Cult Films have limited but special appeal. Cult films are usually strange, quirky, offbeat, eccentric, oddball, or surreal, with outrageous and cartoony characters or plots, garish sets and they are often considered controversial. They step outside standard narrative and technical conventions. They elicit a fiery passion in devoted fans, and may cause cultists to enthusiastically champion these films, leading to audience participation and repetitive viewings and showings. Cult movie worshippers persuasively argue with all about the merits of their choices, without regard for standard newspaper or movie reviews.
Many cult films fared poorly at the box office when first shown, but then achieved cult-film status, developing an enduring loyalty and following among fans. They are often made by maverick film-makers with low-budget resources and little commercial marketing. Cult films have tremendous followings with certain groups, e.g., college campuses, midnight movie crowds, etc. Camp films are cult-type films, but they are often poorly made or ludicrous, yet still enjoyable and appreciated. Cult films follow no rules or pattern - some cult films are popular only among certain limited groups of audiences or friends.
Some cult films are music-based, such as This is Spinal Tap (1984), a tongue-in-cheek spoof of rock documentaries, following a British heavy metal band's disastrous US tour, Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982), a bizarre film based on the popular rock album, Ken Russell's Tommy (1975), the Who's rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who sure plays a mean pinball, and The Blues Brothers (1980), a farcical musical comedy involving two loser musicians who resurrect their old blues band. Two other quintessential rock musical cult films are The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a tale set in a mysterious castle with kinky extraterrestrial Transylvanian transvestites, two stranded young people, and a mad scientist, and a rebellious teenage musical comedy Rock 'N' Roll High School (1979) which featured a rock band named The Ramones.
One of the biggest, best-known cult films was not intended to become so popular. It was a low-budget, government 'documentary' propaganda film from the mid-30s created to dramatize the dangers of marijuana use and demon weed titled Reefer Madness (1936). A number of cult films have been well-regarded, such as Kubrick's intriguing A Clockwork Orange (1971), a surrealistic tale of an ultra-violent future and the danger of psychological reconditioning, or Coppola's anti-Vietnam war epic of a terrifying journey into hell in Apocalypse Now (1979), or another Kubrick classic, Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964). Michelangelo Antonioni directed Blow-Up (1966) - a thought provoking, absorbing work (and intriguing murder mystery) about perception and voyeurism in mod, mid-60s London. Nicolas Roeg's controversial, bizarre science-fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) told of a fragile but intelligent earthbound alien, while Roger Vadim's 60's psychedelic sci-fi spoof Barbarella (1968) featured Jane Fonda as a sexy astro-woman. A visually rich Philip-Marlowe style detective film, Blade Runner (1982) set in futuristic, proto-punk Los Angeles and about an ex-cop who hunts down renegade human replicants, has developed a wide cultish following.
Director David Lynch's work has often been regarded as cultish and campish. His nightmarish first film Eraserhead (1978) contained many baffling images in a post-apocalyptic setting. Then, his bold landmark murder mystery about a severed human ear titled Blue Velvet (1986) - it was a disturbing look at the hidden, bizarre world behind a college student's picture-postcard, all-American home town with Dennis Hopper as a deranged, sadistic, gas-sucking, lunatic kidnapper. And his crazed lovers-on-the-run film Wild at Heart (1990) was also filled with dark, odd, and confusing characters.
Another director/writer John Waters (dubbed "The Prince of Puke") has also produced a unique crop of intentionally bizarre, crude, kitsch and bad taste-laden cult films with eccentric oddball characters including Pink Flamingos (1972) about a grotesque, transvestite trailer park matron named Virginia (played by Divine) who literally eats real dog feces in a competition to become the 'World's Filthiest Person,' the garish film Polyester (1981) - a spoof on suburbanite, middle class soap operas and the first film shot in Odor-ama, and Hairspray (1988), a campy satire of the early 60s featuring beehive bouffant hair and 60s music and dancing.
Director Percy Adlon created the off-beat, quirky comedy/drama Bagdad Cafe (1988) about a strange, rundown hotel/cafe in the middle of the remote Mojave Desert with a number of unusual offball characters, including Jack Palance as a bandanna-wearing, snake-skinned booted, weirdo artist. In the ultra-low-budget B horror film Carnival of Souls (1962) by Harold (Herk) Harvey, a young woman wanders into a Kansas town after a near-fatal car accident, where she confronts nightmarish, spooky circumstances. The absurdly outrageous black French comedy/horror film Delicatessen (1992), the debut film of directors Jeunot and Caro, featured the odd-ball occupants of a shabby apartment building in post-apocalyptic 21st century Paris, where the building's tenants supply the fresh meat for the butcher shop! The slick, stylish and suspenseful French film Diva (1982), the debut film of Jean-Jacques Beineix, was about a young French mail carrier (and opera lover) who secretly and illegally taped the vocal performance of an opera soprano, thereby becoming embroiled in affairs of the criminal underworld. The surrealistic, cult-followed Trust (1991) - director Hal Hartley's second sardonic feature was an unusual 'romantic comedy' about an obnoxious, disillusioned and pregnant high school dropout in a "trusting" relationship with an older, suicidal and volatile electronics expert. A cultish, B-movie soap opera, Danish TV mini-series (of four and a half hours length) of social satire titled The Kingdom (1995) combined a modern hospital setting in Copenhagen with ghosts, creepy occultism, gory medical footage, and cinema verite.
Other classic cult films include Ed Wood's directorial debut film Glen or Glenda?: Confessions of Ed Wood (1953) (aka I Changed My Sex, I Led Two Lives, The Transvestite, or He or She), one of Wood's worst - a very weird film about transvestism. His real masterpiece about invading aliens in California who animate the dead was Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). Additional cult favorites include the quirky, nihilistic and lunatic comedy by Alex Cox titled Repo Man (1984), a story about an LA teenage punkrocker who is apprenticed in the craft of repossessing cars, or Tim Burton's Pee Wee's Big Adventure (1985), an odyssey of nerdish Pee Wee's search for his Red Rocket bicycle, or Terry Gilliam's popular and inventive Brazil (1985), a tale set in a Kafka-esque future with surreal, totalitarian horror, or Martha Coolidge's Real Genius (1985), a witty tale of campus physics nerds whose experiments are unwittingly being used for a US government death weapon, or the post-nuclear Australian action film Mad Max (1980) and its sequel, The Road Warrior: Mad Max 2 (1982), or the silly horror spoof Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1979).
Of the more recent, new breed of low-budget horror films, creating both laughs and screams in scenes of raw energy, splatter-master director Sam Raimi's films stand out with his cult favorite star Bruce Campbell. His Evil Dead trilogy is exceptionally tongue-in-cheek cultish, including the original Evil Dead (1983), its superior sequel Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987), and a third incarnation transported to the Dark Ages, Army of Darkness (1993). The films feature cartoon-like action, comedy, horror, otherwordly spirits, bloody gross-outs of gore, and non-stop craziness. For example, in one sequence in Evil Dead 2, main hero/actor Bruce Campbell engages in a violent battle with his own hand. One excessive non-Raimi film which comes close to equaling the degree of techno-horror is the black comedy Re-Animator (1985), a film which answers the question: "Can a severed head make love?"
Brothers Joel (director) and Ethan (producer) Coen have produced some quirky, stylish, bizarre, off-beat films with tremendous followings. Their films include Blood Simple (1985) with delicious plot twists in a sleazy, ingenious tale of murder and double cross, a baby-kidnapping caper which includes a wild chase finale in Raising Arizona (1987), a complex, stylish gangster film and intriguing black comedy titled Miller's Crossing (1990), the dark comedy of a 30s Hollywood - the story of a New York playwright experiencing writer's block in Barton Fink (1991), the visually astonishing The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and their latest film which is bringing mainstream recognition, Fargo (1996).
Fans of British lunacy from the original Monty Python's Flying Circus BBC-TV series have found the madcap Python humor in various films and settings, including a collection of classic sketches in And Now for Something Completely Different (1972), a medieval farce titled Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974), the tasteless religious spoof Life of Brian (1979), and the irreverent satire Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983). The cultish Star Trek trekkies have many versions of Star Trek films with all the familiar plot elements and characters that were resurrected from the TV series. George Lucas' tribute to classic swashbuckler films of an earlier era, the Star Wars (1977) trilogy, has also developed loyal cult followings.
Certain teen comedies have been chosen as cultish - the early 60's slice of adolescent life viewed in George Lucas' American Graffiti (1973), or its anarchic counterpart Animal House (1978) with food fights, toga parties, beer drinking, and rock 'n' roll. Recent cult films cherished by Generation X teens (children of the children of the 60s) include the teen comedy Dazed and Confused (1993), a rambling tale of senior high schoolers in the late 70s, and Reality Bites (1994) a contemporary story about a group of recent college graduates who are seeking their place in the world. An offbeat, black-comedy satire on competitive teen social popularity in a modern high school was found in the darkly funny Heathers (1989). An earlier, big-cult favorite was director Hal Ashby's macabre Harold and Maude (1971) about a strange taboo romance between a 20 year-old boy and a fun-loving 80 year-old woman with ingenious scenes of the spoiled rich boy's mock suicide attempts staged to upset his mother.
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