Cult - vo.rs

WR: Mysteries of the Organism: The Cult Film That Argued With Politics

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Some films are provocations you can summarise; WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) is a provocation you can only gesture at. Dušan Makavejev’s Yugoslav landmark is a collage that welds a straight-faced documentary about the disgraced psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to a fictional sex comedy set in socialist Belgrade, then splices in Warhol Factory drag stars, a Fugs poet marching through New York with a toy rifle, archival Stalinist kitsch and a plaster cast of an erect penis. It should be incoherent. Instead it is one of the sharpest political films of its decade, a genuine argument conducted in the grammar of montage, and it got Makavejev effectively exiled from his own country for the trouble. More than fifty years on it remains a masterclass in how to think on film.

The Holy Mountain: Jodorowsky's Alchemical Provocation

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The Holy Mountain (1973) exists because a Beatle liked El Topo. That is the short version of one of the strangest financing stories in cinema: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, evangelised by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s midnight-movie sensation, leaned on Allen Klein’s ABKCO to bankroll whatever the Chilean provocateur wanted to make next. What he wanted to make was a million-dollar avant-garde epic about the alchemical transformation of the soul, staffed by non-actors he had reportedly put through weeks of spiritual and physical training, and ending on a gesture designed to detonate the very cult that had funded it. It is the most beautiful hostile act in the history of cult film, and half a century on it has lost none of its capacity to dazzle and offend in the same breath.

Dead Alive (Braindead): Peter Jackson's Splatter Comedy Peak

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

There is a story people tell about Peter Jackson, and it goes: video-shop kid from Pukerua Bay makes home-made splatter films, then somehow ends up an Oscar-laden lord of Middle-earth. The film that sits at the hinge of that story is Braindead (1992), released in North America as Dead Alive, and it remains the most concentrated dose of what made Jackson worth watching in the first place. It is, by a wide and gleeful margin, the goriest film ever made — production reportedly ran through hundreds of litres of fake blood for the finale alone — and it is also, disarmingly, a tender little comedy about a boy who cannot leave his mother. Those two facts are the whole film, and the way they braid together is why it endures.

Street Trash: The Melt Movie as Reagan-Era Fable

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0000

There is a small, disreputable genre of 1980s horror that fans call the melt movie, and Street Trash is its filthy masterpiece. The premise is a one-line joke: a liquor-store owner finds a dusty case of wine called Tenafly Viper walled up in his cellar, sells it for a dollar a bottle to the homeless men living in a junkyard, and the wine dissolves anyone who drinks it into a puddle of glowing coloured slime. That is the whole engine. What makes the film worth a revisit almost forty years on is that Jim Muro and writer-producer Roy Frumkes built something around that joke — a genuinely angry, genuinely funny fable about who American prosperity decided was disposable, told in the most tasteless idiom available.

Ten Under-Seen Genre Films on the Streaming Edges

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The streaming era was supposed to be a boon for the curious. Everything, everywhere, one search away. What actually happened is that the recommendation engines learned to serve you more of what you already watched, and the strange, the foreign and the low-budget got shoved three pages deep where nobody scrolls. The great films of the last fifty years are all findable, if you know their names — and knowing the names is the whole game now. A good critic is, more than ever, a person who tells you what to type into the search bar. The video shop had a back wall of staff picks and a clerk who had seen everything; the streaming service has an infinite shelf and no one standing beside it. Recovering that guidance is half of what this desk is for.

The Midnight-Movie Canon

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The midnight movie is a delivery system as much as a genre. It began at the tail end of the 1960s, when a handful of New York cinemas discovered that the films too strange for a normal booking could fill a house at midnight, week after week, with the same crowd coming back to worship. The Elgin, the Waverly and the Bleecker Street cinemas turned unshowable pictures into rituals, and a distinct kind of film grew up to fill the slot: transgressive, dreamlike, often barely coherent, and always better with a room full of the converted shouting back at the screen. These are films that needed a congregation. Seen cold and alone on a laptop, many of them look like failures; seen in a packed room at one in the morning, the same films become scripture. The audience was always half the show.

Zardoz: Boorman's Folly and the Case for Watching It Anyway

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

The image that has followed Zardoz around for fifty years is Sean Connery in a red loincloth and thigh-high leather boots, a bandolier across his bare chest and a ponytail down his back, glowering out from beneath a Zapata moustache. It is a genuinely funny costume, and it has done the film a lasting disservice, because the still gets shared and the film goes unwatched. John Boorman made Zardoz in 1974, one film after Deliverance had turned him into a director studios would hand money to, and he spent that credit on the strangest, most self-serious science-fiction picture a major had bankrolled that decade. It flopped, it was mocked, and it has spent half a century as a punchline. I want to argue for it as a real film — imperfect, overreaching, sometimes ridiculous, and far more alive than most of the tidy dystopias that get respectful retrospectives.

The Best Genre Debuts: First Features That Announced a Career

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Most first films are apprentice work — you can see the seams, the borrowed moves, the moments where the budget won. Then there are the debuts that arrive with the voice already finished, where a director you had never heard of turns out to have known exactly what they wanted from the first frame. Genre cinema produces more of these than any other corner of film, partly because genre is where a young filmmaker with no money can still swing for something huge: a locked room, a monster, a crime, a rule about time. Constraint sharpens the vision, and a debut is nothing but constraint. There is a particular thrill in watching one of these for the first time, knowing what the director went on to become, and catching the whole future signature already in place — a camera move, a fixation, a way of holding a silence a beat too long.

Flash Gordon (1980): Camp, Queen, and the Best Bad Good Film

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Flash Gordon (1980) should be a catastrophe. It has a leading man whose voice was dubbed by another actor because his own delivery did not work. It has dialogue that lands with a clang, a plot assembled from 1930s comic-strip cliffhangers, and a tone that veers from high-camp winking to total sincerity within a single scene. By every conventional measure of quality it fails, and it was treated as a flop and a joke by plenty of people at the time. And yet it is one of the most purely joyful films ever made, a delirious explosion of colour and sound that has outlasted a hundred more respectable pictures, because it commits so completely to its own absurdity that the absurdity becomes a kind of grandeur.

Society (1989): The Body-Horror Satire With the Nastiest Ending

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) is a film with a secret, and the secret is that it spends most of its running time pretending to be a much tamer movie. For an hour it plays as a moody, slightly stiff paranoid thriller about a Beverly Hills teenager who suspects his wealthy family is hiding something monstrous. The pacing wobbles, the acting varies, and a first-time viewer could be forgiven for wondering what the fuss is about. Then the last reel arrives, and the film unleashes one of the most deliriously repulsive climaxes in horror history, a set-piece so far beyond what the previous hour prepared you for that it retroactively rewrites everything you have watched. Society is a slow build with a nuclear payload, and the wait is the whole design.