here, for instance, is what Roger Ebert said…
FIGHT CLUB is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since DEATH WISH, a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.
What’s funny is how the condemnations of the boomers solidified FIGHT CLUB as a Gen X movie. (In his AV Club piece, Tobias calls it “the quintessential Generation X film.”) The DVD release, in fact, included many of those critical quotes in its self-aware packaging. Its cult has only grown in the last nine years, and though many people — even its fans — miss some of its complexities and ambiguities, it still ranks as one of the best films of the last 25 years.
September 11th, 2008
For months now, The Onion AV Club has spent each Thursday spotlighting a different modern cult movie in a noble mission to establish a “New Cult Canon” to follow the list of classic cult movies developed in the 1970s and 1980s, largely by author Danny Peary (who wrote CULT MOVIES, CULT MOVIES 2 and — wait for it — CULT MOVIES 3).
This week, in a break from the new stuff, the Club is presenting “The Old Cult Canon,” a list of 16 movies that established the idea of just what the heck a cult movie is. Ranging from FREAKS to ERASERHEAD to REPO MAN to (of course) THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, it’s as good a primer as any if you’re looking to investigate the phenomenon on your own. (I’m pretty sure they’re all available on DVD).
I bought Peary’s CULT MOVIES as a freshman in college, and spent the next four years — and countless hours in the campus theater — checking movies off the list. I’ve seen just about every one (many several times), but I have to admit, I’ve never seen THE HARDER THEY COME, EL TOPO or AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD. Anyone out there familiar with these movies? Love ‘em? Hate ‘em?
And has anyone out there seen PINK FLAMINGOS? If you’re only familiar with John Waters from HAIRSPRAY (either version), this one might come as a bit of a shock.
September 4th, 2008
Over at the Onion AV Club, Scott Tobias continues his excellent series, “The New Cult Canon,” with one of my favorite films, the 1999 documentary AMERICAN MOVIE. Focusing on Mark Borchardt, a struggling Wisconsin filmmaker who’s working on a no-budget horror movie titled COVEN (pronounced COE-VEN, so it doesn’t rhyme with “oven). The movie is very funny, but I’ve always thought it was a lot more than just an amusing look at an oddball director, and Tobias agrees. Here’s how he sums up the film:
“But American Movie isn’t about filmmaking per se, it’s about the dreams and delusions of a man who comes from blue-collar stock, but refuses at his peril to fall in line with what’s expected of him.”
For all his goofiness — and there’s plenty of it, believe me — Borchardt is a genuinely inspirational figure in AMERICAN MOVIE. His film, COVEN, isn’t a cinema classic, but it is much better than you might expect having seen its creation, and parts of it show a genuine talent for setting up shots and finding the unnerving elements lurking just beneath the scene. But in a way, COVEN’s quality isn’t really what matters. It’s that Borchardt made it, period. That he did something with his life besides work menial jobs, hang out with his buddies and drink beer (though, if you’ve seen AMERICAN MOVIE, you know there’s a lot of that, too.)
Several years ago, Borchardt visited Rockford for a screening of AMERICAN MOVIE and COVEN at the now-defunct Storefront Cinema. I had a chance to go out for dinner (and drinks!) with him, and he’s exactly as he appears in the film — friendly, energetic, opinionated, quirky and truly one of a kind. Sitting there with him at the Olympic Tavern, as he asked the waitress to bring him a beer until the drinks arrived, or watching him waving a half-full can of Pabst around the theater during the question-and-answer segment, you could hardly believe this is a guy who’d made a film.
But, as AMERICAN MOVIE shows, that’s the whole point.
