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?
Obscure film that has developed a certain cult following concerning a murderous family. This plays out like a non-comedy version of the Addams Family and has an undeniable ghoulish atmosphere
The single most influential science-fiction film of all time, one that created a massive industry of sequels and spinoffs, not to mention copycats, and changed the way that people thought of science-fiction
George Lucas’s first sequel to Star Wars and a work that holds up every bit as well as its predecessor, in many places betters it. The story darkens the mythos and introduces new characters, while the special effects sequences are the peak of the series
The title suggests a work about film fans facing the end of the world but this is actually a documentary about the cult film phenomenon
The work on which the cult of director Dario Argento was built. The film consists of a series of extravagantly arty deaths at a girls boarding school, although comes without any real plot connecting this
Possibly the best film made by Martin Scorsese. A disturbing vision of urban psychosis set in a morally festering New York City where the psycho, Robert De Niro’s title character who spills over with pent-up violence, actually becomes the hero of the show
Extraordinary directorial debut from Japan’s Shinya Tsukamoto, a frenetic, fetishistic and surreally deranged vision of man-machine fusion that feels like David Lynch having gone away and done a crash reading course of William Gibson
An absolute horror classic, a film that has been conceived as a harrowing assault on one’s nerves. This has become a landmark genre classic and led to numerous sequels and copies but rarely any that matched the original
Legendary animated masterpiece from Richard Williams that was butchered in release. Williams’ animation is visually extraordinary
John Carpenter at the peak of his career, remaking The Thing from Another World as a wild and phantasmagoric film steeped in paranoia that proved to be the absolute epitome of the era’s fad for air-bladder transformation effects
The finest moment from gimmick master William Castle with Vincent Price as a coroner searching for a parasite that feeds on fear. Full of Castle’s luridly sensationalistic effects and containing the first portrayal of an LSD trip on screen.
Cult film from Alejandro Jodorowsky, a surrealistic Western that comes with an incoherent mishmash of symbolism, Zen mysticism and 1960s raised consciousness
Interesting little film that has gained a small cult reputation, a True Crime work based on a series of unsolved killings conducted by a masked figure in a small Southern town in 1946. A solid, quasi-documentary-like depiction that adheres to the facts for the most part
The film that launched the name of Troma Films. The world’s first superhero splatter film, this readily dives into bad taste just to see what kind of offence it can get away with
Classic tv movie that is a horror anthology offering a trio of tales all featuring Karen Black. The first two items are okay but the one that made the film into a cult item was the third episode with Black being chased through her apartment by an evil doll
Acclaimed as one of the worst films ever made, this has a legendary bizarreness that has made it a cult film, everything from the ridiculousness of its dialogue and effects to the cast that seems made up of unskilled amateurs
The greatest science-fiction film ever made? Stanley Kubrick goes against all convention – the film is slow, has no clear story and reaches an enigmatic ending and yet it is a work of brilliance, both visually and in terms of effects technology
Carl Dreyer’s cult film is not a vampire film as we know it but creates an incredibly haunted uncanny mood
From cult director Stephanie Rothman, a provocative and intriguing entry in the 1970s lesbian vampire film
Considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films, this is a study in obsession and features a reincarnation plot. What works more so than the contrived plot twists is Hitchcock’s expert direction, all thunderously brooding mood and lush Technicolor dreaminess
Absolutely fascinating David Cronenberg film that swims with a heady mix of ideas that blur tv, reality and the human body
Head-scratchingly strange Italian film that seems made as a crosshatch of 1970s Devil Child films and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Makes no sense in terms of story but worth watching for the bizarreness of its imagery
One of the key films in the cult of Takashi Miike that has been frequently banned for its taboo-defying outrages in which a mysterious visitor causes a family household to descend into perverse extremes
Psycho-thriller featuring a mad Bette Davis torturing her sister Joan Crawford. This held considerable shock at the time for seeing two former glamorous Hollywood stars beyond their glory days and going nuts. The film’s success inspired a whole fad of imitators
Classic horror film that imagines a secret world of pagan rites existing into the modern day. As much a classic for its colourful creation of a folk culture as it is for an unforgettable ending
Ralph Bakshi left behind counter-culture animation to embark on this original fantasy film that comes with a trippily surreal quality, mixing fantasy tropes with a science-fictional rationalisation