The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Cult Movies are films that have gained a dedicated audience outside of mainstream appreciation. Exactly what constitutes a Cult Movie is not an easy definition as there seems no overriding theme between films beyond their having a select audience.
In most cases, these are films that failed in their original release but have found a dedicated Fandom afterwards. Equally, Cult Movie has become a marketing label that is used to define midnight screenings or specialty streams at film festivals, even the dvd catalogues of some companies.
Cult Movies usually include those that have a psychedelic or mind-bending quality; original and underappreciated films that were critical and box-office failures; weird, surrealist and downright strange cinema; those that are widely regarded as Bad Movies; those that have some provocative or transgressive sexuality that was ahead of its time; camp classics or embarrassing failures of since well-known actors; or those that have levels of fascination that go beyond a mere multiplex reading.
Sometimes a cult work can also become a mainstream success. Few would argue that both Star Trek (1966-9) and Star Wars (1977) have massive cults but can the mainstream success of either mean that they still can be called cult works?
Droll, elegant camp masterpiece with Vincent Price giving the best performance of his life as a deformed madman employing the Biblical Plagues of Egypt as a motif to take revenge against the surgeons who killed his wife
The film that created the cult of anime in the West. Essentially a Cyberpunk version of The Fury, this has been construed as a series of climaxes that get progressively larger in scale until they almost reach a point of sensory overload
One of the most influential films on this site, producing a host of sequels and making the careers of all involved. At heart, a simple monster on a spaceship film, it is made into a classic through Ridley Scott’s relentless suspense and H.R. Giger’s design work
The second film from John Carpenter, a powerful and effective work about a handful of police and prisoners trapped in a police station at siege from an all-out assault by gang members outside
One of the original genre parodies, a very silly and amateurish film that also manages to be occasionally quite funny. Three sequels and an animated tv series followed
The film that made the world pay attention to Takashi Miike. Starting out as a seeming love story, this culminates in some of the most brutal and hard-to-watch torture scenes ever committed to film
Peter Jackson first appeared with this no-budget splatter comedy. A miracle of DIY filmmaking, the film plays out like a live-action Roadunner cartoon where the creativity of Jackson’s home-made gore effects is positively ingenious
Charmingly capricious and silly adaptation of the comic-strip with a wide-eyed Jane Fonda as the spacegoing heroine. Filled with some wonderfully naughty gags and a production and costume design scheme that goes to a gorgeously deranged excess
Remarkable little no-budget film from Frank Henenlotter about the relationship between a man and the deformed, psychopathic torso of his severed Siamese twin
An entertainingly violent Japanese comic-book of a movie in which a classroom of school pupils is abandoned on an island with weapons to eliminate one another. Frequently cited as the inspiration for The Hunger Games
Osama Tezuka is a cult figure in anime and manga – what is less well known is that he also made adult animation. This, about a woman’s temptation by The Devil in mediaeval France, is a mind-boggling array of psychedelia and eroticism
Documentary made about Troll 2, which is considered a strong contender for the worst film ever made. The attempt to talk to all those involved in the making of the film proves absolutely hilarious
Classic work that defined the Italian Gothic cycle of the 1960s and turned Barbara Steele into a cult actress. Mario Bava shoots vivid, incredibly atmospheric scenes in black-and-white in ways that no other director does
A hit among the Blaxploitation fad of the 1970s, this has the novelty of casting a vampire film with African-American actor William Marshall. A whole series of Blaxploitation takes on horror themes followed.
Ridley Scott’s film was not a success at the time but has since been regarded as a SF masterpiece, one of the defining screen treatments of android themes while the incredibly dense Cyberpunk vision of the future was copied by many subsequent films
This has the notoriety of being the very first ever splatter film and served to turn director Herschell Gordon Lewis into a cult figure. Shoddy and unpolished, you have to admit it goes for broke
A film that has gained a cult reputation about a group of people who start suffering flashbacks from a bad batch of LSD taken in the 1960s that now causes them to become crazed killers
One of the key David Lynch films in which cleancut college kid Kyle MacLachlan finds a severed human ear and is drawn into a dark underworld of S&M lorded over by a maniacally deranged Dennis Hopper
One of Peter Jackson’s early films, which is maybe the funniest zombie comedy ever made. This becomes a work of unparalleled genius in the glorious gore-drenched excesses it reaches for
Terry Gilliam’s satire on Nineteen Eighty-Four is a darkly brilliant work – it is a madly out of control film but is filled moments of wild imagination and black-than-black humour than make it an unnerving ride
The first sequel to the 1931 Boris Karloff Frankenstein, which many prefer to the original. Director James Whale comes into his element and provides a whole other level of droll humour that the first film did not have
THE most extreme film covered on this site. The defining work of the notorious Italian cannibal genre, a pseudo-documentary work that features stomach churning tortures, guttings and actual animal mutilations
Classic film that has gained a cult reputation, this creates a superbly eerie and haunted atmosphere as a woman moves to a new town and finds herself surrounded by mysterious figures
Val Lewton’s classic work of psychological ambiguity about a woman who believes she is turning into a panther. Lewton’s ingenuity was to leave the actuality of the monster one that was merely suggested
My introduction to Wu Xia – imagine some vision of Kwaidan as directed by Sam Raimi, filled with sensationally beautiful and out of this world imagery and completely nutsoid fantastical battles with ghosts and demons
One of the key films by Stanley Kubrick, centred around ultra-violent thugs in a near-future setting. Everybody was outraged at Kubrick choreographing scenes of violence to classical music but the film has a considerable brilliance and very dark sense of humour
A psycho-thriller that has gained a modest cult reputation. This comes seeped in Catholic guilt and director Alfred Sole delivers twists and turns with a fine hand. Featuring a young Brooke Shields in her film debut.
Key film from cult exploitation director Ted V. Mikels. The film’s premise – “pet food company uses bodies from the graveyard as their cat food, making the cats hungry for human flesh” – seems the essence of the grindhouse film
John Carpenter’s first film, made as a student project in collaboration with an also unknown Dan O’Bannon. A send-up of the boldly going space exploration of Star Trek, this features a ship where the crew are going stir crazy. The results are hilarious
One of several Elizabeth Bathory films that came out at the same time, this has gained a cult reputation. Delphine Seyrig gives a marvellously arch performance, while director Harry Kumel films with a gorgeous and dreamy colour palette
George Romero’s successor to his cult hit of Night of the Living Dead. Romero creates a very different film, one that takes place in a mall and comes with a level of droll satire. A bigger budget allows him to push things to gore-drenched extremes
A very unique and unsettling variant on the zombie film wherein a soldier killed in combat in Vietnam is brought back from the dead by the pleading of his parents but returns not quite the same as before
Satiric hit produced by Roger Corman, a spoof of Rollerball, with David Carradine as a driver in a futuristic road race where points are won by running down pedestrians. Also featuring a young unknown Sylvester Stallone
Cult Italian film with Rupert Everett as a cemetery keeper facing the resurrected dead. This has an hilariously off-the-wall mix of black, deadpan humour and artiness, plus Everett at his laconic best
One of the better among several films based on the activities of the true-life body snatcher and necrophile Ed Gein. Roberts Blossom gives an amazingly creepy performance
One of the classic works from Hammer Films and Terence Fisher, often regarded as one of their finest moments. In this adaptation of a Dennis Wheatley novel, Christopher Lee (in a rare heroic role) fights Satanists
Ken Russell makes an historical work about the Catholic Church’s persecution of a supposed outbreak of possession at a convent in 17th Century France. As to be expected of Russell, this is shocking and outrageous. Oliver Reed gives one of his best performance
The film that made Clint Eastwood’s name. He is a rule-bending cop who decides he has to defy the system in his pursuit of a psycho (a thinly disguised version of the then active Zodiac Killer)
A thoroughly overrated cult classic. A baffling mixture of precognition, time travel, sinister talking bunnies and 1980s satire. What this doesn’t do is ever fall together into a coherent explanation about what is going on
The point where the legend of Hammer Films and the careers of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing began. A vivid colour remake of the Bram Stoker book that put a stake through the heart of the staid Universal horrors and created a new English horror industry
Paul Bartel’s black comedy where he and Mary Woronov play a snobby couple who pose as kinksters to lure swingers and then kill them off. all to fund setting up an exclusive restaurant
The first film from David Lynch, a surrealist work that is one the cult films of all-time. A masterpiece of mood that swims in an atmosphere of dream and Freudian symbolism of cryptically inscrutable meaning
One of the key films from John Carpenter with Kurt Russell giving his best ever performance, a slick exciting action film that imagines a future Manhattan Island having been transformed into a lawless prison
Ferociously paced low-budget hit that put the names of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell on the map. What made the film a cult hit was Raimi’s full tilt pace and entertainingly over-the-top splatter effects
Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell return in a sequel to their earlier low-budget cult hit. With a far better budget this time, Raimi goes completely over-the-top with a delirious silliness that will bring tears to the eyes
Classic French thriller about a mad surgeon who abducts women to graft their faces onto his disfigured daughter. The film has a rare visual poetry combined with moments of horror that are still effective decades later
Classic SF film where Marshall Thompson faces an invasion of hopping brains – pure thought monsters that have been unleashed by an atomic scientist dabbling in telekinesis
David Fincher tackles Chuck Palahniuk’s novel about secret brawling clubs. Maybe the only major studio film with an openly anarchist manifesto. Brilliant, incendiary, all over the map plotwise and thoroughly unique
This offers the amusing idea of a softcore parody of the old Flash Gordon serials. A surprisingly well-made film in terms of effects but the jokes often seems belaboured amid the witless mugging
A classic of 1950s SF that creates one of the most well remembered screen robots. An uncredited adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there are few other films that devote so much attention to creating a sense of wonder
Cultishly bizarre, deliberately offbeat and wacky film that was made as a vehicle for the band Oingo Boingo. More a film you admire for its determination to be strange than anything else
Shock film in which director Tod Browning depicts the lives of the deformities at a circus, casting real-life freaks in the roles. This was banned for many years before being discovered as a cult classic
The first X-rated animated film. Ralph Bakshi’s first film, taken from Robert Crumb’s cartoons, this is hilariously raunchy as the titular talking cat takes a strung-out but often sharply politicised journey through 1960s counter-culture
Classic anime from Mamoru Oshii, a Cyberpunk work with a heroine who is a cyborg special forces officer, a work that delves deeply into the philosophical questions of what is human and what is machine
Classic film from Edward D. Wood Jr, an hilarious pseudo-documentary where Wood earnestly tries to make a case for transvestism. This has bad movie moments that are utterly surreal.
One of the key films in the cult of director Larry Cohen, this throws in a mind-bending mix involving an androgynous alien messiah, random shootings, alien abduction and Catholicism
An Acid Western was a Western made with a psychedelic trippiness. Directed by Robert Downey Jr’s father, this is a surreal work about a Christ-like visitor in a zoot suit who turns up in a Western town
John Carpenter’s all-time classic, the film that created the slasher film and has been much imitated, not to mention multiply sequelised and remade. None of these however come anywhere near recapturing Carpenter’s eerie spookiness
Cult animated film that adapts several stories from the adult fantasy comic-book Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal. These vary but in its better moments that has a trippy cult hallucinatory quality
An immensely disturbing film loosely based on serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. John McNaughton directs with a chillingly understated ordinariness and Michael Rooker has never been better in a role.
This was a minor cult hit at the time and concerns an alien that hops between human host bodies while having the invincibility of a Terminator. The idea is played with considerable panache and directed with great flair
A key work in the cult of Alejandro Jodorowsky in which he plays a character called The Alchemist who guides a group on a mystical awakening. Surreal, challenging and mind-expanding
Very strange Japanese ghost story that has been rediscovered as a cult classic. It resembles a film like Willy Wonka turned into a haunted house film where the intention seems to have been to be a bizarre and wacky as possible
This was a hit in its dayo by tapping the burgeoning teenage market who had just realised they were misunderstood thanks to James Dean. Not a particularly great film but it is one that carries a great deal of primal ferocity
One of the key films upon which the Takashi Miike cult is based. Miike takes a nominal Yakuza plot based on a manga where he pushes the sadism and ultra-violence to a mind-boggling extreme
One of the great ridiculous titles of all time. It’s a shame there’s nothing that comes anywhere near matching it in this tatty, poorly made film about a fortune teller turning men into disfigured, hypnotised slaves
The finest film to come out of 1950s SF cinema, concerning an invasion of pods that replicate people but for their emotions. The sense of paranoia and psychological tension is unsurpassed
Early Derek Jarman film that acts as a snapshot of the 70s punk movement, a rambling indulgent treatise that depicts a future England that has collapsed into anarchy
Perhaps the greatest of all monster movies, one that has attained iconic status. A masterpiece of stop-motion animation, it imbues Kong with character and attains a delicate fairytale-like atmosphere
A vampire film that has gained a cult reputation. This nominally falls into the lesbian vampire fad but mostly takes place on a level of dreamy suggestiveness. Not fully successful but certainly something unique
Culty New Wave film with Anne Carlisle as a model who has a miniature UFO land on her New York apartment roof where it devours her lovers for the opiate in the brain produced during orgasm
The original, Roger Corman’s zero budget film about a killer plant is an hilarious black comedy that has become a cult favourite and remains his most well remembered film
Excellent Australian-made Nature’s Revenge film with a couple on a weekend at a beach at siege from nature. Like the film’s obvious model The Birds, the attack occurs for never-specified reasons
The first of the Mad Max films and a considerable jolt if one comes to it after any of the sequels. This is an altogether different film – a grim and violent road movie more in the vein of Death Wish
A sequel that makes an extraordinary leap over its predecessor. It created an entire genre of films – even its own design and clothing aesthetic – and is one of the most kinetic, exciting action films ever made
Nicolas Roeg’s film featuring David Bowie as an alienated alien visitor to Earth, a film that is equal amounts brilliance and pretentious distractions
John Frankenheimer film. concerning a Communist plot for creating a brainwashed assassin, Frankenheimer shoots with stark and blackly funny effect and this has duly become a cult classic
George Romero’s deconstruction of the vampire film is one of his most remarkable films. In contrast to vampire cliches, all we get is a pale teen with an unhealthy obsession contrasted with a religious extremist who demands he be exorcised.
Film that has a minor cult reputation for its cheaply trippy 3D hallucination scenes. Outside of that, The Mask (not to be confused with the Jim Carrey film) is a dull variant on the Dr Jekyll story in which a ritual mask causes the wearer’s dark side to emerge
A film that was as groundbreaking when it came out as Star Wars was in its day. The Wachowskis create a defining work on Virtual Reality themes and do so with a sublime cool and a series of breathtaking action moves that blew everybody away
Stark and effective film based on a true-life historical figure, this sets out to depict the barbarism of the 17th century witch hunts. Vincent Price plays seriously and the film is all the more effective as a result
Film that has developed a cult reputation set in a seaside town where the dead are returning to life. The film has an unsettling nightmare ambience where things happen without any explanation
Fritz Lang’s visionary work was something way ahead of it time and is one of the few silent films still screened today. The film’s politics are naive but Lang’s visions of the city of the future and the first screen robot are vivid.
Quirky offbeat comedy in which Anthony Edwards picks up a ringing phone at a diner and the call warns that a nuclear strike is about to hit L.A. in 50 minutes during which he tries to find his lady love as the city descends into chaos all around from what may have been a prank call
The film that created the modern zombie genre, that took a creature from voodoo and reinvented at a something stumbling and wanting only to devour flesh. George Romero creates a horror film that shoots out all cozy, established convention
One of the most extraordinary of all anime films – apparently a favourite of The Wachowskis (you can see they’ve borrowed moves from it), concerning ninja facing supernaturally empowered assassins demonic forces, directed with an extraordinary visual stylism
The first screen adaptation of Dracula and one of the most amazing of all vampire films, a German Expressionist fairytale that exists in haunted netherworld through which stalks the crepuscular figure of Max Schreck
Electrifyingly ultra-violent film from Park Chan-wook who ably borrows from Takashi Miike. The film equally becomes a conceptual twister as the protagonist is forced to go on a reality-bending quest through his own life.
Classic psycho film that came out the same year as Psycho but was killed in release being seen as morally repugnant. From the great Michael Powell, this features a killer obsessed with filming women as he kills them and finds an uncomfortable brilliance in the way it blurs a director’s obsessions and a viewer’s complicity in what they see on screen
Voted the Best Australian film of all time, Peter Weir creates an incredibly haunting mystery about four girls who disappear while on said picnic. A film full of unexplained answers that remains just beyond your fingertips
Film version of Pink Floyd’s best-selling album, an extraordinary surreal audiovisual dive into the fraying mind of a rock star
This has become legendary as the Worst Film Ever Made. Maybe it is but the audience that celebrates its technical gaffes, the purple prose and bizarre bheind-the-scenes stories has contrarily made it one of cultish fascination
Bafflingly surreal film from Andrzej Zulawski in which Isabelle Adjani gives birth to a tentacled monster in a subway. Nobody has any idea what the film is about but it has become a cult work since
One of the defining classics of the genre, enormously influential, muchly imitated and parodied and possibly the most over-analysed film ever. Alfred Hitchcock expertly creates a creepy psycho-thriller in which he delights in lulling us and undermining expectation
Alex Coz’s surreal cult film with Emilio Estevez as an L.A. punk working as a repo driver who gets wound into the hunt for a car with radioactive aliens in the trunk
One of the most entertaining bad movies ever made, an alien invader film featuring the famous Ro-Man, a gorilla suit with a diving helmet
The No 1 cult film of all time, more a phenomenon than a film, a demented glitter rock homage to mad science cinema and 50s sf films run through with celebration of a gender-bender joie de vivre
Documentary where people offer up various crackpot theories about the hidden meanings of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Fascinating in a bizarre freakshow way, an undeniable cult film in the making
This arrived as the same instant full-born bad movie cult sensation. Although you cannot help but feel that the people who ridiculed the film are missing out on the joke – in not seeing that it has been made as something intentionally absurd
A warm parody/tribute to the George Romero zombie films that saw the emergence of Simon Pegg as a star. It also saw the zombie film move towards a more comedic emphasis, although few subsequent entries come with such good-natured humour