MALLrAts AT 25

“Back in 1995, Mallrats was absolutely classified as a sophomore slump - and should have been,” admits director Kevin Smith, revisiting his out-of-time second feature on its 25th birthday. “Ironically enough, the movie has aged incredibly well - to the point where nobody remembers its failures but the director himself. He carries it with him like a cross - or herpes.”

Back in the early ’90s, Smith was riding high on a wave of unexpected success following the release of his hit debut feature Clerks - a rough-and-ready convenience-store comedy that helped herald in a whole new era of indie cinema. It was during his whirlwind period that Smith first conceived of the idea for its follow-up, a movie that celebrated all the colourful corners of pop culture that he loved from his youth - from comics to movies and everything in between. On paper, Mallrats looked set to be a guaranteed crowd-pleaser but on release, audiences had different ideas.

“The dark origins of trace right back to had won the Filmmaker Trophy. I thought it might have been a -like joke where I get up on stage and they dump pig’s blood on me,” he laughs, “but afterwards there was a party, where I met Jim Jacks. Jacks was the producer of , and - and he loved . He asked me if I knew what I wanted to do next and I said ‘I’ve been thinking about making a movie called - which was but in a mall.’”