Cult Cinema - 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.

Big Trouble in Little China: The Action Film Where the Hero Is the Sidekick

Sun, 11 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986) died on release. It cost around twenty-five million dollars, made back a fraction of that, helped sour Carpenter on the studio system for good, and then it did the thing that the best flops do: it refused to stay dead. Rented, taped, traded and re-watched for four decades, it has become one of the most beloved cult films of its era, and the reason is a single structural gag so clean that most first-time viewers do not notice it is happening to them. The film gives you a swaggering, wisecracking action hero in Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton, and then it quietly arranges the plot so that Jack is useless, the comic sidekick who has wandered into the lead role and never worked it out.

Dark City: The Older Cousin The Matrix Never Credited

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Fourteen months before The Matrix taught a generation to ask whether the world was real, Alex Proyas had already answered the question and shown the machinery behind the curtain. Dark City opened in February 1998 to modest business and a shrug, and then spent two decades being rediscovered as the film that got there first — the reality-is-a-lie neo-noir the later blockbuster stands on. The overlap is not coincidence and not quite theft. Both films were shot at Fox Studios Australia, and some of the standing sets Proyas built for his eternal night were reused, redressed, for the machine world the Wachowskis unveiled the following year. The older cousin never got the credit, and the family resemblance is impossible to miss once you have seen both.

Why the Midnight Movie Needs a Crowd

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 13:00:00 +0000

You can stream The Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight in perfect resolution, alone, on a screen the size of your palm, and you will have watched a mediocre film. Twenty thousand people have watched the exact same movie in a packed midnight house with rice in their hair and toast in the air and thrown themselves into a decades-old call-and-response, and they will tell you, correctly, that it is one of the great nights of their lives. Same film. The difference is the room. This is the thing the streaming era has quietly forgotten: a whole category of cinema was engineered to be completed by an audience, and without the audience the engine has no fuel.