cult classic Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Since last September, at Fantastic Fest, it became immediately apparent that Repo! The Genetic Opera was due for a cult following, and a successful roadshow run last November and December seemed to confirm as much. I wasn't the biggest fan of Darren Lynn Bousman's goth-rock horror musical at the time, and don't exactly see myself giving it another look any time soon, but when its DVD release hasn't prevented fans from organizing summer screenings with shadow casts far and wide, it's futile to deny that it has at least an audience beyond home video and into the realm of true theatrical cultdom.

Meanwhile, the sheer sloppiness of Tommy Wiseau's infamous The Room has it similarly garnering underground popularity. I settled for seeing it on Cartoon Network when Adult Swim aired it as their idea of an April Fool's joke, and it became much more of a chore to sit through than I could've possibly imagined (and it's not like the constant commercial breaks weren't helping).

Would it have been much better with a crowd? I couldn't say, as the appeal hasn't quite reached Central Florida yet, but I ask: just because a film has reached the ranks of something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, does that mean it truly deserves to? What are your personal criteria for a proper cult classic? What's your fondest memory of audience partici... pation, and what other films do you feel stand to join the ranks of the modern midnight movie that maybe haven't quite crept up on the ol' cultural radar just yet?

I think we can all agree that the 1980 roller-disco romance Xanadu isn't exactly what most people would call the height of film making achievement. But as a 5-year-old girl (yeah, I watched movies at a really young age -- strange, I know), it was possibly the best thing I had ever seen. The story of a young artist named Sonny (played by Michael Beck) slaving away recreating album covers (is that even a job?) and the muse who inspires him to pack it in to start the roller disco of his dreams may have been a huge success on the Billboard charts, but the film barely broke even at the box-office -- my god, the spandex budget alone would have bankrupted the production. Of course, none of that mattered to me as I watched Olivia Newton-John glide across the floor to the tunes of E.L.O.

So in a movie chock full of guilty pleasures, the scene in which Gene Kelly and Beck envision their perfect club is by far my favorite. Combining a big band sound with the new wave rock of The Tubes may sound like a horrible idea on paper, but when you watched those worlds collide on stage it took two great songs and turned them into one. guess you could say this was my introduction to the mash-up.

Xanadu Fun Facts:

• The film was an unofficial remake of the 1947 film Down to Earth starring Rita Hayworth.
• John Wilson was inspired to create the Razzie Awards after catching Xanadu playing on a 99-cent double-feature with Can't Stop the Music.
• Andy Gibb was originally cast to play Sonny.
• Xanadu was Gene Kelly's last musical performance.

Dancin'

What sounded like one of the year's most ill-fitting and head-scratching projects -- Neil LaBute and Nicolas Cage (of all combos) getting together to remake Robin Hardy's 1973 chiller The Wicker Man (a true cult classic if ever there was one) -- ends up being a half-compelling, half-goofy and half-redundant piece of remake revisionism. (Yes, that's three halves, but it's that weird a movie.) That's not to say you won't find a few really strong components in LaBute's (ultimately pointless) revisit ... but it'll take a straight face and a eagle's eye to find the good stuff. And even then, the only people who should bother with the remake are the ones who simply can't be hassled renting the original because it's old and British.

Cage stars as state cop Ed Malus, a hard-working and noble sort of everyman hero, whose story begins with a mysterious, deadly roadside explosion and the malaise that comes only when a cop loses two civilians ... and the bodies are never found. After stewing around in his misery juices for a few days, Ed receives a letter from an old lover: She needs him to make the trek out to a private and very isolated island off the coast of Washington because her daughter's gone missing and there's nobody on the island who can help.

After bribing a local pilot and mildly butting a few heads upon his arrival, Edward settles in with the meat of the mystery. But the off-kilter community of Summersisle, which is composed almost exclusively of unfriendly females, indentured males and billions of bees, does not take too kindly to Eddie's arrival. (It probably doesn't help that he has the word "male" as part of his last name.) Indeed, most of The Wicker Man consists of Cage flaccidly interrogating a series of very sneaky women before the mystery is laid bare with a finale that (thankfully) hasn't been monkeyed with too much.