Product Description

THE PITCH For almost as long as I can remember, movies were always important, an event, like church, the only difference being that the queue to get in to see Jungle Book was a fair bit longer. But movies took you out of yourself, made you belong to something, a quasi-religious experience if you like. Which is why, today, whenever I go to the cinema, I spend the first minutes of every movie worrying in case the audience is going to talk all the way through it. This book has something to do with all that but it really exists for one reason only - to increase your enjoyment of the movies. If you want a thoroughly exhaustive reference work, put this back on the shelf now. If you want a film buff's guide to cinema as an art form, sorry. Or if you want a list of the cast and crew on every film, best go elsewhere, there are certain websites we'd recommend. But if you want several hundred socking good reasons to visit your local rep house, watch a late-night rarity on TV or splash out on that DVD movie you've been promising yourself, you'll find them in here. There are no dull films in this book. Mad films, yes. Great films, certainly. Films that provoke fierce disputes as to whether they're well cool or, well, crap: you bet. So if your ambition is to spend even more of your life watching films than you already do, this should serve you well. Now go. Use it wisely. And may the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end at least once. Paul Simpson

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40523 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Synopsis
This new edition of the Rough Guide to Cult Movies offers a new improved blend of essential trivia and informed opinion as it takes you on a tour of the most compellingly weird - and weirdly compelling - films in the world. From 'A Bout de Souffle' to 'Zoltan Hound of Dracula', this guide selects films to savour in every genre from circus movies to westerns of all flavours - spaghetti and sauerkraut. New genres have been added - gambling and vampires - and this edition includes a miscellany of movie trivia identifying, for example, the four women who have played Hamlet on screen, a peek at celluloid's greatest back stories (such as the rumours of munchkin mayhem in The Wizard Of Oz) and a personal selection of cult movies from the likes of Johnny Depp, Julie Christie, Kevin Spacey and Bert Kwouk.

Excerpted from The Rough Guide to Cult Movies by Paul Simpson, et al. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CULT MOVIES
A cult has been described as any cause, person or object admired by a minority - a definition which comes awfully close to embracing Jerry Lewis' later work. But without cults in general (and cult films in particular) what a grey old world this would be.

There are almost as many different definitions of what makes a cult movie as there are cults in the world today. The movies, where one man's masterpiece is always liable to be someone else's Howard The Duck, is a world where no opinion is final and deciding what makes a film `cult' can be as intellectually arbitrary an exercise as deciding whether a film is `good' or `bad'. There is also a considerable difference between the films we watch over and over again and the films which are mentioned in critics' lists of greatest ever movies: the gap between the films we admire and the films we love, however irrationally.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines `cult' as:
1) a system of religious worship especially as expressed in ritual
2) a devotion or homage to a person or thing
3) a popular fashion especially followed by a specific section of society
4) denoting a person or thing popularised in this way.

The dictionary, in its linguistic wisdom, assigns the last definition to a cult figure or cult film. In cinematic terms, the word `cult' has often been applied to films starring 50ft women on a mission of personal revenge, killer tomatoes, or an entire western town populated by midgets. Sometimes this has been extended to include movies that are either `so bad they're good' (the clichéd example of this genre being any work by the `world's worst director' Ed Wood) or are the objects of a quasi-religious worship (Star Wars).
The word `cult' also implies some kind of secrecy, a knowledge hidden from the masses. So a cult film may be the preserve of a few (eg Where's Poppa?, the comedy where George Segal's brother, dressed in a gorilla costume, is implicated in the gang rape of
a policeman in drag) or have depths missed by the casual viewer (while many of us have never wondered what was in Marsellus' case in Pulp Fiction, for others it is a celluloid Holy Grail).

THE CULT OF CASABLANCA
Umberto Eco, author of The Name Of The Rose (which became a cult book and, to a lesser extent, a cult film) identifies Casablanca as a cult movie. This sounds ludicrous as Casablanca is one of the most famous films of all time. But Eco goes on to say that: 'The work… must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan's private sectarian world, a world about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of the sect recognise through each other a shared expertise.'
By this definition, Casablanca is a cult movie, as is Pulp Fiction, just as, in the adjacent kingdom of the small screen, Monty Python is still a cult in that people (mostly men) still go around saying 'it has ceased to be' and nudging each other hilariously in the ribs. For the purposes of this book, we have taken Eco's definition and added
a few other criteria of our own.
Any movie mentioned here should therefore:
1) inspire people to go around quoting it to each other or generally inspire an unreasonable amount of devotion long after the fickle masses have forgotten the movie's existence
2) be good but under-appreciated, possibly because in a marketing machine increasingly built on stars and event movies, they were just too different to be guaranteed a long residence at a cinema near you
3) be an undiscovered gem, possibly because it's foreign or went straight to video in this country
4) be so bad it really is worth watching
5) be compelling for some other reason - the script may stink but there's a song, a stunt or something that makes it all worthwhile
6) be a mainstream film which nonetheless has that indefinable something we can only describe as `juice'
7) not be Police Academy 2-7.
The only thing to add to that is that we have made a conscious effort to include as many different actors, directors, genres and countries as possible. That's because we think it's possible to enjoy The Battleship Potemkin and the moment Springtime For Hitler breaks into 'Don't be foolish, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party', to feel a great and irrational exhilaration when you hear John Belushi chant: 'Toga! Toga! Toga!', or cheer as an outraged John Wayne thunders into battle shouting: 'Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!'
Anyway, enough already...

Customer Reviews

SMALL BUT PERFECTLY FORMED
This is without doubt a very useful book.

With hundreds of reviews covering every genre, it's an intelligently written and witty little number, more than capable of pointing you in the right direction of many great films you might not have otherwise considered. It's so user-friendly, in fact, I guarantee you'll be flicking through its pages on a regular basis in relation to your viewing and buying habits. I certainly have, and often still do (LONE STAR, 1996, Dir. John Sayles, p449/Westerns, being my most recent DVD acquisition).

And due to its easily-accessible nature and scale, THE ROUGH GUIDE TO CULT MOVIES, I kid you not, makes for ideal reading matter in the, er, powder room. Trust me, you'll be amazed at your capacity for info-retention during these sessions - I'm rather fond of the following quote, which seems to have lodged itself firmly in the brain for no particular reason: "You're not only wrong, you're wrong at the top of your voice" (Spencer Tracy, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, 1954, Dir. John Sturgess, p412/Thrillers). In one end, but not always out the other.

So, sit down, relax...and say hello to a small but perfectly formed mini-repository of facts and entertainment. It'll never outstay its welcome, that's for sure.


HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Not what's written on the tin
Don't be fooled, there is precious little about cult movies in this book. The book starts out with a very dubious definition of what constitutes a cult movie and then seemingly ignores this definition and presents reviews of predominantly mainstream films. Where cult movies do appear they tend to be regarded with disdain rather then reverence. For a much more informative and humorous review of cult movies see Jonathan Ross' excellent book "The Incredibly Strange Film Book".

Even more fun than Escape to Victory !
Full of fun, daft trivia (I can't get over the idea of David Niven as the Humphrey Bogart character in The African Queen), and probably one too many pictures of Elvis Presley. The genre-by-genre guide makes it east to dip in to. A very good stocking filler if you've got a friend or relative who's enthusiastic about the movies.