Moviedrome

Assault on Precinct 13 was the second film directed by John Carpenter. It has a tremendous cult reputation, as has his first, Dark Star, which he directed and co-wrote with Dan O'Bannon.

razil is the film that Michael Radford’s 1984 should have been. It has all the atmosphere and preoccupations of Orwell’s book, plus references to heavy metal comics, Eisenstein and Mad magazine. Gilliam said, when asked where the story takes place, ‘Somewhere on the Los Angeles/Belfast border’.

Get Carter is a nasty British gangster film. For some reason, all British movie gangsters are extremely nasty - from Richard Attenborough’s Pinky Doyle in Brighton Rock in 1947 through Richard Burton’s and Bob Hoskins’ anti-heroes in, respectively, Villain (1971) and The Long Good Friday (1980), up to and including The Krays (1990). All our gangster heroes (unlike Edward G. Robinson or Jean Paul Belmondo) are schizoid, sadistic arseholes who shoot people in the kneecaps and sentimentalise about their mums. Rather like the real thing, in fact.

Goin’ South was the second film Nicholson directed, the first being Drive, He Said. His third directorial effort, The Two Jakes, comes out this year. Goin’ South is a product of the old Nicholson/BBS gang who made Easy Rider. The cameraman was Nestor Almendros, the producers Harold Schneider and Harry Gittes, who lent his name to the character J.J. Gittes in Chinatown.

Dead of Night is the classic British horror film, indeed the classic horror film. No expense was spared making it; obviously, film was, at one time, considered an essential industry over here. This is a portmanteau film - that is, it consists of a series of different short stories connected by linking episodes. In some films of this type, the stories are all directed by the same person; in this instance, there are five cautionary tales and four directors. With one exception - a golfing anecdote based on a short story by H.G. Wells - they are all tales of horror and mounting fear.

The Terminator is a 1980s L.A. science-fiction film. It has all the necessary elements of the sub-genre: punks, policemen, chases down alleys, tracking shots through the cop shop, an obsession with guns. What raises it above the level of the ordinary is the script and the Bad Man, who gets star billing. The script is credited to James Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd, respectively director and producer. This is a little misleading, since the real source of the story is an old episode of The Outer Limits called ‘Soldier’, the story of an assassin sent back in time to kill someone and change the future. This was written by Harlan Ellison.

The Honeymoon Killers is a genuine classic cult film. It is a rarely seen docu-drama about two ‘lonelyhearts murderers’ - Nurse Martha Beck and Ray Hernandez - who together killed several of Ray’s wives and girlfriends in the 1940s. At one point in the film, we are told the year is 1951, but there is no attempt at period verisimilitude; working on a tiny budget, the film-makers used cars from the late 1960s, and locations that always look the same whether we’re supposed to be in Alabama or New York. The film was shot in black and white by Oliver Wood. It bears a striking visual resemblence to Night of the Living Dead, the other cult masterpiece made in Pittsburgh at around the same time.

In 1954, Burt Lancaster played an American Indian in a psychological western called Apache, directed by Robert Aldrich. Eighteen years later, Lancaster appeared in another western by Aldrich which also dealt with the Apaches: Ulzana’s Raid. Apache had been made when the US cinema was re-evaluating its view of the American Indian, who in the bad old days of cowboy films had been generally portrayed as a villainous savage prone to the most hideous extremes of cruelty and violence. Ulzana’s Raid was made at the neight of the Vietnam war, and uses the American Indian for very different ends. As with Soldier Blue and Chato’s Land, Ulzana’s Raid depicts the west as a battleground between white people who basically had no business beig there and savage Indians prone to the most hideous extremes of cruelty and violence. By going to war with those they believe are ‘savages’, the 'civilized’ people in each film turn out to be exactly like them.

The Loved One is based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. The script is by Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern, both of whom had had horrible experiences in Hollywood from which they drew for the film’s opening scenes. The transition from the movie business to the cemetery trade is seamless - after all, they’re pretty much the same thing. Richardson had already directed The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Tom Jones, and this was his first American film. It has an all star cast: James Coburn is a customs inspector, Liberace sells caskets, John Gielgud and Robert Morley are members of the loathsome Santa Monica British Colony.

An American Werewolf in London is part of a very honourable cult genre: the werewolf/vampire film. The rules of these films are standardised. Vampires are blood-drinking, living corpses whose mere bite can make you one of their number. Werewolves are people who turn into wolves, or wolf-like humanoids, at every full moon, and their bite turns other humans into werewolves. Vampires can only be killed by fire, removal of the head or a stake through the heart. Werewolves can only be killed by a silver bullet or the SAS.

Yojimbo is a samurai film made by the greatest of all film directors, Akira Kurosawa. If the story seems familiar, it may be because it was remade, in 1964, by Sergio Leone with the title A Fistful of Dollars.

Robert Altman, the director of A Wedding, was one of the top names in American cinema in the 1970s. He directed M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs Miller, which I would offer up as his best films. Not all of his were great of course: he was also the director responsible for the interminable Quintet and the truly awful A Perfect Couple. But at his best, there was no other film-maker like him. He was a master of the big ensemble film, much of which appeared to be improvised or scripted by the actors. His most complex extravaganzas were the brilliant Nashville and A Wedding.

The Phenix City Story was directed in 1955 by Phil Karlson, who also directed the 1962 Elvis Presley remake of Kid Galahad as well as From Hell to Eternity and the rat movie Ben. It’s an example of that much-loved cult genre, the exposé film. Other examples are Reefer Madness, I Was a Communist for the FBI and Midnight Express.

The script for Walk on the Wild Side was written by John Fante, an American author of some cult renown, from a book by Nelson Algren (author of The Man with the Golden Arm). It is a total melodrama, about a naive farm boy in love with a sculptress who has become a prostitute. The farm boy is played by the English actor Laurence Harvey, who played upper-crust Americans in a number of films, most notably in The Manchurian Candidate. In Walk on the Wild Side, Harvey is supposedly from Texas, although his accent is more that of a southern gennelmun…

Sergio Corbucci was also the director of the cult western Django, which was banned in Britain for many years. Although The Big Silence is his best film, it has never been shown publicly here or in the United States. It’s easy to see why. The film, like most Italian westerns, is incredibly bleak and pessimistic; but worse, it has the most horrible ending of any film I’ve ever seen. It was considered so strong that the producers asked Corbucci to shoot another. Apparently, that version played in certain Middle Eastern countries, where action films are popular but they have to have a happy ending.

A Bullet for the General - original title: Quien Sabe? - was directed in 1966 by Damiano Damiani, a politically oriented director who intended it to be a commentary on United States intervention in Latin America.