Ten Great Summer Grindhouse Movies
The proliferation of midnight/cult movie programming at movie theaters great and small during the summer months has made it easier to catch up with the classics many of us were too young to see the first time around, discover new curiosities, and be reminded of the essential communal aspect in truly appreciating the intentions of genre filmmakers. Horror plays best late at night with an anxious and receptive audience and a comedy becomes more infectious when the laughs roll in waves throughout a theater.
I will never forget when Quentin Tarantino’s short-lived releasing company Rolling Thunder Pictures brought the gleeful gore of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond and the Shaw Brother’s z-level King Kong rip-off Mighty Peking Man to my impressionable young eyes as part of the Midnight Madness shows at local specialty theater – the Landmark Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak, Michigan. Recently, that same theater began showing the endearing Danish export Trollhunter. Earlier this month, Montreal’s vaunted Fantasia Festival introduced a slew of the psychotronic joys that we will be experiencing in the months to come, but for now here, in no particular order, are ten recent cult movies to help you make it through the dog days of summer.
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Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisener, 2011)
Begun as one of the fake Grindhouse trailers only seen by Canadian audiences, Eisener’s feature-length dark comedy about a vigilante vagrant (Rutger Hauer in a valiant performance) mowing down some of the most vile residents of a lawless town may be the best midnight movie of the 2000s (even beating out Rodriguez’s delightful Planet Terror for sheer WTF! moments). The beautifully oversaturated colors, lighting, and clever camera-work will bring to mind early Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi handing his bag of tricks to a new generation of nihilistic punk kids raised on Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma movies.
House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009)
A small, slow-burn tribute to horror movies from the grimy VHS era. Director West doesn’t merely pay slavish detail to the babysitter, satanic, and old dark house genres that once littered the best disreputable indie video stores, he remembers to make a great thriller amidst all that style and homage. Boasting naturalistic acting from a crack cast that puts to shame nonsense like this year’s The Roommate, West miraculously makes you forget how desensitized Eli Roth and his ilk have made you and slides the creepiness right up your spine until unleashing a go-for-broke climax.
Rubber (Quentin Dupieux, 2011)
Words do little to convey the shear madness on display in the directorial debut of French electronic music artist Mr. Oizo. In his post-modern horror comedy, a tire somehow comes to life and rolls around an American desert using its newfound telekinetic abilities to make random heads explode. Made for midnight, this is one to see and enjoy the baffled looks on your friends’ faces as you explain that “it’s really brilliant!” Besides the berserk central concept, Rubber is also a pointed commentary on the way we watch movies that at times feel like one of the existentialist comedies of Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco.
Birdemic (James Nguyen, 2010)
If Alfred Hitchcock had suffered a head injury and lost all of his studio funding, the result might be similar to this no-budget fan-fest surprise which boasts some laughable yet entertaining effects of birds attacking a small town.
Amer (Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani, 2009)
A baffling study of style-over-substance from two French devotees of the 1960s and 1970s arty thrillers of Mario Bava, Jess Franco, and Dario Argento. Ostensibly the almost wordless tale of a strange woman over three periods of a life lived in a creepy old Italian manse with her sinister parents, a dead grandfather inhabiting one of the rooms, and a shrouded figure pursuing her into adulthood. Ripe with red-bulb eroticism and startling flashes of horror, Amer was championed by Quentin Tarantino in recent interviews – one sees a kindred spirit in Amer‘s delirious genuflection to “cool” even if it keeps an arm’s length from an audience wondering what it was all about.
Four Lions (Christopher Morris, 2010)
The first film to be released from the venerable Texas theater chain the Alamo Drafthouse is a bold dark comedy from England centered on four wannabe Islamic terrorists in London bumbling their way through a series of ill-conceived plots that doesn’t shy away from humanizing the young militants – a clever blend of dangerous fanaticism and perfectly-timed shock humor. A more serious film than most others on this list, but it is the sort that will thrive by word-of-mouth if adopted by adventurous movie fans.
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
It is rare that a movie can be nominated for an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Picture) and still be considered eligible for the cult vaults, but this vicious black comedy from Greece is not going to be winning mainstream acceptance anytime soon – not when it concerns the suburban imprisonment of the three grown children of a businessman determined to keep his kids away from the world’s evils by engaging in some extremely limited homeschooling and surreal games. Not for the fainthearted – the film does not flinch in depictions of incestuous behavior and animal slaughter – it is nonetheless a beautifully quirky, triumphant indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy.
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (Eli Craig, 2010)
Firmly camped in the Sam Raimi school of horror comedy, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil upends scare flick clichés with a freshness not seen since the first Scream movie. A group of college kids are scared out of their wits by two of the sort of hulking hillbillies usually seen stuffing nubiles into freezers or woodchippers but in a good-natured Three’s Company twist it seems that Tucker and Dale are adorable, well-meaning sorts looking for some R & R at their vacation cabin while the increasingly-hysterical students keep accidentally offing themselves – escalating things to a high-spirited onslaught of cartoonish gross-out gags with poor Tucker and Dale forced to defend their honor. A big hit at the genre festivals, look for it in theaters this fall and On Demand at the end of August.
Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, 2006)
If you’ve never been exposed to Canadian treasure Maddin’s wild flights of fancy, this is a perfect place to start. Employing his singular, fetishy silent movie-era techniques to tell the autobiographical adult fairy tale of an orphanage housed on a desolate island and presided over by a lighthouse-perched, overbearing mother and her mad scientist husband, Maddin hit on a nice balance of his usual weirdness and a coherent plot. When a female detective in the Nancy Drew mold shows up dressed as a boy to find out the secrets of the good doctor’s experiments the film mines droll humor from its alternate universe Saturday matinee trappings.
Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)
Finally about to make its way to American movie houses (in a 3D conversion!) nearly a decade after the controversial premise precluded it from finding stateside distribution, Japanese new wave master Kinji Fukasaku’s violent satire of a group of teenage students forced to hunt each other to the death in a government sanctioned program to ensure a placid youth population will be seen for the modern masterpiece it is. Fukasaku’s epic unfolds like a real-time video game with each gleefully violent setpiece giving way to strangely tender moments of young love mirroring the volatile emotions of adolescence. The best of its kind since A Clockwork Orange. Don’t let the similarities to The Hunger Games fool you; this is no young adult tale of female empowerment.
Gregory Fichter
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