Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Steven Lisberger’s cult classic ‘TRON’ (1982). The story of a “scruffy” programmer (Jeff Bridges), who gets sucked into the glowing gridlocked world of The Computer, where avatars who remain devoted to their “users” are forced by the evil “master control program” to fight for their lives in gladiatorial combat, is, on the surface, your stand...

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Agnieszka Smoczynska’s ‘The Lure’ (2015) (Córki Dancingu).  In an alternative 1980s outside of Warsaw, Poland, two mermaids, “Silver” and “Golden,” wash up onto the shore.  Soon taking up temporary refuge in a night club cabaret, the two sea-bound sisters do what any classic fairytale finned creature would do: perform nightly as si...

On this week’s deep dive, The Cultists present Eugene Kotlyarenko’s dark social media satire, ’Spree’ (2020). Loosely based on the 2014 Isla Vista spree killer, Elliot Rodgers, Spree twists the foundations of its tragic origins into something a little more universally tangible with Joe Keery’s “Kurt”—an Uber-style driver and aspiring internet streamer who will do anything to finally be seen, even...

On this week’s deep dive, The Cultists Present Quentin Dupieux’s  ‘Rubber’ (2010). Notoriously known as that movie where a tire gains psychokinetic powers and just enough sentience to go on a killing spree, this film often gets tragically mis-labeled as your standard B-rated monster movie horror romp. And yet, Rubber is anything but.  Once and best described as ‘Samuel Beckett by way of...

This week, The Cultists present Craig Denny's The Astrologer (1976). In 1976 a man named Craig Denny completed a very special film.  A film of significant grand importance to, well, only Craig Denny, really.  Essentially your standard vanity project to showcase Denny’s range of “skills,” The Astrologer tells the abridged tale of the alleged autobiography of Denny’s life as a conman, psyc...

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Tom Ford’s ‘Nocturnal Animals’ (2016).  The sophomore film by fashion industry icon Tom Ford, on its surface, “Nocturnal” is a gorgeous technical showcase of Ford’s skills behind the camera.  Which is why it comes as much more of a surprise that, for a film so beautiful, the core of Nocturnal Animals is all about the ugly underbell...

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Richard Kelly’s sleeper cult epic, 'Southland Tales' (2006) . In 2006, the writer and director of ' Donnie Darko' (2001) , Richard Kelly, released a very special film into a world that was simply not yet ready for it.  Sprawling in scope but jam packed with content, “Southland” is an anti-linear mosaic of fervent energy, ineffable tones...

On this week’s deep dive, The Cultists present Excess Baggage (1997).  An utterly perplexing and largely forgotten film, “Excess” tells the tale of a young sociopath with a penchant for pyromania whose impulsive plan to fake kidnap herself sets off a chain reaction of inconsequential events that will culminate in a sexual rendezvous with a mumbling high luxury thief in a car trunk.  Spor...

This week The Cultists present the Daniels’ bizarre and beautiful film Swiss Army Man (2016).   On the surface a WTF film about a lost man and a flatulent corpse, at its depths ‘Swiss’ is an introspective visual poem about life, love, and the devastating emptiness of loneliness and isolation.  Yet again an indie flick that is completely divisive among audiences, the one thing that c...

On this this week’s deep dive, The Cultists Present Hercules in New York (1969). Known largely as the film that starred a 22 year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first ever film appearance, "Hercules" is everything it promises to be: A film in which the demi-god son of Zeus, Hercules, well...goes to New York.   In prep for this one, Benji does the figurative heavy lifting by researching...

On this week’s deep dive, The Cultists present The Blair Witch Project (1999).  Marketed upon its release as a true story of real footage showcasing a group of lost filmmakers and their grisly demise, "Blair" quickly became a proto-viral obsession. And what started out as a simple, unassuming experiment in film-making-on-a-budget, quickly turned into one of the most profitable movies in the h...

On this week’s deep dive, The Cultists Present Harmony Korine's controversial cult flick ‘Spring Breakers’ (2012).  Booze, bikinis, pissing in the streets, temporal existentialism, Disney-girls-gone-wild, flirtation with French New Wave, Brechtian theater... this movie has a little bit of everything.  The one thing this film doesn’t have is an audience consensus on what to do with it. &n...

On this week’s deep dive, The Cultists Present The Blob (1958).  It came from outer space— a red gelatinous goo of surprisingly hardy structural integrity with one thing on its mind: slow, meticulous, all-consuming hunger-based homicide.  Starring an already very adult-looking Steve McQueen playing the haggard but charming 17-year-old boy who cried extraterrestrial wolf, this plucky litt...

On this week's deep dive, The Cultists Present Walter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985). The first and only directorial endeavor by the man who literally wrote The Book on film editing, Murch’s follow up “sequel” to the 1939 MGM classic, The Wizard of Oz, is a sequel like no other.  Produced four decades after its predecessor, and taking the stance that Oz is now a desolate horror show of a crumble...

This week The Cultists Present Michael Lehmann’s ‘Heathers’ (1989). On the surface, Heathers seems like just another flick about mean girls in high school, but lurking not even all that deeply under the film’s pastel veneer is a downright savage satire of the teen experience. Initially written by a young Daniel Waters as a three hour long film in the hopes of baiting Stanley Kubrick, Waters’ scrip...

This week, The Cultists Present Dominic Sena’s ‘Swordfish’ (2001). A film that on its surface is just another Hollywood bank job flick about cyber hacking and hostages, Swordfish still manages to stick out among the cache of big budget action films. But why? Is it the film’s notorious green and orange color pallet? Its heavy-handed hypocrisy? John Travolta’s mind-boggling facial hair? Hugh Ja...

This week The Cultists Present Nicolas Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1973). Heralded for decades as the inspiration for countless filmmakers that have come after, Don’t Look Now is a staple of nearly every seasoned director’s “Must See” list, and has inspired an almost baffling array of homages, from Schindler’s List to Pretty Little Liars.  London and Benji once again take the slow scenic route,...

Craig Schwartz is a puppeteer with a problem. He remains dedicated to The Craft, but the cold cruel world only cares about the gimmicky hacks that think that size matters. His only choice is to endure until one day he finds the key: a portal hidden behind the filing cabinets of his tedious day job, which directly allows him to slid into the cranial cavity of actor John Malkovich like a human meat...

Meet Jesse. She can’t read, she can’t write, and she delusionally wishes the moon would just look at her already, BUT she’s pretty. And, well, that’s all that matters, really.  From the neon-fueled mind that brought us the likes of ‘Drive’ and ‘Only God Forgives,’ Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Demon’ takes us on an alternate, but no less perilous and candy-lit route through the stucco jungle of Los...

On this week's annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Rob Cohen's The Fast and the Furious (2001).  This unassuming summer flick, filmed on a shockingly modest budget of only 40 million in the early days of 2001, was never supposed to be anything other than a one-off— a “lifestyle movie” examining the intimate network of the LA Street Racing scene with a bit of petty larceny thrown in. Wit...

This week The Cultists Present Robert Longo's Johnny Mnemonic (1995). The year is 2021. A mysterious virus has swept through the globe and one man holds the cure. The catch? That cure is embedded in the 160 GB neural cortex implant now seeping data all over his brain. It will kill him. Or, at least, it would, if that man wasn’t one Keanu Reeves.  With a screenplay by cyberpunk founding father...

This week The Cultists Present Walter Hill’s ‘Streets of Fire’ (1984).  Following the success of '48 Hours' in 1982, Hill and co. were given carte blanche by Universal to do whatever their hearts desired. Hill’s greatest wish? A Rock and Roll fable set in an unknown time and place. A world filed with motorcycle chases, rockstars, gang wars, neon lit diners, and wet hardboiled streets—and all...

This week, The Cultists Present Stephen Herek's Critters (1986). Once upon a strange and otherworldly time—otherwise known as 1986—the cinematic landscape gave us a gift. Sporting the tag line “hangry hairballs from outer space,” the titular Critters have only two goals: fuck shit up and then eat it.   Brought to us by the fever dream team who would later go on to create the likes of ‘Bi...

This week The Cultists Present David Cronenberg‘s  A Dangerous Method (2011). A not-so-intimate insider film about the foundational years of psychoanalysis and the Will They/Won’t They smoldering friendships of Carl Jung,  Sabina Spielrein, and Sigmund Freud, A Dangerous Method is all about its source materials. From reproducing the personal letters of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud’s priva...

 This week The Cultists Present Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996). This film was marketed as your standard mid-90s soft-core erotic tale, and yet, in typical Greenaway form, there is nothing standard about it. A deeply insider film about calligraphy fetishism, formalist objectification, and 10th century Japanese literary references—all culminating in a climax of Ewan McGregor getting t...