The 50 Greatest Cult Movies of All Time
It's midnight somewhere.
BY PHIL NUGENT AND ANDREW OSBORNE
"Cult movie" is a hard thing to pin down. For the purposes of this list — celebrating the tenth anniversary of Donnie Darko — we've put a premium on the intensity and selectiveness of a movie's appeal. We've also limited each director to one film. See
you at midnight!
you at midnight!
1. Barbarella (1968)
The first R-rated comic-book movie stars Jane Fonda as a planet-hopping secret agent who has trouble keeping her clothes on. It was directed by Fonda's then-husband, Roger Vadim, who must have seen it as an opportunity to spend nine million dollars' of producer Dino De Laurentiis' money just to tell every ticket-buying man in the world, "Eat your heart out!" — P.N.
2. The Big Lebowski (1998)
Any movie can have fans, and just about any science fiction, fantasy, or superhero movie these days might inspire those fans to dress up as their favorite characters and attend a convention. But the cult of the Coen Brothers' stoner detective bowling phantasmagoria is even more grassroots and bizarre, with the faithful not just mimicking characters from the film, but also props and appendages (like the rug that really ties the Dude's room together and Bunny Lebowski's severed toe). — A.O.
3. Brazil (1985)
Terry Gilliam's Brazil is the arguably the best (unofficial) movie version of Orwell's 1984 ever made, and certainly beats the pants off every official version. The movie only became more legendary, and more dear to the hearts of its cultists, thanks to Universal Pictures' attempts to geld it; their "happy ending" version is hilarious precisely because it looks as if it had been re-edited by Brazil's propagandist villains. — P.N.
4. Breathless (1960)
American film brats from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino have long been devotees of the French New Wave, helping to popularize the movement's aesthetic of handheld cinematography, jump cuts, and cool-cat naturalism. Jean-Luc Godard's tale of lovers on the lam was itself inspired by film noir, and has since returned the favor by influencing the style of countless Hollywood film and TV productions, from Bonnie & Clyde to Breaking Bad. — A.O.
5. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
James Whale's sequel to his own 1931 Frankenstein is the wildest and greatest of all the classic Universal horror movies, and, with Ernest Thesiger's high-camp performance as the misanthropic mad scientist, an early Hollywood landmark of coded gay sensibilities. — P.N.
6. Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
Ornery genius filmmaker Sam Peckinpah effectively dynamited what was left of his Hollywood career with this movie, which was released to universal condemnation but endures as one his most personal films. Cult character god Warren Oates plays the scurvy loser whose last chance to make some bread is to perform the action alluded to in the film's cut-to-the-chase title. This might be the movie whose existence demanded that somebody coin the term "scuzzball classic." — P.N.
7. The Brood (1979)
David Cronenberg redefined the possibilities of the horror movie as a vehicle for personal filmmaking with this, his first great movie. Samantha Eggar plays a woman who becomes so successful at channeling the rage she feels towards her parents, her estranged husband, and others, that she literally births a series of monsters that brutally attack whoever she's mad at. Cronenberg, who conceived the film while going through a divorce, calls it his version of Kramer vs. Kramer. — P.N.
8. Clerks (1994)
Clerks made a big splash for its DIY aesthetic and ear for vulgarity, but its lasting appeal suggests it has a kind of universality. Dante and Randall are the patron saints of wise-ass wage slaves everywhere, while Jay & Silent Bob (and their real-life counterparts, Jason Mewes and the film's auteur, Kevin Smith) represent the freedom (and hazards) of life beyond timecard conformity. — A.O.
9. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Probably the cultiest big-name American director of his generation, Stanley Kubrick in his prime had a delightful habit of concocting large-scale outrages, presenting major studios with the bills, and making them like it. His urban sci-fi black comedy about violence and free will made Malcolm McDowell an icon and changed the way people think about movie brutality, and also how they hear "Singin' in the Rain." — P.N.
10. Death Race 2000 (1975)
Roger Corman's signature mixture of action, satire, titillation, politics, and cheap thrills reached its zenith in this sci-fi splatter comedy. Death Race 2000 (about a futuristic game show based on running over pedestrians) just about demanded that someone step up and create the video-game industry, so that its gimmick could find its true home. Holding the loose elements together is David Carradine, a natural star and a man whose whole life was a cult movie — one where too many of the best parts probably happened when no cameras were around. — P.N.
Opening a month after September 11, 2001, and virtually ignored upon release, Richard Kelly's directorial debut now seems like both a snapshot of the seemingly safe but deeply ominous world we remember living in just before the planes hit, and a direct response to events that happened after it was made. — P.N.
12. Down By Law (1986)
Before the Sundance Film Festival essentially transformed it into mainstream Hollywood's minor league farm system, American indie film routinely produced weird hipster gems like Jim Jarmusch's deadpan debut Stranger Than Paradise. But his follow-up, the existential prison film Down By Law, was (arguably) even cooler and cultier, if only for the inclusion of surrealist beatnik idol Tom Waits. — A.O.
13. Easy Rider (1969)
While Hollywood was stubbornly ignoring the counterculture (or, worse, pandering to it with tone-deaf misfires), Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper pushed all the right peyote buttons and hit the zeitgeist jackpot. Together with Jack Nicholson, the stoner auteurs shook up the film industry with this lived-in portrayal of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, while inadvertently ruining "Born To Be Wild" for all future generations. — A.O.
14. Eraserhead (1977)
Any number of David Lynch's movies could be here, but his first feature remains a startling testament to the richness and variety of what one man can pull out of his own head, if he's determined to work as long as he has to to get it out. (Because Lynch kept running out of money, Eraserhead was in production off and on for five years.) The moral, as with the punk movement that exploded around the same time, is "do it yourself" — if the people you try to explain your dream to just look at you funny, get a camera and crew and just do it yourself. — P.N.
15. The Evil Dead (1983)
Sam Raimi's feverishly inventive, Karo-syrup-drenched, $400,000 horror movie is a Hollywood calling card that the director probably had to live down before he could persuade anyone to trust him with something like the Spider-Man franchise. But the legions of kids whose heads exploded as they watched this on video throughout the '80s will always be Raimi fans. (If you actually saw this in a theater at any point before 1984, you earn a lifetime coolness certificate.) — P.N.
16. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
Russ Meyer's best-known (and least breast-obsessed) exploitation classic is the kind of fantasy that most people would only put on film if they already had plans to burn the negative before any respectable people could get a look at it. The first twenty minutes — featuring freelance dominatrix babes racing their sports cars in the desert and killing anyone who looks at them funny — are like a drive-in movie from Mars. What happens after that? I'm not sure. I usually just watch the first twenty minutes again. — P.N.
17. Fight Club (1999)
With the end of the millennium breathing down his neck, director David Fincher and his stars —Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter — took a deep breath of their own and plunged into the deep end. Positioned to be the movie of a generation and a zeitgeist blockbuster,Fight Club proved too strange for most of the mass audience to take in on its initial release. But it refused to go away quietly and today lives on, a big bar of eye candy that talks like an unhinged and overcaffeinated street preacher. — P.N.
18. Freaks (1935)
Legendary horror director Tod Browning, a former man of the circus who had a real feel for the seedy carnival atmosphere, broke every rule of polite movie entertainment with this intense melodrama. (One woman claimed the film had caused her to have a miscarriage.) Many early Hollywood movies were rediscovered by audiences on the midnight movie circuit of the '70s; Freaks was one of the strongest and strangest. Its cult included the Ramones, who got an anthem out of the freak-show stars' chant of "Gabba gabba." — P.N.
19. Grey Gardens (1975)
Many listeners were surprised by Jacqueline Kennedy's blunt statements in recently released tapes from 1964. For me, however, the most shocking part of that interview was how closely the former First Lady's informal cadences mimicked those of her cousin "Little Edie" Beale, the eccentric and beloved star of this paean to impoverished gentry, defiant individuality, and the perils of utter denial. — A.O.
20. The Harder They Come (1972)
Like many films on the list, this offbeat, low-budget crime story failed during its initial run in theaters, then later gained an enthusiastic word-of-mouth following thanks to midnight screenings. But what truly makes the Jimmy Cliff vehicle a classic is its indelible soundtrack, which helped to introduce Jamaican reggae to the world. — A.O.
21. Harold and Maude (1971)
A deeply romantic, life-affirming movie dressed up as an outrage of a black comedy, Harold and Maude was the perfect movie for its shell-shocked era. You could say that only in 1971 could Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon pass for movie stars, let alone as a movie-star couple. But then, a lot of people who love this movie weren't even born in 1971. — P.N.
22. Heathers (1989)
Though far from the first movie to rip the lid off high-school life, Heathers' formula for black comedy — murderous slapstick and invented, baroque teen slang — made it one of the most influential cult hits of the late '80s. It set off a wave that Joss Whedon caught and rode like Moondoggie. And did I mention that I love my dead gay son? — P.N.
23. Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Mickey Spillane's novels about the detective Mike Hammer pushed the hard-boiled genre about as far as it could go, and director Robert Aldrich's movie version pushes it over a cliff. Kiss Me Deadly's take on the ruthlessness of film noir is so extreme that it crosses into parody, and keeps going until it becomes something close to hard-boiled science fiction. Quentin Tarantino famously tipped his hat to it with Pulp Fiction's glowing suitcase. — P.N.
24. The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)
Nicolas Roeg's poison-pen letter to America stars David Bowie as a reclusive genius-businessman, who's actually an alien visitor who just wants to make his fortune and get the hell back to his home planet. No other movie has managed to make our planet look so ravishingly, frighteningly beautiful while basically making a case for why we ought to just blow the place up and start over. — P.N.
25. Mommie Dearest (1981)
Movies that knowingly court ironic cult status rarely work. Instead, the classics tend to be the ones that fully commit to their own weirdness, like this over-the-top adaptation of the bitter, score-settling memoir by Joan Crawford's daughter, Christina, featuring a sincerely unhinged performance by Faye Dunaway as the (allegedly) monstrous screen diva. Say it with me, drag queens: "No... wire... hangers!" — A.O.
26. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974)
Holy Grail is the kind of historical burlesque you could only get from people who are serious enough students of history to know how ludicrous most of it is. It's also one of the most compulsively quotable primary artifacts of the geek universe. (It's sobering to think that, without this movie, someone could say he has three questions without reducing half the people within earshot to hysterics.) — P.N.
27. Mothra (1961)
Japanese monster movies are a whole denomination of cult films unto themselves, and we'll probably get some grief in the comments section for not representing the subgenre here with its biggest star, Godzilla. But our Saturday afternoon hearts will always belong to Toho Studios' giant psychic moth. Not only is she a kick-ass chick, but she travels around with a pair of tiny priestesses who sound like The B-52s! — A.O.
28. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
George Romero's $114,000 independent production came out of Pittsburgh to spread across the planet, powered solely by stunned word of mouth. At first, the closest thing it earned to reviews was a string of angry editorials (including one by the young Roger Ebert) wondering how anything so nasty could be exhibited in theaters. One measure of how influential it's been is that zombies are now the biggest players in horror, with the possible exception of lovesick vampires. They'd always been the also-rans of the monster derby, until Romero gave audiences a good look at what they're like when it's feeding time. — P.N.
29. Office Space (1999)
Mike Judge's first foray into live action was quietly released and received mostly tame reviews, but was picked up on video and spread like wildfire among viewers for whom its juicy satire of cubicle drudgery struck a nerve. Eager to learn from its mistakes, the studio that produced Judge's next feature, Idiocracy, did its best to not release it at all. — P.N.
30. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)
A dual triumph for its deep-in-character star, Paul Reubens, and its first-time director, Tim Burton, Adventure captures a certain kind of mid-'80s sensibility. It's a live-action-cartoon tribute to kitsch, with one crowd-pleasing foot in the multiplex and one in the art scene. — P.N.
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