Cult Classics

Total Film

The Modern Guide to Movies

Total Film2 min read
Cult Classics
The world of cinema today, and indeed the last few decades, may sometimes feel populated entirely by big-budget superhero films, polished family animation, oversized spy thrillers, sci-fi sequels and award-baiting costume dramas. But look just behind
Total Film1 min read
Total Film
Bookazine Editorial Editor Erlingur Einarsson Senior Art Editor Stephen Williams Compiled by Sarah Bankes Head of Art & Design Greg Whitaker Editorial Director Jon White Managing Director Grainne McKenna Magazine Editorial Group Editor-in-Chief Jane
Total Film18 min read
The Greatest Cult Movies Of All Time
Coming at the height of the race to make ‘the next Star Wars‘, notorious hype-monger Cannon Films released a live-action version of the Mattel toy line starring Dolph Lundgren as Eternian prince He-Man, Frank Langella as evil sorcerer Skeletor, and a
Total Film6 min read
Hopelessly Devoted To Cult Cinema
With just a jump to the left of mainstream cinema, you will find a place where a light burns for films ridiculous and rare, subversive and strange. These are the films the box office forgot, cemented in ardent admirers’ memories. Here is a cinema of
Total Film1 min read
So Cult It's Not
Kinky and subversive stage play, written as an homage to Golden age B movie sci-fi — the movie adap is so catchy it's had the longest release in film history. Oft-quoted Brit classic which found its way into public consciousness. Richard E Grant's ad
Total Film1 min read
Cult Leaders
TV-com alum whose kinetic genre homages carry a very British spin. SEE Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World's End Former SNL-er who successfully upscaled his best characters. SEE Wayne's World, So I Married An Axe Murderer, Austin Powers Moustached
Total Film6 min read
Friday The 13th
Let me give you some advice on the film business – anyone who sets out to make a franchise is doomed. William Goldman was right – no one in Hollywood knows anything. None of us knew what we had with Friday The 13th. When you have a franchise it is lu
Total Film2 min read
Ringu's Sadako Crawls Out Of The TV
When Hideo Nakata's dread-drenched horror movie Ringu bowed in Japan in January 1998, Hollywood was echoing Wes Craven's Scream by cranking out post-modern, teen-centric scare fare. Ringu, with its slow-burn plotting, grainy images and limp-haired gh
Total Film10 min read
Flash gordon
It's one of the biggest ‘what ifs?’ in cinema history. How different would modern Hollywood look had George Lucas succeeded in his mission to nab the film rights to Flash Gordon in the ‘70s? Of course, what happened next has become the stuff of legen
Total Film9 min read
Suspiria
Some weeks into the shoot of Suspiria, American star Jessica Harper was approached by Italian director Dario Argento and handed a brown paper bag. “Inside was this mound of wriggling maggots,” she recalls, a look of horror twisting her finely drawn f
Total Film1 min read
Blue Velvet
David Lynch's work with the composer Angelo Badalamenti began here, with Lynch communicating his wants in moods: “Beautiful, cosmic, floating.” Luxuriating over an almost nauseatingly plush backdrop, Badalamenti's piercing theme sets the seductive bu
Total Film4 min read
Auto eroticism
in the mid-1980s, several years before Canadian auteur David Cronenberg and English producer Jeremy Thomas collaborated on an adaptation of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, they talked of having a crack at another ‘unfilmable’ book, J.G. Ballard's 197
Total Film9 min read
The Warr iors
It's nice to think that maybe something you did over 40 years ago still, as we say, plays,” remarks Walter Hill, reflecting on his 1979 cult hit, The Warriors. Over four decades on, the film remains a fan favourite that lures followers to events such
Total Film1 min read
Akira
In dystopian Neo-Tokyo, 2019, gang member Tetsuo marvels at his friend Kaneda's trickedout motorcycle… With co-writer Izo Hashimoto, director Katsuhiro Otomo painstakingly adapted 1988's Akira (out now on 4K UHD) from his own 1982 manga. The Tron-ins
Total Film2 min read
BILL & TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY
Killed by robot duplicates, loveable dolts Bill and Ted battle Death for the right to live. Die Hard 2‘s William Sadler auditioned hard for the Reaper role, arriving with Czech accent ready. Adding clogs to compensate for Sadler's shortness (5ft 8in)
Total Film9 min read
Airplane!
Before Total Film even sits down and says a single word to Airplane! co-writer/ director Jim Abrahams, we've been punked. We should have known. Among the interview tidbits that accompanied the film in the 2005 Blu-ray release was an in-joke Abrahams
Total Film2 min read
Close-up
Why was ‘Don't call me Shirley’ the first scene to be shot? Scheduling. Basically Jon Davison [producer] scheduled it that way because David, Jerry and I had never directed a movie and that was such an easy scene. I think we shot all the cockpit stuf
Total Film6 min read
Wayne's World
Wayne Campbell was the brainchild of Mike Myers, a surprise candidate for schwinging success. Raised in Toronto's blue-collar suburbs, Myers was not the funny one at home. He was insecure about his “thick Canadian accent and acne scars”. But he was g
Total Film1 min read
What Happened Next…
The original Airplane! gave all three writer/directors careers, even though they didn't return for the sequel. Their follow-up spoof in 1984 was Top Secret! (starring a young Val Kilmer). It has become something of a cult favourite, although it was n
Total Film3 min read
RETROSPECTIVE Austin powers INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY
It's a very odd thing growing up in Canada in an English immigrant house,” smiles Mike Myers, tracing the homegrown origins of Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery. Following its 1997 release, this spy spoof launched a franchise, infected pop
Total Film1 min read
Crystal Visions
THE DARK CRYSTAL: THE ULTIMATE VISUAL HISTORY IS OUT NOW (TITAN). ■
Total Film7 min read
The Witches At 30
i was an aficionado of Roald Dahl for a long time before Nic Roeg proposed we do The Witches,” reveals the Grand High Witch herself, Anjelica Huston, talking to Total Film in 2020. In the late ‘80s, Hollywood royalty Huston had already taken the indu
Total Film2 min read
Carrie's Blood Bath
They're all going to laugh at you!” promises teenage Carrie's cruel mother as she sets off to prom in Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's novel. As much as audiences might hope the shy high schooler (Sissy Spacek) will get her happy en
Total Film9 min read
Tron
If Tron was any more ‘80s, it'd be wearing legwarmers and listening to Adam Ant on a Walkman. With its arcadeinspired plot, synth-heavy soundtrack and splashes of neon, Disney's 1982 sci-fi fantasy is unmistakably a product of its time. Beneath its r
Total Film6 min read
Camp classics
David Lynch admired it so much he used its wind noises for Eraserhead. Tim Burton made his best film about its maker. Even if Glen Or Glenda might not be on nodding terms with coherence, Ed Wood Jr.'s 1953 film is the kind of mess only one man could
Total Film7 min read
Dogme days
Dubbed ‘The Mad Prince’ by the Danish press after winning three prizes at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival for stylised WW2 tale Europa, Lars von Trier first mumbled the word “Dogme” to producing partner Peter Aalbæk Jensen back in 1993 on a sleeper tra
Total Film1 min read
Dogme: The Legacy
A series of low-budget, naturalistic, dialogue-driven US indies led by Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha), the Duplass brothers (The Puffy Chair) and Joe Swanberg (Kissing On The Mouth). While it's the closest we've since come to Dogme, “It was never a un
Total Film1 min read
The Dogme Founders: What Happened Next?
After The Idiots, von Trier wowed Cannes with lo-fi musical follow-up Dancer In The Dark, which picked up the Palme D'Or, but later soured his relationship after ill-advised Nazi gags at the Melancholia press conference. Last seen with Nymphomaniac (
Total Film6 min read
Hammer time
When Martin Scorsese was 11 or 12 years old, he'd visit his local picture house with his mates. “If we saw the logo of the Hammer films, we knew it was a very special picture, and we knew it was a certain type of film,” he said. He's referring, of co
Total Film8 min read
VHS FROM Nasties TO Nostalgia
Don't let the cumbersome aesthetic fool you: it was a god in its day. It enjoyed a tantalising title position with ‘sex’ and ‘lies’ in a breakout indie hit. It formed a movie title with the word ‘drome’, promising illicit delights within. It spawned
Total Film3 min read
Rewind
“My older sister hired Friday the 13th Part II and The Boogeyman and sat me down to watch them with her when I was eight. I had to sleep in with my parents for the next six months but it started my lifelong fascination with the horror genre.” Jamie G
Total Film2 min read
Giallo
Giallo is Italian for yellow, the colour of the covers of the cheap paperback crime-mystery novels that flooded the country in the 1930s. These were initially Italian translations of Agatha Christie, Ed McBain, Raymond Chandler et al, and then, inevi
Total Film2 min read
The Tf Brain Cult Classics
1. Which 1986 flop was the first theatrically released feature based on a Marvel property? 2. Which title connects Howard Hawks with Brian De Palma? 3. Who directed, for want of a better word, 2003's The Room? 4. True or false? The Dark Crystal recei
Total Film8 min read
John Carpenter Celebrating The Master Of Horror
Hang out on Film Twitter long enough and you'll eventually stumble across someone posing this chin-scratcher: ‘Which director is responsible for the longest, unbroken run of classic movies?’ There are cases to be made for plenty of filmmakers: Coppol
Total Film2 min read
Best In Show
Bored travellers on the eponymous spacecraft bicker, bomb unstable planets and fend off a beachball alien in this bluecollar, stoner riposte to the solemnity of Kubrick's 2001. Carpenter and co-writer Dan O'Bannon padded out their USC graduation shor
Total Film2 min read
Sultan Of Synths
As a musician, John Carpenter has never been one to blow his own trumpet. Asked about his influence on later composers, he'll claim ignorance. He describes himself as “sort of a bum in music” or even “a second-rate bum.” “I have minimal chops,” he sa
Total Film2 min read
Resident Evil
Back in 2010, when John Carpenter released The Ward – his 17th and, to date, final movie – Total Film visited the legendary director's Hollywood pad for a chat. Here, Editor-at-Large Jamie Graham takes us on a tour… Just as Halloween's bogeyman Micha
Total Film6 min read
John Carpenter fan Club
Obviously Carpenter's The Thing is one of the greatest films of all time. I think very few people would dispute this. Masterful dramatics aside, the technical work is still unmatched. I'm not sure those effects could even be duplicated, given the pro
Total Film6 min read
Trash Flow The Career Of John Waters
Paving a pathway for mavericks and bad-taste mavens from David Lynch to Todd Solondz, the Farrelly Brothers, Harmony Korine and beyond to follow, Waters developed his appetite for disruption at an early age. As a kid, he would put on outrageous puppe
Total Film6 min read
Kathryn Bigelow Life In Pictures
Shot for pocket change in just 22 days, Bigelow's feature debut is a biker noir that takes its cues from Easy Rider and The Wild One. Co-written and co-directed by Monty Montgomery, whom Bigelow met while studying at Colombia University, The Loveless
Total Film7 min read
My Life In Pictures William Friedkin
Al Pacino is a cop on the hunt for a serial killer who is targeting gay men… “Cruising was… challenging. The world of S&M hadn't been portrayed in a mainstream movie before – but I don't think even then people were aware of how far I was prepared to
Total Film2 min read
Jane Campion
Born in Wellington in 1954, Kiwi Jane Campion already had a degree in anthropology and an art-school diploma before she turned to filmmaking. An early short, 1982's Peel, showed her keen eye for familial dysfunction in suburban Australia, and saw her
Total Film3 min read
Fantastic Tales
An out-of-work clown faces a cannibalistic landlord in a darkly funny dystopia. “I was living above a butchery store and I woke up every day to the sound of the knife, and my ex-wife said, ‘Oh, they are killing the neighbours and we have to leave ver
Total Film2 min read
Takashi Miike
Born to Korean parents near Osaka, Japan, Takashi Miike's start came at the Yokohama Vocational School Of Broadcast And Film, where he was taught by Cannes-winning Japanese director Shôhei Imamura (The Ballad Of Narayama). Though Miike's work strikes
Total Film2 min read
Heads You Lose
IF you had to pinpoint the exact moment Canadian writer/director David Cronenberg joined the big leagues, you'd pick this gob-whalloping SFX showcase, which has balls and brains to spare. Especially brains. In an anodyne conference room, an egghead t
Total Film2 min read
Life Of Brian's Crucifixion Scene
The perfect capper to a satire that's routinely voted The Greatest Comedy Ever Made, Monty Python's Life Of Brian concludes with the execution of Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman), a very naughty boy who's persistently mistaken for the Messiah. OK, so it

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