Cult Movies

Hmmmm... How about The Crow, Somewhere in Time, The Princess Bride, or Labrynth? Or how about a film from Kevin Smith? Or- I dunno- STAR WARS!! Yes I know its very well known, but so are The Exorcist and Apocolypse Now. The same goes for The Godfather Part I and II. And howabout an anime movie? Ghost in the Shell or Akira or one from Studio Ghibli would be excellent choices. Star Trek II- The Wrath of Khan would have been a great choice to cover the cult Star Trek franchise. Another lesser known movie that I would have liked to see, but wouldn't have anticipated would be the MST3K classic, Manos the Hands of Fate. It gives the included Showgirls and Plan 9 from Outerspace a run for their money in its badness. Also, if you had to give a Hitchcock movie a space for his status as a cult director, I would have listed Vertigo or Psycho. Heck, even The Birds is more culturally relevant than Dial M for Murder, which was included. Don't get me wrong, this is really worth buying, but I just would recommend the authors to write a sequel to cover all the stuff they excluded.

"Cult Movies" isn't so much a rumination on the existence and proliferation of cultish behavior around certain movies as it is a guide to some of the more venerated and talked-about cult films. It really works best as bathroom reading, where you can open to any page and read about "Blade Runner," "La Jetee," "A Clockwork Orange," "The Italian Job" and so on and so forth. A light diversion, and maybe that's all it was intended to be. And it works very well on that level. One thing really stands out: British film scholars have the foresight to include BOTH "Bill & Ted" movies in this tome?