50 Great Cult Films

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I’ve seen 45 of these movies, and Hedwig is the only one of the remaining 5 that I want to see.

I don’t get why Lewbowski gets the #1 slot.

@vonbobo: Of course Donnie Darko is on it.

@SeanHyde-Moyer: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is one of my all time favorite movies. Never occurred to me that it might qualify as cult. Richard Dreyfus is in it, fer Pete’s sake.

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There are people out there who like The Untouchables that don’t know where the pram scene originates…

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Yeah, @ChuckV, I think maybe Battleship Potemkim is probably considered canon for film class, but maybe not with people who aren’t in a film program…

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Yeah, if cult simply means obscure to the average person, then BP is definitely cult. If cult means having a cult following, well, I suppose anything widely distributed and acclaimed has got a following of some sort. I’m just not certain BP’s following would be easily labeled as cult. It’s rather mainstream to the type of person who would watch silent Soviet cinema. (Could we simply label all silent Soviet cinema as cult? That’s a possibility, but seems dismissive.)

Of course, this is all from a US perspective…

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I think we could say that film nerds are a kind of a cult, yeah?

Also, I would think that there very well might be a cultish fandom for Soviet era films, too.

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Pretty sure Woody Allen fans are a cult.

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Yeah, but if “cult films” are to be their own pseudo-genre, they probably shouldn’t completely subsume other genres whole.

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Or Night of the Comet.

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Ugh. Woody Allen… But yeah, at this point, probably… they’ll follow him no matter what he did… “but he’s a GENIUS.” Ugh. No. All his dumb movies are about obsession with women too young for the men who are clearly stand ins for him. How often can one man make a film about that?

Sure, but there are plenty of genres of film in Soviet cinema, too. Not all of them were of the Socialist realism (?). I think there are people who seek out Soviet pirate films, for example. I read an article about them once, but can’t remember where I read it…

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Which part of my comment? :thinking:

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Love that movie. 80s time capsule of awesome cheesiness.

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I don’t know where 20 out of 50 puts me on the ‘cultists’ spectrum, but I do feel secure and revel in my nominal-ness.

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The identifying of cult films is tricky as hell because by strict definition if it’s got a cult following then it’s a cult film. So Titanic, Star Wars and Gone with the Wind are probably all cult films.

I can’t recall exactly what label to file Potemkin under (probably something with dialectic(al) in the label) but Socialist Realism was later starting in the ‘30s. Eisenstein had a bit of bother because his early work wasn’t “realist” and was pejoratively labeled “formalist.”

Soviet pirate films sound cool. Hadn’t heard of them before. On a related note, here’s the first bit of a documentary about Soviet musicals, although it moves from the USSR to East Germany.

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Booty gets you?

(Sorry)

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Yeah, hence my question mark (not a film grad, so…).

I guessing lots of the early days of film (I’d argue that Potemkin qualifies there) wasn’t really divided up into genres like we have today.

Apparently, they were big in the 70s, and some of the only genre films people were allowed to make, and also some of the only films that were more popular than western cinema.

:face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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You know a movie’s fucked up when Harry Dean Stanton is the reasonable one.

Most of the movies I was thinking were missing have come up in this thread already (well done everyone!). Here’s a few that must have simply slipped your mind.

  • Alphaville. Godard’s sci-fi movie in which in one minor aside, a man is executed for having showed emotion (a tear at his wife’s funeral), the sentence carried out in a pool by a Busby Berkeley-style set of bathing beauties with knives.
  • Wax, or, The Discovery of Television Among the Bees. The first movie streamed on the World Wide Web.
  • The Dark Backward. Judd Nelson is a dreadful stand-up comic whose career picks up when he grows a third arm out of his neck.
  • Meet the Feebles. Peter Jackson’s The Muppets, plus drugs, prostitution, Vietnam flashbacks, and a murder spree. Or you could try his Bad Taste or Dead/Alive.
  • Zardoz. Am I really the first to mention Zardoz on here?? @beschizza how could you.
  • The Tenant. One of the Polanski trilogy of the horror, not of creaky old houses, but of apartment buildings where one must interact with other people.

I also can’t resist bringing up Schizopolis and Tapeheads.

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Well, by 1925 cinema had definitely settled down into many (but not all) of the common film genres, comedy, drama, western, etc. Potemkin would have been called by the Soviets agitprop, but the underlying theory was Soviet montage theory. (Which I thought of, but it just seemed a little too simple a name.)

Early Soviet filmmakers were very big on underlying theories. In the early days of the Soviet film schools, there wasn’t enough celluloid to go around, so instead of shooting, they had to do a lot of intellectualizing instead.

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What? No Phantasm?

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Speaking of Coscarelli… What about BUBBA HOTEP!!!

bubba-ho-tep-stuff-on-you

Early Peter Jackson films, too, Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive (Braindead). Heavenly Creatures is on there, though.

[ETA] OH! Heavy Metal Parking Lot… Gummo?

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Well I’m a derp. I responded to the wrong comment! Accept my apologies and a nice coleslaw! I was responding to a comment criticizing Event Horizon’s spot on the list, which wasn’t your comment. But everything aside, I’m OK with people not liking stuff I like. I’m not some sort of movie authoritarian, although that does make me imagine a pretty cool uniform.

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