Category Archives: Cult Movies

The Passionate Christ

April 6, 2012Books and Movies, Classic Films, Cult Movies, Directors, Uncategorizedchristianity, controversial films, jesus christ, martin scorcese, religious films, the last temptation of christ, Willem DafoePhilip Concannon

By Philip Concannon

Martin Scorsese has famously described cinema as simply being “a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out,” but when The Last Temptation of Christ was released in 1988, very few were willing to consider the film on those terms. This adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel remains one of the most controversial films ever released by a Hollywood studio. It sparked protests, threats and even physical attacks, with a cinema in France being firebombed by a group of Christian fundamentalists for daring to screen the film. The charge was blasphemy, with the biggest bone of contention being a much talked-about sex scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The fact that few of those criticising The Last Temptation of Christ had seen it, or had any intention of doing so, was apparently beside the point. Continue reading The Passionate Christ →

The Gospel According to Pasolini

April 5, 2012Classic Films, Cult Movies, Directors, History, Italian Cinemachristianity, italian cinema, jesus christ, pier paolo pasolini, religious films, the gospel according to st matthewViv Wilby

by Viv Wilby

It’s not hard to see Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film, Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew), as a deliberate shift away from, perhaps even rebuke to, the style of religious filmmaking that had poured out of Hollywood in the 1950s and early 1960s. These were gaudy, technicolor affairs, stuffed with earnest matinee idols, hammy character actors and hundreds of extras. Starlets draped in wisps of chiffon would flash kohl-rimmed eyes at pained looking holy men. And just in case we were in danger of forgetting, a stentorian voiceover would remind us that This Is The Word Of The Lord.

In contrast, Pasolini’s film is simple and spare. Shot in stark black and white with a cast of non-professionals, it follows the linear narrative of Matthew’s gospel. We move through the familiar beats of Christ’s life: the visit of the three wise men and flight into Egypt; the baptism in the river Jordan and temptation in the wilderness; the calling of the apostles; the preaching and miracles; culminating in Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem, his betrayal by Judas Iscariot, arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection. Continue reading The Gospel According to Pasolini →

Nuking From Orbit

March 27, 2012Classic Films, Cult Movies, Future Releases, Genrealien, alien resurrection, alien3, aliens, Prometheus, ridley scottMostlyFilm

by Thomas Pratchett

'sup? Just chillin'. — 'Last one to the top's a rotten xenomorph egg!'

In 1979, Ridley Scott made a film about a bunch of people who find an alien spaceship and discover that the long dormant life inside isn’t so dormant, and in fact wants to kill them. In 2011, Ridley Scott made a film about a bunch of people who find an alien spaceship and… you can see where this is going. By now, everyone knows that Prometheus is a (so Scott claims) tangentially related prequel to Alien, although exactly how related they are is still to be seen. We’ve got the same Giger-esque architecture, milk-filled androids, stark white interiors played against grimy steam-filled corridors and pods filled with slimy things that want to hug our faces. If anyone else had come up with such a scenario and claimed it had no real links to the Alien franchise, 20^th Century Fox’s lawyers would have moved faster than you can say ‘minimum safe distance’.

Continue reading Nuking From Orbit →

MONOGLOT MOVIE CLUB: CITY OF DRIZZLE

March 1, 2012Brazilian Cinema, Cult Movies, Monoglot Movie ClubSpank The Monkey

Part of an occasional series in which SPANK THE MONKEY goes to foreign countries, watches films in unfamiliar languages, and then complains about not understanding them

Cidade de Garoa: that’s the affectionate name Brazilians have for São Paulo. “City of Drizzle.” Fernando Meirelles would have had a much less violent film on his hands if he’d set City Of God here, mainly because most of it would have involved scenes of people sitting indoors waiting for it to stop pissing down.

On a business visit to São Paulo for a week, one of my non-work priorities – as ever – was to catch a couple of Brazilian films in situ, to get a feel for the side of their cinema that doesn’t normally make it out of the country. And it only seemed right and fitting that when I finally found a local movie at the very end of the week, in order to get there I had to walk for five minutes through one of the worst rainstorms I’ve seen in my life. But that was the least of my problems.

Continue reading MONOGLOT MOVIE CLUB: CITY OF DRIZZLE →

David Lynch’s The Straight Story

February 29, 2012Cult MoviesMostlyFilm

by Laurent de Alberti

When Septuagenarian Alvin Straight finds out that his estranged brother has suffered a stroke, he decides to embark on a journey to reunite with him, in spite of his own poor health. Unable to drive, he resorts to riding a lawn mower through the Midwest to cover the 300 miles that separate them.

It is a popular opinion among Lynch detractors that his films are all style and no substance, and under the cover of mystery, glamorous amnesiacs and strobe lights lay some pretty empty propositions. This is obviously unfair and actually completely inaccurate. The American director might not be dealing with emotions in the most obvious way but far from being shallow, all of his films remain explorations of human nature, even if, more often than not, it is usually its darker side.

Continue reading David Lynch’s The Straight Story →

Wild at Heart

February 22, 2012Classic Films, Cult Moviesjim5et

by Jim Eaton-Terry

Wild at Heart seems to be the one universally accepted dud in David Lynch’s back catalogue. There are the early oddities (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune), his masterpiece Blue Velvet, then the nightmarish trilogy of Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Wild At Heart is dismissed as Lynch lite, his one attempt at a mainstream lovers-on-the-run movie fatally flawed by compromises to commercial acceptability in the wake of Twin Peaks.

Continue reading Wild at Heart →

Love, Sex, Betrayal & Spoons – A Night With Tommy Wiseau

February 16, 2012Cult MoviesPhilip Concannon

by Philip Concannon

Who the hell is Tommy Wiseau anyway? That was the question foremost in my mind as I made my way through the dark streets of London’s West End for a midnight screening of The Room. Normally it would take a screening of an all-time classic or a new film by one of my cinematic heroes to tempt me out on such a freezing night, but here I was lining up for a film I knew by reputation only – that is, its reputation as one of the worst films ever made. When I reached the Prince Charles Cinema, it quickly became clear that my ignorance of The Room and its director put me firmly in the minority. The queue, which was already stretching around the side of the venue, was full of people in tuxedoes or wearing neckties around their heads, brandishing plastic cutlery or tossing inflated American footballs to one another. They regaled each other with random lines of dialogue that sounded bizarre or banal shorn of their context – “Johnny’s my best friend!” “I have breast cancer!” “You’re tearing me apart!” Everyone appeared to be in on a joke that I didn’t yet understand.

Continue reading Love, Sex, Betrayal & Spoons – A Night With Tommy Wiseau →

If My Calculations Are Correct, Part Three

February 2, 2012Classic Films, Cult Movies, Film Festivals, Genre, TelevisionRicky Young

by Ricky Young

With seven films outstanding in our look-back at the 1983 BBC2 sci-fi season, should we perhaps turn from our never-ending vigilance against external dangers (such as wrenches and communists), and instead take some time to contemplate the monster that is Man himself? What lessons can we learn about our nature via these Technicolor messages from our own recent past? Well, if 1955’s Conquest Of Space is anything to go by, lesson #1 today is ‘religion is for unstable, murderous nutcases’, so thanks for all the pressing updates on that, Dawkins, you charmless little tit.

Produced and directed, respectively, by 50s sci-fi greats George Pal (who oversaw When Worlds Collide from Part 1) and Byron Haskin (who would go on to helm Robinson Crusoe on Mars, from Part 2), Conquest of Space might not be the oldest of the films we’ve rewatched, but it has a tone and feel of something made considerably earlier. Oh, and it’s loopier than a hipster’s earlobes, but have no fear – we’ll get to that.

Continue reading If My Calculations Are Correct, Part Three →

If My Calculations Are Correct, Part Two

December 2, 2011Classic Films, Cult Movies, Film Festivals, Genre, TelevisionRicky Young

by Ricky Young

If this look-back at the 1983 BBC2 science-fiction season has a theme, it’s that if you’re a simple God-fearing man (or, to a lesser extent, woman), just trying to make his way in the world in the shadow of that first cracked atom, then whatever you do, for heaven’s sake give scientists a wide berth.

In nearly everything we’ve covered so far, men of science have either directly or indirectly been responsible for alien invasion, alien near-invasion, alien semi-invasion, or just alerting aliens to our existence so they can stage – yes! – an invasion. It’s almost as if American society in the 1950s went to bed at night afraid of sudden and total destruction from a massive yet amorphous enemy far away.

Not that such mattered to me, watching these films after my tea every Tuesday night for four months, a stripling of nine tender years. I’ve tried to revisit as many as I can, and I’ve found that it’s less the stories and the dialogue that have resonated over the ensuing three decades, but certain images, sound effects and colours.

It also sort-of explains why I blew up that government aerospace research lab that time, with everyone deliberately trapped inside. Goddamn good-for-nothing scientists.

Continue reading If My Calculations Are Correct, Part Two →

If My Calculations Are Correct

November 28, 2011Cult Movies, Genre, Home Video, TelevisionRicky Young

Part one of a four-part piece, by Ricky Young

Starting on 11^th January 1983, and running over 15 weeks, BBC2 ran a branded season of sci-fi films on Tuesday evenings – crucially, for those who were 10 years old at the time, in that all-important between-tea-and-bedtime slot. Alerted to this by my father, who was always on the lookout for great films in front of which he could fall asleep, I sat on the floor and exposed my brain to far more strange and dangerous cosmic rays than could possibly have been good for me.

It was quite the grab-bag of movies, ranging from early-50’s schlock, late-50’s nuclear hand-wringing, psychedelic 60s romps, 70s paranoia and masses more besides. I watched them all. Little of their importance (or lack of) or legacy (ditto) meant anything to me at the time, but the joy contained in that long string of Tuesday nights still resonated in the back of my brain as an indistinct blur of space-ships, laser-beams and sudden stabs of orchestral menace. I’m not going to get all Nick Hornby on you here, but if I had to track down what kick-started my love for the genre, chances are I’d find it in a four-month excuse for a bunch of cheap repeats.

So when the subject came up in conversation recently, with similarly vague-yet-enthusiastic recollections, I felt it my duty to MostlyFilm – Europe’s Best Website – to revisit some of these half-remembered gems and bring them into sharp and unforgiving 1080p focus. And, I’ll warn you now, take the piss a bit.

Continue reading If My Calculations Are Correct →