Cult Classics: Introduction 
Often left of center and coming out of left field, for a movie to be regarded as a cult film, genre is not a prerequisite: comedy, drama, camp, horror, and everything else in-between can fall into this vague…
Cult Classics: True Stories
The tagline for True Stories, musician David Byrne’s feature directorial debut, describes it as “a completely cool, multi-purpose movie,” and it’s right: a musical, comedy, art film, and piece of mid-80s Americana…
Cult Classics: Meet The Hollowheads
How do you even begin to describe a movie like Meet The Hollowheads? Is it a satire or sci-fi? Comedy or demented horror? How can one express what witnessing…
Cult Classics: Fantastic Planet
Cult films seem to depict to two worlds: a heightened, askew version of reality as we know it, and a bizarre reality that is barely recognizable. Of the former, previous entries like…
Cult Classics: Better Off Dead
Lane Meyer wishes he were dead. He tries over and over–self-immolation, carbon monoxide poisoning, jumping from a bridge, even hanging–but like most things in his life, it never quite goes…
Cult Classics: Eating Raoul
Paul Bartel is not a household name. He had a respectable enough career as a bit actor in a number of TV and film roles and established a solid working partnership with Mary Woronov, a former…
Cult Classics: Liquid Sky
1980s New York City was a radically different place than it is today: teeming with bohemians and artists trying to bridge the transitional period between Punk and New Wave, it hosted a percolating scene of artists living on the fringes far from the uptown…
Cult Classics: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Upon its release, a movie about a rock star-surgeon-physicist-adventurer battling aliens from the 8th dimension, for some inconceivable reason…
Cult Classics: Waking Life
“Dream is destiny,” says a little girl playing with a paper fortune teller with a little boy in the opening scene to Waking Life. In the next scene, the little boy steps outside at night and observes a comet. His feet lift off the ground and he tries to hold onto the handle of a…
Cult Classics: Big Trouble in Little China
“You know what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like this?” “Who?” “Jack Burton. Me!” Jack Burton and his truck, The Pork Chop Express…
Cult Classics: Fateful Findings
Why do we like terrible movies? Not just bad movies, or mediocre movies–those are depressingly common and a ton come out each year from big and independent studios alike. Those are then shuffled off into the catacombs of daytime…
Cult Classics: Repo Man
What is punk? Is it a style, a music genre, or an attitude? Director Alex Cox argues that it’s all three–but only the the latter is the genuine article–in Repo Man, a film about a young Los Angeles punk named Otto…
Cult Classics: The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
B-movies are like catnip to the well-attuned film fan. This low-budget dubious genre of film was first created by studios back in the day of double features, when cheaper, less-publicized films were produced…
Cult Classics: Freddy Got Fingered
Listen: incredibly stupid things can be some kind of wonderful. And there are very few movies stupider than Freddy Got Fingered. This singular film–which MTV gave absurdist comedian Tom Green $14 million to make any film that he came up with–is perhaps the stupidest film ever made. But it’s also brilliant in its stupidity. Mind…
Cult Classics: Grindhouse
The lurid exploitation films of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s gave cheap thrills to filmgoing audiences looking to make out in the back seats of the theater or their cars, see a few gross kill-shots and grungy effects, or else enjoy the well-tread tropes and hackneyed cinematography that these films promised. Their enjoyment by cinephiles…
Cult Classics: Wild Palms
The early 90’s was a watershed moment in American culture: the alternative was quickly becoming mainstream, and with it large corporate interests were starting to wonder if there wasn’t…
Cult Classics: Cabin Boy
Chris Elliott’s comedic schtick is not for everybody. Having first launched his career as a writer and performer on David Letterman’s old late night show in the 80’s as an absurdist figure who would do bits playing odd characters…
Cult Classics: Forbidden Zone
One of the central tenets that defines a cult film is its inaccessibility to a general audience. Great cult films have gained their notoriety for being exceedingly difficult works for many people to understand or appreciate. Meanwhile, they are also…
Cult Classics: Jesus’ Son
Over the course of a lifetime, you may often find yourself in the company of a strange coterie of people—weird frenemies and loose associates you don’t fully trust but often rely on for one thing or another. More so, your…
Cult Classics: The History of Future Folk
People with passion tend to come across as a little, well, odd to the normies of the world. You know what I mean: the devout Star Trek fan or dedicated KISS fan that attends every convention and concert and happening…
Cult Classics: UHF
Who doesn’t love “Weird Al”? I know I do: the first record I ever independently bought was In 3-D in 1988 from a flea market when I was 6. I’ve lost a lot of great vinyl albums over the years…
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