They still make cult movies, don't they? It's hard to tell sometimes, seeing as how many of the flicks that became staples at North America's repertory theatres and campus film societies – e.g., The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Flamingos – are now pushing 40. And as we learned from all those nights we spent watching Logan's Run, anything that old is not to be trusted.
It's not that there aren't newer films that are just as deranged as the original midnight movies. The trouble was that with the waning of the rep circuit and the audience's isolation and fragmentation due to home video and DVD, it became more difficult for a prime piece of cinematic audacity to develop the following it might have once earned via late-night engagements at neighbourhood theatres.
One very welcome development in Toronto's film scene is the resurgence of the cult movie, presented the way it should be – on a big screen in a room full of rowdy patrons, rooms like the revived Fox Theatre in the Beaches and Trash Palace (see www.trashpalace.ca for schedule and not-so-secret secret location). Ironically, with their retro-grindhouse, cult-oriented programming, such venues cater not to the boomers who watched El Topo whilst stoned out of their minds, but to later generations of movie fans whose education in cinema's seedier side was conducted principally through home viewing and who are hungry for a more participatory experience.
Presented at Innis Town Hall at the University of Toronto's Innis College and open to the public free of charge, the Free Friday Film series is another sign of life. Brandishing a purist attitude (they only screen 35-mm prints – no DVDs), the student programmers are admirable for their willingness to add new faves to an increasingly musty canon of cult flicks. Screening Friday night is one such candidate, which has already earned the reputation as one of the decade's most mystifying yet delightful movie curios.
Here's some of the Innis screenings
- Funky Forest: The First Contact (tonight)
- Open Your Eyes - Oct. 3
- Buffalo 66 - Oct. 17
- La Haine - Nov. 21
Here's an earlier post on Trash Palace. And here's a 2005 effort -- Cult movie experiences in theatres: Time to let go?