I was nominated by a friend on Facebook to post my favorite movies for ten days. I’ve done this before, so I’ll try to focus more on the kind of cult weirdo shit I like since I already talked about Hollywood and indie films I was into.
The Prophecy (1995) is a lesser-known film series starring Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel, who wants to start a war with heaven over a battle of good vs. evil from two millennia ago. In the first film, he menaces on Earth, torturing a priest-turned-cop (Elias Koteas), trying to kill a fellow angel (Eric Stoltz), intimidating children and a schoolteacher (Virginia Madsen), and forcing a recent suicide (Adam Goldberg) to come back to life to be his servant. It’s a stunning fantasy horror film that I was captivated by, and especially by the killer performance of Viggo Mortensen as Satan, who only appears in the last twenty minutes but steals the movie from everyone else. The sequel wasn’t as great, but decent to watch, and I didn’t bother with the other movies. So this is one of my favorite cult movies ever.
Day 2 of 10 of cult movies I like
I remembered when Johnny Mnemonic came out in 1995, it was seen as a huge joke, like it was already a punchline as a bad movie. I saw it years later as an adult, and I really liked it a lot, loving how it was this cyberpunk movie with a really unusual cast lineup and potential to be better.
The basic plot is that Johnny (Keanu Reeves) is this courier in the future who carries downloaded computer data in his head to deliver to people, and he ends up taking on twice his capacity and is in danger of dying if he doesn’t get it out within two days. He is being hunted by gangsters for the data and meets up with underground resistance folks who are subsisting on black market tech.
It’s a plot that heavily gets into the fears of technology being addictive as a literal sickness, especially when implanted into the body, and the movie has this messy look for a Hollywood film that I really liked a lot. It is darkly funny at times, and the cast was pretty awesome: Reeves, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, Beat Takeshi, Udo Kier, Henry Rollins, and Dolph Lundgren. I also really like dated cyberpunk movies where the technology is very 90’s despite it being set far in the future, being kind of anachronistic. It’s a really fun movie to watch, and nowhere near as terrible as its reputation would make you think.
Day 3 of 10 of cult movies I like
I haven’t seen the original Maniac Cop, which starred Bruce Campbell as a good cop trying to catch a rogue killer cop, but I loved the sequel. Robert Davi took his place as the righteous detective, and I loved the gritty mix of noir and low-budget but high quality action. There are some really great stunts in this film, including a famous scene where Claudia Christian is dragged by a runaway car, and this atmospheric dark city mood that is very 80’s NYC. This was just one of the best cop movies I’ve ever seen.
Day 4 of 10 of cult movies I like
I’ve seen Earth Girls Are Easy a couple of times, and it’s just a really fun, goofy, satirical movie. It makes fun of sex, it makes fun of Valley Girl stereotypes, and it’s just very bright and cartoonish. Julie Brown co-wrote the film, and she is a fantastic comedy talent with a really prolific and varied career and a sharp self-awareness. I love the campy songs, the 80’s pop, Geena Davis’ wide-eyed girlish innocence, and the male aliens just wanting to hook up with hot Earth women. It’s just this movie that makes me really happy to watch.
Day 5 of 10 of cult movies I like
The Brotherhood of the Wolf was one of the strangest movies I’d ever seen. I saw it in college in 2002, hanging out in a student lounge area watching it with some random kids, and was really taken aback by how weird it felt. It’s a French movie (that I watched dubbed in English, so that added to the weirdness) about a wolf-like beast terrorizing villages in 1700s rural France, and a hero is selected to hunt down the beast. He barely speaks and acts more like a barbarian, just murdering anyone that gets in his way. His sidekick is a Native American man who knows Asian martial arts, played by Mark Dascasos. There’s a disabled hunter (Vincent Cassel) who seems incestuously in love with his sister, and Monica Bellucci as a courtesan, with a hilarious scene fade transition of her bare breasts to a pair of snowy mountains. I haven’t seen it since then, so I don’t remember how the rest of the film goes. But I had both really liked and thought it was one of the most bonkers movies I had ever seen.
Day 6 of 10 of cult movies I like
I really dug Ginger Snaps a lot, a Canadian teen horror film about a girl who becomes a werewolf, with jokes about it being a metaphor for puberty as “the curse.” The film is centered on a few strengths: Katharine Isabelle’s captivating performance as the raw and seductive Ginger who struggles to stay human as her animalistic side begins to take over; the deep relationship between Ginger and her reserved sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) as best friends, and Brigitte’s fight to find an antidote to save her sister from completely becoming a monster; and the way the film balances dark comedy with straight horror, especially with the fantastic special effects of Ginger as a beast. I don’t remember how I heard of this film, but I had really liked it a lot. There are two sequels, but they haven’t been as highly acclaimed as the original, so I may not try hard to find them.
Day 7 out of 10 of cult movies I like
I don’t remember how I came across Freaked, but I thought it was one of the most unique films I had ever seen. It was co-written, co-directed by and starred Alex Winter as a pompous movie star who ends up getting turned into a mutant freak along with a gang of other changed captives by a mad scientist (Randy Quaid) for his own sideshow profit.
It was a weird movie that had this early 90’s underground punk energy to it, especially with the music of the Butthole Surfers on the soundtrack. It also featured Keanu Reeves in an unrecognizable role as a dog-man hybrid with a Latino accent disguising his typical Keanu voice (he’s hardly credited in the film), Bobcat Goldwaith as a guy with a sock puppet for a head, and Mr. T as a bearded lady. I watched it again recently on YouTube, and it still holds up really well as a bizarre and fun movie.
Day 8 out of 10 of cult movies I like
I wasn’t a fan of anime growing up. I really didn’t like anime meant for kids because I found it too loud and busy, and the animation had a lot of repeated tropes, like giant eyes welling up with tears or people screaming with cartoonish sound effects. I did watch some Sailor Moon and some 80’s Nickelodeon stuff like an anime retelling of fairy tales and the Noozles, but it wasn’t really my bag. When I got older and watched anime on the Sci-fi Channel, I also didn’t like it because, while it was darker and meant for adults, it often had storylines of young women and girls being raped by giant demon monsters, and I couldn’t watch it.
So in 2001, an anime that was partially inspired by the classic sci-fi silent film Metropolis came out (combined with being an adaptation of a manga by Osamu Tezaka), and I was really interested because I adored the silent film so much. My mom and I went together to the Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan, and while I was excited, I was also nervous because I didn’t want this film to have any of the rape or sexual abuse that I saw in other sci-fi anime. Thankfully, it did not. It was a gorgeous film that truly struck me at how great anime could be, and I was happy to finally find a happy medium in the genre that fit my interests. I especially loved a climatic scene set to the tune of Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” and really felt connected to the whole noirish city landscape.
I haven’t seen the film since then, but it did give me a new appreciation of anime, and I’ve enjoyed films like Spirited Away, When Marnie Was There, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, and Princess Mononoke for being thoughtful and mature stories with character depth.
Day 9 out of 10 of cult movies I like
The Fisher King just hit me hard as a movie. I don’t even know if this qualifies as a cult movie, but it’s certainly strange and fantastical. I don’t know why it affected me so much, but the film was emotionally heavy, was sad but full of hope, and just had these damaged characters just trying to get through life.
Robin Williams, who I much preferred as a dramatic actor than his spitfire comedy, was so sweet and kind in his portrayal of Parry, a homeless man with schizophrenia who was once a professor at Rutgers, but fell into mental illness after his wife was killed in a mass shooting.
Jeff Bridges’ radio DJ host inadvertently blames himself for the shooting because he had delivered a “screw the rich”-style rant to a caller that would commit the massacre. Bridges, who I was vaguely aware of before but never had really seen act, was tremendous in how he conveyed both the pain and regret of his actions and the anger in his life falling apart afterwards and trying to save Parry to do some good in the world.
The film has this burgeoning love story between Williams and Amanda Plummer’s character that is just so sweet and awkward between two hopeless dorks who, as Mercedes Ruehl’s character says, “were made for each other.” It’s so touching and so lovely, and is a shining light in a otherwise bleak world.
The film, directed by Terry Gilliam, brought magical realism into 1991 NYC and made it feel believable within its world, of coldness and grit combined with fantasy elements like impromptu musical numbers in Grand Central Station and a search for the Holy Grail in a castle in upper Manhattan. The film was just stunning to me, and was one of the most devastating yet beautiful films I’ve ever seen.
Day 10 out of 10 of cult movies I like
I haven’t seen eXistenZ in a very long time, so I don’t recall the whole plot, but I do know that it is about people entering a virtual reality video game and getting caught up in the story as it blurs between fantasy and reality. It was a really intriguing film to watch, was directed by David Cronenberg, and had a fantastic cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh (who I loved as a teen and am happy to see have a career resurgence), Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar (famous Canadian indie director/actor), Callum Keith Rennie, and Christopher Eccleston. I really need to watch this again, I just found the film so fascinating.
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