The Cult Flicks That Make Us Tick
Set in late 1969, this ultimate cult movie sees two drunk and out of work actors, Withnail (Richard E Grant) and I (thought to be called Marwood by some fans, and played with grinning aplomb by Paul McGann), drink and drug their way through London and out into the country, where I must repel the advances of Withnail's homosexual uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths). As with many cult movies, the plot sounds thin and perhaps dumb. The magic lies in a number of things: the beautiful cinematography that captures both London and the Lake District at their most varyingly beautiful; the attention to detail - from the names of pubs that the pair visits to the complicit nods between the leads; the exuberant acting; and, most notably, the incredible script, which boasts so many famous lines that it is a joy to watch over and over again. Don't ever drink lighter fluid.
The film that saw a thousand students (your reviewer included) start to drink White Russians, The Big Lebowski is perhaps the archetypal Coen Brothers film: it has the usual array of quality actors (John Goodman, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and, of course, Jeff Bridges as The Dude), quirky scenes with wonderful dialogue, a modicum of political astuteness (set during Gulf War I), and some very funny moments. The Dude is perhaps the laziest man alive. When he becomes a pawn in an apparent kidnapping plot involving another man of the same name (Jeffrey Lebowski), he must use all his cunning and contacts to find his way through. In a brilliant satire of film conventions, The Dude fails at every turn, and as the film wears gloriously on we come to realise that The Dude is not involved in any grand masterplan at all. He is simply a human being bumbling along as best as he can - that is, ineptly.
One of the finest movie twists you will ever see. Forget Sixth Sense, forget Se7en, forget Fight Club. The Usual Suspects beats them all. A wonderful story about storytelling, as we follow crippled conman Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) bamboozling the rozzers with his tales of the destruction wrought by a group of robbers at the behest of underworld legend, Kaiser Sozé. Not only did this launch Spacey into the big time, but also Benicio del Toro, who charmingly mumbles his way through the role of Fred Fenster. The supporting cast includes Pete Postlethwaite, Chazz Palminteri, Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne and Kevin Pollak as the various criminals and cops embroiled in the labyrinthine plot. Christopher McQuarrie won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Suspects, whilst director Singer went on to direct the two successful X-Men films. It's control-losingly cool, but it's really all about the fantastic twist.
Not so much a sequel as an improvement on the first film, Evil Dead 2 rocks. Contrary to Jack Black in High Fidelity, the soundtrack is not so amazing, but the camerawork, the cheapo, sick effects, the make-up and Bruce Campbell most definitely are. The film is dark and gory, with some spooky moments (that are lost in part three of the story, Army of Darkness). Above all, though, it is funny. The whole film is rendered unforgettable when Campbell's hand gets possessed by the evil demons that are attacking him in his abandoned log cabin. He starts to smash plates over his own head and pokes himself in the eye. As he manages to find a chainsaw, Campbell laughs demonically (irony, see?) at the hand and bellows: "Who's laughing now?" Cut to a light being sprayed red with blood as Campbell cuts his own hand off. Wonderful.
Before Baby's Day Out, Home Alone and Beethoven (all of which Hughes wrote, but did not direct), John Hughes made some pretty cool American high school movies, the best being Ferris Bueller. Starring a young Matthew Broderick (Election, The Stepford Wives), the film tells the story of tearaway teen and total legend Ferris, who can't be arsed to go to school because the day is too beautiful. He blags a day off, and brings along girlfriend Sloane (the name - so 1980s!) and best buddy Cameron. They do everything there is to do in Chicago, all the while avoiding suspicious headmaster Ed Rooney (played by Jeffrey Jones, who steals the show, but who has subsequently been convicted for being a pederast), who is seeking to bust them. Beatles songs never really work that well in films (except their own films), but here is perhaps the most rousing rendition of Twist and Shout that you are likely to hear.
The original cross-dressing fantasy, the extreme cult status of which is more than recognised. Forget watching Titanic eleven times at the cinema; some people have seen this film literally thousands of times and never tire of it. People dress up, people sing along, people throw rice and worse. There is Susan Sarandon, there is Meat Loaf, there is Richard O'Brien and, of course, there is the wonderful Tim Curry, as the deranged alien from the planet Transexual, Dr Frank N Furter, who is trying to create the perfect lover for himself, the titular Rocky. As with other cult movies, it's pretty tacky - but that's part of the fun. I saw it for the first time on my own in a cinema in Valencia in Spain. I was one of, say, eight audience members and I was underwhelmed. Seeing it with a crowd, though, is a liberating experience. Put on those suspenders and go watch this camp masterpiece whenever you can.
Making his first film on a micro-budget of about US$40,000, Smith was, along with Robert Rodriguez, the most talked-about North American guerrilla filmmaker of the 1990s. Clerks basically pits Jay and Silent Bob (who have featured in all of Smith's subsequent films) as two layabout dealers who hang around and shoot the scum outside their local video store and Quickstop, run by Randal and Dante respectively. Not very cinematic, the movie does feature some fine dialogue (including a great conversation about contract workers in Star Wars), and some very funny set pieces (including a spot of necrophilia brought on by the death of a customer in the Quickstop lavatory; Dante's girlfriend goes in and mistakes the stiff for, er, a different kind of stiff). Clerks achieves true cult status as an object lesson in making a big career out of nothing.
Cronenberg is a cult director par excellence, with Scanners, The Fly, Videodrome, Crash, eXistenZ amongst the list to his name, and this is his cultiest film. A mad scientist is trying to overcome a parasite, which by turns looks like a penis and a turd, and which turns its host into a sex-craving, orgiastic maniac. The action is contained within a futuristic high-rise complex on an island for rich people: the perfect breeding ground for the pooey cocks. Soon, many are infected and only a couple of asexual heroes can escape from the lust that spurs on the zombie fizgigs. With some wonderfully creepy moments (a phallus creeping up the inside of a girl's leg in the bath is a personal favourite), some acting that is more wooden than a giant sequoia, and some great laughs, this is a thought-provoking, nay intellectual look at sexuality, contained in one of the greatest B-movies ever made.
Al Pacino proves that he is no great shakes at acting as he hams around Miami in this three-hour celebration of drugs and violence. It features mountains of cocaine, chainsaws, and some really poor dialogue. Scarface is a film so over the top that director Brian de Palma's opening quotation about the Cuban communist infiltration of the USA becomes not so much political as preposterous. (Cuba apparently deliberately sends its criminals to the US to ruin society. Except that criminal Scarface fulfils the American dream and becomes rich - even if only to fall. Are we to assume that the law-abiding Cubans are in fact living in peace and happiness back under evil Fidel? Is that such a bad thing?) Really one for the unthinking student who mistakes the Emperor's new nudity for the height of fashion. Scarface? Shitface, more like.
The film that launched Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Donnie Darko is a profound tale of self-sacrifice and time travel. With a glittering supporting cast that includes Drew Barrymore (who produced the film), Noah Wyle, Mary McDonnell and a revelatory Patrick Swayze, this film will long be a student favourite - this student would rate it as perhaps the best film of the millennium so far. The most beautiful thing for me is that Donnie, like Faust before him, elects to disinherit his apparent superpowers (the boy who gets the girl, floods the school, busts the paedophile ring) in order to save Gretchen, the girl whom he loves and whom his ego eventually threatens. Donnie learns that it can be better to die than to demand life; that, in effect, everything is in its place and guided by a power that is greater than our own, in spite of our efforts to attain it for ourselves.
14th Oct 2004