This alliteratively titled film is more about the margin than the mainstream. In fact, the movies it examines were far beyond the margin. Are they still? That's an important question to which I don't know the answer.
The birth of the midnight showing of cult films started in the early 1970s, in a political climate that was ripe for disillusioned, ironic film goers to pour their unrealized idealism into films that made heroes out of freaks. Six of those movies are highlighted in this film, which takes a non-flashy, straightforward talking head approach to examining how the movies were made, distributed, and received. Luckily the talking heads are the directors and the cinema owners who dared to show these films, often for years before they gathered a following. The films include, in temporal order, Jodorowsky's El Topo, Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Perry Henzell's The Harder they Come, John Waters' Pink Flamingos, Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Lynch's Eraserhead.
As one person in the film said, and I'm roughly quoting here: "A director doesn't make a cult film, an audience makes a cult film." and that's essentially what brings these films together. The right political climate, the right tone, the right distributor, the right director, essentially everything coming together to create the perfect word-of-mouth hit. Samuels chooses to allow critics to discuss the films but more importantly the directors themselves are on hand to examine and explain their work, thus showing directly the different thought processes that took place, but also indirectly how each personality is manifest directly in the film! Waters IS Pink Flamingos, O'Brien isn't just Riff Raff but also a huge chunk of Rocky, Lynch is industrial Philadelphia. These films are the directors and vice-versa precisely because they were low budget, underground, and made with such verve and dedication. I would daresay these directors are closer to their films than big budget, mainstream directors. That makes us closer to the films too.
Besides personality, a different aspect of film-making is described in each film. For example, for El Topo Jodorowsky describes how he combined different genres (spaghetti western, horror, coming of age, etc.) . Romero discusses shooting the closing scenes of his film in a style similar to the news reels of Vietnam and the other news shows of the day, with their growing depiction of the day-to-day senseless violence seemingly affecting the country at large. Waters describes the importance of filth as a theme and the Charles Manson trial as an influence on his films, while O'Brien and others discuss the difference between the stage version of Rocky versus the film (interestingly enough, audiences begin to co-opt the film and create their own stage version- thus bringing the film back to its theatrical roots).
This is what a documentary should be, the documentarist should allow the story to tell itself, not be the story itself. I'm no firm believer in captured objectivity, but I still fundamentally believe in a documentary's pedagogic powers. I want to learn something, dammit! I did here. And it also reminded me of what I love about cult movies and anything cult in general. Though seemingly marginal, cult has the power to make a person feel very much not alone. The receivers of that bit of culture are sharing something that the mainstream just can't and never will get. That knowledge in and of itself brings people together. Unfortunately, as the people in the film point out, this cult culture has become socially and materially acceptable, and what was once marginal is now hopelessly mainstream.
Leaving the theater, I just couldn't believe that out of the six films presented in the documentary, I had only seen Pink Flamingos and Rocky Horror Picture Show, and neither one at a midnight showing! Oh, the shame!
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