Ten Deep 08.27.09: Cult Movies

Posted by Owain J. Brimfield on 08.27.2009

Into the dark and mysterious underworld - well, kind of - of cinema we go as Owain J. Brimfield takes a look at ten of the finest cult movies your money can buy!





Welcome to week 44 of 'Ten Deep'! We're keeping with last week's theme to some extent this week with a thematically related column, but before we get ourselves underway, let's have some:

Reactions and interactions

Firstly, of course, the usual suspects: those commenters who fail to actually read the column before leaping in with criticisms or suggestions. For those of you who missed it, I specifically said I'd be setting my definition of "low budget" at $250,000, and I even directly referenced the fact that this would exclude Halloween and The Evil Dead. Rest assured that each of the numerous mentions of either of those films elicited a snort of contemptuous mirth when I revisited the comments section. Except our own Joseph Lee, who gets a pass because I know he just loves Halloween so much.

Others suggestions, by the way, that fall by the wayside due to the same criteria: Reservoir Dogs ($1,200,000 budget), Cube ($365,000), El Topo ($400,000) and, because I'm being very picky, El Sexorcisto's commendably leftfield choice of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, since IMDB doesn't list its budget. Nice obscure pick, though.

As to the genuine suggestions, Dude sings the praises of Slacker, which he's quite right, I did completely forget for consideration but would probably have made only an honorable mention. Jboy1307 suggests Super Size Me, which did make the shortlist, but although it's one of my favorite documentaries, I decided against including it for that very reason, or there would have been several more docs popping up.

Elsewhere, James helpfully explains why black and white is cheaper to film and points out that Kevin Smith confirmed this, which supports my mention of said fact during the column so thanks for that.

Guest#6281 picks up on the error that I labeled Once as Glen Hansard's acting debut, when I of course neglected to mention his appearance in The Commitments. I'd intended to say that the film was his debut in a lead role, but a fair enough point.

A nice McCoys reference from tdk which made me chuckle and inhale a little bit of my drink, so cheers (I think).

MadLiberator makes the argument that $150k in the 1970s was worth a hell of a lot more than $60k in the 1990s, which is a fair point and certainly did make for one or two skewed entries, although I did freely admit at the start of the column that there'd probably be a bit of variation due to inflation.

A passionate defense of The Blair Witch Project from NewBreedofCleaner in support of the film's revolutionary internet hype and buzz. Sure, it was definitely one of the most uniquely marketed films of the decade and made a ton of money, but I was going for quality rather than commercial success in the rankings.

Darth Mortis has some praise and thanks me for omitting any Roger Corman flicks, which made me rush off to check whether I should have included Death Race 2000... thankfully it fell outside the budget cap.

Duck! Some low-flying sarcasm from Tea and Crumpets:

"What a shocker. The Brit puts his countrymen at number one. Who would have seen that coming? Nice to see you slant the budget cap to make that happen too. Only a 100G difference between that and every other film on the list, eh?"

To which I retort: well, duh. What's the point of having your own column if you don't get to exhibit bias towards your personal preferences?

Moving on!

This week we're looking at cult movies, and right off the bat I have to fess up and admit that this is a lot harder to define than I had anticipated, so this list may well completely omit films that the next person might regard as "cult". The definition that I'm going to be using - and feel free to debate this - is an unconventional, stylized and offbeat film with a relatively limited but devoted fanbase. Yep, you can already see the ambiguities creeping in here, can't you. Well, let's just run with it and see what happens. Note that I'm not going to be allowing in any films that are "so bad they're good", which is an entire subgenre of cult in itself, so out goes anything by Ed Wood or from the IMDB worst films list. Don't worry, that sort of thing will be tackled in a future list. Anyway, let's get to it.


As always, there's one golden rule: if I haven't seen it, it's not allowed on the list.

This week's golden rule notable omissions: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Slap Shot





Honorable mention: Suspiria

Dario Argento's vivid horror still sticks in the mind for its notoriously lurid double murder scene.

Honorable mention: Brazil

Terry Gilliam's surrealist sci-fi just misses out on the main list, but fear not, he'll be back later.

Honorable mention: Being John Malkovich

Had the list been based on ingenuity alone, this would surely have been number one.

10. Logan's Run

We kick off this week with a sci-fi classic that takes a bold stab at new frontiers in campy production design. Allegedly the sexiest film ever made, at least if you believe Ross Geller's attribution of that title, Logan's Run sees Basil Exposition himself, Michael York, cast in the titular role of Logan 5 the Sandman, essentially the Geriatric Police in a gaudy futuristic society where aging beyond thirty years is illegal and punishable by death. It's some twisted logic, sure, but in essence not much different from other tales of oppressive societal regimes that clamp down and persecute their citizens for breaking some ridiculous rule. Logan, though, being our hero, begins to question the virtue of such a rule, and he after accepting an assignment to infiltrate a group of Runners (people beyond 30 who, somewhat understandably, don't want to die) joins Jenny Agutter (an actress for whom I'm told men of a certain age hold special feelings; sadly not being that age myself I couldn't tell you what they are) and searches for an escape route to sanctuary. The film's ludicrously garish visual design combined with its genuinely intriguing SF premise immediately makes it an immediate candidate for cultdom, and that's only exacerbated by copious nudity and a completely bizarre scene featuring an utterly surreal robot, which still has me cocking a quizzical eyebrow in memory of its sheer lunacy. For extra cult credentials, fans of the movie have developed their own in-depth version of "cosplay" holding contests whereby they re-enact the perils of the film's Runners, which is as simultaneously nutty and satisfying a kind of audience participation as I've ever come across. Rumor has it that Bryan Singer may or may not have been involved in a remake at some point, but as with the rest of the films on this week's list, such a project would be relatively pointless when the original holds such a unique appeal.

9. A Clockwork Orange

Coming to the screen from the pen of Anthony Burgess, Clockwork Orange has instant obfuscatability (yes, I may have just coined a new word there) for several reasons - the allusive title (ten points for the first commenter to tell me what it means), the bizarre slang language that constitutes the literary source and thus populates the film's dialogue, its censorship and restrictions for many years following its release including a theatrical withdrawal at director Stanley Kubrick's own request in the UK, and the acts of "ultraviolence" that caused a generation of young boys to murder hookers with giant penis statues, or something like that. I may not have checked all my facts, but undaunted by such trivialities am I. For all its literary and philosophical merits, unfortunately the film gained a reputation for being salacious and violent such that people sought it out to watch it for precisely those reasons, an irony that surely wasn't lost on Burgess or Kubrick. Rewatching with a fresh eye, it's still remarkably difficult to get into, the language barrier itself almost violently offensive in a way, until the viewer becomes inured to the dialogue of the "droogies" and desensitized to the crimes they commit, an act that's more to do with the developing horrors of cinema over the years than anything to the film's credit or detriment (sad in a way that a crop of today's teenagers could easily sit through this and be bored by the more horrific passages - back in my day, young 'uns would have been terrified of phallus murder... no actually, they probably would have been just as likely to giggle). The frequent juxtaposition of such seemingly innocent music as Beethoven's refrains and 'Singing in the Rain' (how's that for a rhyme) and Alex's subsequent conditioning against classical music in addition to his violent criminal tendencies do more to underscore the queer brutality of the film than anything else, and while the film has lost some of its power to shock and titillate it remains unflinchingly obtuse and captivating to the portion of the audience who comprehends the Nadsat slang.

8. The Evil Dead

You'll notice I've made the point to include The Evil Dead this week in an attempt to build bridges with those of you who felt embittered by its exclusion from last week's low budget criteria. Of course given that Sam Raimi's notorious gorefest is so beloved of the 411 populace I may still get shouted at for having it so low in the list. It's definitely hard not to see why the film is so appealing to a young male audience: iconic horror movie protagonist with an equally iconic chin, intimate and immediate scares, buckets of blood n' guts, an endearing "my first horror film" feel and, of course, the scene where plucky young ingénue Cheryl attends a council of the tree-folk to convince them to attack Saruman's army... wait, that's the wrong film. What happens in this one again? Something to do with trees and the forest, at any rate. Anyway, the winsome charm of Evil Dead remains well known to most fans of horror cinema, who tend to revere the film as one of the greats in its genre, but it proves to be surprisingly obscure to the mainstream audiences (particularly here in the UK where it was banned until 2001 due to its status as a "video nasty", thanks to the meddling of Mary Whitehouse - although at least they got the name right, as it's very nasty indeed). Even in the wake of its debatably (very debatably) superior sequels, and I'm well aware that comment threatens to throw the matter open for dissection, the original remains one of the true gems of the genre. I was about to label it an "unsung" gem there, which is pretty inaccurate, as its fans tend to sing its praises from the rooftops as loud as they can, but hey, that's why it makes the grade as a cult film, and that's all I have to say about that.

Raped! That's what happens with the tree. Knew it would come to me.

7. Donnie Darko

The most recent entry on the list by some way, but an instant cult classic by virtue of the rapidity that Darko fever swept through a mainly student audience awed by its pomposity and pseudo-philosophical waffle. It's one of those films that tries so hard to be trendy and different it's actually a little annoying, as evidenced by the extent to which the whole "cellar door" business was run into the ground, but thankfully it makes up for its pretension by being a pretty damn good film once you wipe away the murky of sheen of self-importance. Aided by some eccentric casting (particularly The Swayze in a glorious supporting role) and a ballsy director, Donnie Darko became something of a craze as everyone tried to work out whether the head-scratching "time travel" plot actually had anything to do with Frank the rabbit, the end of the world or quasi-autistic protagonist Donnie's peculiar take on mental stability. If you can forget the number of twentysomething douchebags who seemed to proclaim this the best film ever within months of its release - although to be honest, the fanbase is in fact one of the criteria for inclusion in this list so we'd better pay them some small degree of lip service - it's almost surprising to discover that what emerges is a compelling little mystery, complete with a genuine star-making turn from Jake Gyllenhaal and the most ostentatious and successful use of a Tears For Fears track in movie history, although I'm still mad at Gary Jules for beating out The Darkness to the Christmas number one here in Blighty back when I still had any interest in the charts. For all its cod-science fiction themes and posturing, Darko belies its own quality content and remains one of the few actual cult classics to emerge in recent years, so for that we owe it praise.

6. Withnail and I

I'm sorely miffed I couldn't really justify to myself putting this one any higher in the list, as old Withnail holds a special place in my heart, but sometimes I just can't let personal preference run away with it. Produced and directed on a shoestring by writer Bruce Robinson to match the squalor and unemployment the film's two protagonists Withnail and Marwood find themselves living in (the distributor's name, Handmade Films, is, you'd have to say, something of an accurate representation), Withnail captures the close of the 60s in London with an anarchic spirit and a bottle full of vim and vigor... and whiskey. Alcohol features heavily throughout the course of the film, ironic in some way due to Richard E. Grant's teetotalling, and the booze-sodden tragedy is played out amidst a sea of spirits. Fans of the film were quick to develop a drinking game which, simply enough, follows the course of Withnail's alcoholism over the course of the film, and requires consuming (if your bowels are sufficiently sturdy) somewhere in the region of fifty units of alcohol in the space of an hour and a half. I'm not sure anyone has ever finished that and lived to tell the tale, although please feel free to send my photos of the aftermath if you have so I can submit them to a crime scene investigation unit. Peculiarly British in some ways, from the London bedsit our "heroes" call home to the outrageously camp Uncle Monty and his penchant for a spot of buggery burglary, and in other ways completely universal, from Withnail's endless false bravado to the moving ending monologue, Withnail and I is a windswept slice of tragicomedy that represents a nostalgic, if not always fond, depiction of the end of the Swinging Sixties and one of the better cult films to come out of England.

5. Clerks

Yup, Clerks again, a hangover from last week's list inasmuch as it attained cult status thanks in part to the teeny tiny wad of cash Kevin Smith had to play with when making the film. Which such a miniscule financial backing, the film garnered little in the way of a theatrical run, screening only in a limited number of theatres, and thus found its market on home video, where according to reliable oracle of worldly knowledge Wikipedia it rapidly became one of America's most stolen videotapes, back in the days when stuffing a piece of disposable media down your pants left slightly more of a conspicuous bulge than it does in the days of DVD. Of course, the budgetary charms and non-actor performances notwithstanding, what really drove the film's underground success, and in turn writer/director Smith's flourishing career, was the rapier-sharp screenplay, 92 minutes of eloquent banter and astute cultural references that the world of film hadn't seen since... well, since Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs only a couple of years earlier if we're honest, but that kind of undermines the point I was trying to make about the quality of Clerks' writing. I'm still one of the few who thinks the film might have been improved by retaining the original ending - at the very least it would have made Clerks even more of a non-populist movie - but the fact remains that as it stands, Kevin Smith's debut introduced the moviegoing world to a whole cult universe (sorry, Askewniverse) and is still one of the most incisive small-scale comedies to emerge from the murky quagmire of the early 1990s. Appealing to comic-book geeks and disaffected stoners alike, Smith's film knows its audience and isn't afraid to show it, with rambling diatribes on subjects like Star Wars interweaving with necrophilia and roof hockey to create one of the filthiest and most subversive black comedies you're likely to see.

4. Office Space

This tense thriller is a perennial favorite at 411... wait, what?



Aha, but of course, that's not it, I just wanted an excuse to include that clip in the column. Office Space is, of course, the masterwork of erstwhile Beavis and Butt-head creator and 'Milton' scribe Mike Judge, whose new movie Extract is out in a few weeks, fans of coincidence. It seems arguably even more popular round these here parts than the aforementioned Evil Dead, so I doubt I really have much to do in terms of convincing you of its quality. In much the same manner as Judge's follow-up film Idiocracy (in itself a highly entertaining and unsung cult movie and well worth your time), Office Space was released without much fanfare but went on to amass a substantial reputation on home video and DVD, and finally earned its place in the pantheon of pop-culture with a referential treatment on Family Guy, which is pretty much the hallmark of such things in this day and age. Despite running out of steam somewhat in its final act, the film remains one of the slyest comedies ever made, and does a better job at out-Dilberting 'Dilbert' than Scott Adams has ever managed to do outside of his first book. Gary Cole is the typically attributed standout as the lugubrious Lumbergh, but the other star of the show is the completely ridiculous gangster rap soundtrack that's simultaneously out of place and a perfect fit. Thanks to its success in the realm of cult followings the film even managed to claw back enough of its originally limited reputation such that it's now well-regarded, but it's doubtful that even the most prophetic of film publications gave its due on initial release. Huzzah then for home video!

3. This Is Spinal Tap

Truth be told, I held a long and intense debate with my inner monologue about whether or not Spinal Tap really qualifies as a cult film. After all, it's one of the most critically lauded comedy films (arguably) ever made, features a top-notch ensemble cast, helped popularize an entire genre, and there's nary a person who's a fan of both rock music and cinema that wouldn't get a "none more black" reference. That said though, the film never seems to me to have attained the commercial popularity it surely deserved, and while its reputation remains stellar within the crowd of those people who've seen it, it can be equally obscure when presented to the mainstream. It's like Steve Vai in a way, a name that inspires adulation and praise amongst those who know the work, and blank looks and a "say what?" among the majority. So after all that cogitation, it's storming into the list at number three. The film contains a near-endless litany of quotable quote after quotable quote, holding a prestige among its fanbase for the zenith of gags to which it aspires and an irritation for the countless viewings of the movie that are ruined by some smart-ass sitting in the corner of the room saying all the funny lines a microsecond before the actors (yes, I'm looking at you, Jackson). Still, that's not the film's fault. The plot, too, holds a timeless quality, as every generation has its aging rock grandads in the van on comeback road, desperately trying to keep a hold of their fading reputation and coming a cropper everywhere except Japan (incidentally, what is it about the Japanese consumption of popular music that means they treat seemingly every visiting western band as heroes?). For all the moments of genius that make up Spinal Tap, from exploding drummers to x-ray t-shirts, it's more than earned its position in the pantheon of pop-culture and remains one of the enduring cult films of our times.

2. The Rocky Horror Picture Show

For this one I turn you over to Matt from stoptheremake.com:

"Recently it came to my attention that MTV has plans to remake The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Who is the market for this? The original plays quite well in theaters the world over. It's a midnight movie staple. It's generational. Parents and their children sit side by side, shout at the screen and throw toilet paper among other things. One could argue that like a lot of remakes these days the intent is for the original material to reach a new audience. But that makes no sense... The original "Rocky Horror" is no great cinematic masterpiece. The sets are cheap, the costumes cheaper, and the effects awful. But you know what, it's got heart. Lots of it. And an anarchic glee that doesn't care if you get all the references to 50s sci-fi movies. Nor does it care what particular sexual stripe you prescribe to. It's just fun. As Brad and Janet both attest in the film, it's not right "but isn't it nice." That's what big name stars and production values can't do... No remake could ever match the DIY attitude that made the original so memorable. Nothing the show has become and none of that which it has inspired is improved upon by a remake. The movie has been a touchstone for generations of misfits."

Thanks for that snippet Matt, and although it may in fact rebut a later point I'll make, it goes to amply illustrate the passion that most Rocky Horror fans exhibit. For all its camp and cheese the film is one of the foremost examples of audience interaction outside of The Sound of Music, and Matt sums up its cult appeal quite neatly, and certainly more astutely than I could manage since I've never particularly belonged to the fanbase. It's also one of the widely accepted "dictionary definition"-type films that tend to get mentioned when talking of cult films, so it's perhaps a surprise it didn't clinch the top spot, but while there's no denying its appeal, I just had to give someone else the award...

1. Monty Python's Life of Brian

And before you ask, no I didn't put this at number one just to spite our little friend 'Tea and Crumpets' (if that is his real name), although I'm willing to begrudgingly accept that as a necessary side-effect of this choice of list-topper. Perhaps more than anything else, Monty Python's Life of Brian (the cinematic successor to last week's low budget number one Holy Grail) embodies what it is to be a cult movie, although I'm sure I'll get the Rocky Horror fans on my back for that sentiment. The film has a very idiosyncratic sense of humor, just like all the Python material (to be fair much of the televised sketches weren't up to scratch, but the crew were astute at distilling their brilliance for movie consumption), thus limiting its potential fanbase straight off the bat. Then, of course, there's the fact that the film parodies a boggling array of religious themes and historical events, meaning that even the most mild-mannered theological blow-hard tends to find some aspect of the story of Brian the Messiah at best unsettling, and at worst downright offensive. The movie castigates a fair number of other groups and personages while it's at it though, so at least its objective in its spoofage, and features the enduring closing musical number 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life', which is a paean to optimism and forbearance if ever you've heard one. However, among those viewers who aren't excluded from Life of Brian's demographic by virtue of their religious beliefs and/or tolerance of their funnybone, the film inspires some utterly rabid devotion. The sole deciding factor in bumping this ahead of Rocky Horror though is in relation to the film's longevity - while the other film is somewhat a product of its time and generation and, to an extent, seems not quite as successful in capturing new audiences (to me at least), younger viewers of all ages will continue to come across Life of Brian and take it to their hearts, as I've never known a student who hadn't whipped out "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy" at some point. For remaining all these years a continued source of fertile mirth and culty quotability, Life of Brian snags the number one spot.

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We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

And finally…

Feeling aggrieved or elated at this week's ten picks? Then let me know! The magic of the interweb allows you to post your comments right here on this very page, and if they're especially insightful (or idiotic), I may even respond in the next column. Be sure to tune in next week for another edition of 'Ten Deep', but until then - keep watching the skies.