Filed Under: Cult + Retro + Indie, Film

• Cult Fave: El Topo

  	EL TOPO (Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mexico, 1970) If not the granddaddy of cult films, El Topo is at least the progenitor of Midnight Movies, that strain of micro-genre or weirdo niche art films best enjoyed at the witching hour. El Topo is the bastard son of the Spaghetti Western and French performance << FULL POST >>

• Cult Fave: The Killers

  	THE KILLERS (Don Siegel, 1964) Loosely based on an Ernest Hemmingway short story, The Killers is star-studded, in color, and hard-boiled like a crime film should be. Tough guys Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager) bump off Johnny North (John Cassavetes). But the ease of putting down North troubles << FULL POST >>

• News Dump: The Cult Stream New Single

  	Ian Astbury and the boys in The Cult have released "Dirty Little Rock Star," the first single from the new album Born Into This as an advance web stream. Check it the press release: Roadrunner Records recently announced the signing of multi-platinum alternative rock band The Cult last month. The influential << FULL POST >>

• Boy’s Best Fiend: Baxter

  	BAXTER (Jerome Bouvine, 1989, France) Based on the novel by Ken Greenhall, Baxter plays like a pitch-black Benji movie had the mongrel been a bull terrier sociopath. The majority of Jerome Bouvine’s film is told from Baxter’s point of view. Voiced with deadpan ferocity by Maxine Leroux, Baxter is plagued << FULL POST >>

• Daniel Johnston @ The Magic Stick (2/5/08)

  	Say what you will about Daniel Johnston – freak, tortured artist, genius, or all of the above – but when the cult folk-hero took the stage in Detroit's at-capacity Magic Stick, the man came off more like your kooky grandfather singing some songs at a family reunion than a musical << FULL POST >>

• Cult Fave: Death Game

  	DEATH GAME (Peter S. Traynor, 1977) Every man’s fantasy becomes one man’s nightmare in this twisted tale of a man home alone that’s paid a visit by a pair of nubile, nutty hippie girls. That’s the lurid tagline for Death Game, and it largely comes true. However, in the hands of << FULL POST >>

• Cult Fave: Crime Wave

  	CRIME WAVE (John Paizs, 1985) An unfortunate victim of Sam Raimi’s Crimewave (released the same year) and being Canadian, John Paizs’s Crime Wave had “The Big” tacked on to the title before being dumped onto VHS and slipping into obscurity. Starring Paizs as Stephen Penny, a quiet man, the writer-director never << FULL POST >>

• Tribulation 99

  	Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (Craig Baldwin, 1992)Think of Craig Baldwin’s 1992 film as being the ultimate conspiracy movie. Created out of miles of found footage with origins as disparate as Mexican Lucha Libre films, newsreels, Japanese schlock science fiction, Blaxploitation classics, and even a Bond film (to << FULL POST >>

• Cult Fave: Cannibal Girls

  	who stopped for lunch...ended up staying for dinner." Greasy, deadpan, and seemingly spoken after 17 cups of Sanka, it's a line that brings to mind Thanksgiving, Eli Roth's horrorlarious contribution to the trailers that linked the two Grindhouse features. The lines continue, of course; these films loved to cozy violence << FULL POST >>

• Cult Fave: The Five Deadly Venoms

  	FIVE DEADLY VENOMS/WU DU (Cheh Chang, 1978) From prolific chop socky producers Runme and Run Run Shaw, Five Deadly Venoms (aka Aka Wu Du and Five Venoms) is a classic in the pantheon of kung fu cinema. The plot pits five rivals against each other. Like the Food Network << FULL POST >>