According to BBC’s online entertainment writer Stephen Dowling, in his article When a cult film's not a cult film, Tarantino's films pay tribute to grindhouse films - the B-movies, Blaxploitation and Hong Kong martial arts films that used to play in scruffy cinemas in rundown areas.
“Quentin Tarantino arguably became the coolest director of the 1990s, responsible for the iconic failed-heist film Reservoir Dogs and its follow-up, the circuitous Pulp Fiction,” enthuses Mr Dowling.
“Both were steeped in references to an earlier, less sophisticated era of movie-making-funky, contemporary soundtracks, sudden outbreaks of violence, sharp, hip dialogue that pointed to the days of 1970s B-movies.”
Looking Back Over The Years:
However despite Dowling’s glowing review of Tarantino’s films, Andrew Leavold, who owns and manages Australian online film store Trash Video, is less than impressed with what he describes as post modernism gone mad.
“At the moment you’ve got a retro movement of a retro movement and its kind of like the 90s feeding on the 70s revival of the 50s, “ says Mr Leavold,
“We also have the benefit of hindsight now to say the 50’s was a golden era or the 30’s was a golden period but when you actually look at those decades, god knows how much generic pap was getting churned out but we choose to forget and we only elevate those 10 or 30 films out of the decade that people know about to make a generalisation about”.
“It’s kind of reductionism gone insane where you shrink your frame of reference to a very tiny selection and if you shrink what a cult film is down to 10 films and then start making sweeping generalisations about that short list you will come up with some very wrong conclusions.”
Making a Judgement Call:
Nevertheless drawing these types of conclusions is what Luke Buckler who stocks the shelves of Planet Video in Western Australia does daily. Mr Buckler says staff need to constantly make judgement calls when stocking sections of the store devoted to cult.
“A couple of years ago a film came out called Dead Mans Shoes and it’s a Shane Meadows film about a brother who wants to revenge his brothers mistreatment,” he said.
“The film had copious amounts of violence in it but at the same time, a great story and we made a judgement call to put it in the cult section.
“We also had a big debate about Snakes on a Plane.”
And it is a debate that has no end in sight as animated discussions will continue to be fuelled by movies such as David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Both of which flopped at the box office yet have experienced a gradual rise to cult status over time. Conversely, in 1980, Plan 9 from Out of Space won Ed Wood Jr a posthumous Golden Turkey Award for the worst movie ever made. Nevertheless the director has a number of classic cult films in his filmography, all of which are the subject of numerous websites, discussions and a biopic directed by Tim Burton in 1994.
In Conclusion:
According to Tim Dirks on his Greatest Films website, cult films follow no rules or pattern. Consequently, trying to find a definition for one might be as pointless as attempting to eat soup with chopsticks but for those compelled to try, one definition of a cult film is probably and simply: A film watched by one hundred people ten hundred times.
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