Ten of the very best British cult movies

[DB7]

Ten of the very best British cult movies



Among them The Rebel, Repulsion, The Knack and How to Get It, Theatre of Blood, The Go-Between and Witchfinder General



Jeff Dawson



div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited { color:#06c; } There’s a wonderful moment in the spoof rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap when the band’s long-suffering manager is called to account for his act’s apparently diminishing popularity. They haven’t declined in stature at all, he asserts, it’s just that their appeal has become “more selective”.

You can argue till you’re blue in the face over what exactly constitutes a “cult” film — one whose life came later, on TV/video/DVD, after non-performance at the box office; one that was maybe too far ahead of its time for mainstream audiences to comprehend; perhaps a flick that induces devotees to dress up in silly costumes; or just that plain old guilty pleasure. Whatever the case, you can be assured of one thing — with a true cult film, selectivity will always be part of the appeal.

Too often these days, the adjective is tossed about rather liberally, cynically tacked onto fare spilling out of the bargain bin in the hope of resuscitating fading fortunes, or, more often, applied to movies that have actually been big popular hits. Make no mistake: the 10 films below will be far from household names. Instead, as minor classics, they have developed an ardent following, often only re-evaluated years later, as having made a unique and intriguing contribution to British cinema.

Costumes are optional, of course, but feel free to quote them at will...



Hell drivers (1957) d. Cy Endfield

Background: a noted magician and inventor of a pocket computer, Endfield was bran*ded a communist by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He came to Britain to restart his career, scoring a hit later with the 1964 epic Zulu. This, by comparison, is a small, taut thriller, though future Rorke’s Drifter Stanley Baker struts his stuff alongside the sterling British thesps Patrick McGoohan, Herbert Lom, William Hartnell, Sid James, Jill Ireland, Alfie Bass, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum and a youthful Sean Connery.

Plot: an ex-con starting at the Hawlett trucking company, Tom Yately (Baker), competes on the number of loads he can shift in a day. The macho posturing — not least against the menacing Red (McGoohan) — masks the corruption at the heart of the operation.

Key moment: in the greasy spoon, when Red kicks the chair from under Yately. “If you think you’re good enough to sit in my place,” he growls, “you have to prove it.”



Peeping Tom (1960) d. Michael Powell

Background: patriotic wartime movies such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp had Powell and Emeric Pressburger trumpeted as Britain’s finest film-making duo. On Powell’s first solo effort, however, he killed his career stone dead, notching up a movie reviled for its lurid voyeurism and violent sexual imagery. This psychological thriller has since been championed by Martin Scorsese as being ahead of its time, not least for its recog*nition of the seductive power of the camera.

Plot: a cold-fish cine-photographer, Mark (the pointedly Aryan-looking Carl Boehm), cajoles gullible, lonely women into taking part in his “documentary” before dispatching them with a spike on the end of his tripod, their deaths captured for posterity. (He had a troubled childhood, you know.)

Key moment: a blind woman (Maxine Audley) suspects something fishy going on in Mark’s poky flat. “All this filming isn’t healthy.”



The Rebel (1961) d. Robert Day

Background: despite huge success in the UK with his Half Hour radio and television programmes, Tony Hancock hungered for international film success. With this in mind, he had Galton and Simpson, who had written his most successful shows, attempt to broaden the appeal of his television persona by creating The Rebel.

Plot: a wage-slave office clerk quits his job and moves to Paris in search of fame and fortune as an artist. But his “childlike” work is loathed by the critics, and he finds favour only with the beats, until the art of a former roommate is mistaken for his own.

Key moment: Hancock’s Picasso-esque nude sculpture, Aphrodite at the Water Hole, is discovered by his landlady (a lovely cameo from Irene Handl): “You poor man. Fancy knocking around with women like that!”; “I’m not one of the realist school of art, I’m an impressionist”; “Well, it don’t impress me.”



The Hill (1965) d. Sidney Lumet

Background: again, a Yank at the helm, this time Lumet, best known for his courtroom thriller 12 Angry Men, and a proven master of claustrophobic tension. Adap*ted by Ray Rigby from his stage play, the film is set in a British prison camp in the Western Desert during the second world war. Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, Roy Kinnear, Ian Hendry, Alfred Lynch and Michael Redgrave fly the flag — and not least Sean Connery, on a Bond hiatus, as the granite-hard NCO, busted down to private.

Plot: in a “glasshouse” for insubordinates run by menacing drill officers, interns are forced to scale a self-constructed mound in the exercise yard, in full kit, until they collapse from heat exhaustion.

Key moment: the death of an inmate prompts a mutiny by the prisoners and the attempted exposure of the sadistic staff sergeant (Hendry) they hold responsible: “Right, you bastards, fall in!”



The Knack... and how to get it (1965) d. Richard Lester

Background: another US director gone native, Lester had helmed A Hard Day’s Night for the Beatles by the time he embarked on this wacky sex farce, set in the early days of swinging London. Winning the Palme d’Or seems appropriate for a film that has a strangely Gallic feel — with its jazzy John Barry score, tricksy new-wave cinematography and fleeting glimpses of the francophile actresses Jane Birkin and Charlotte Rampling.

Plot: “Some have it, some don’t,” as the slogan goes, teeing up a story in which a sad-sack schoolteacher, Colin (Michael Crawford), seeks lothario lessons from his lodger, Tolen (Ray Brooks). When a naïve out-of-towner, Nancy (Rita Tushingham), catches Colin’s eye, Tolen puts the moves on her, too.

Key moment: an exasperated Crawford nailing up their front door: “One lot of women is enough for any house.”



Repulsion (1965) d. Roman Polanski

Background: more than a decade before his own controversial flight from American justice for having relations with a minor,Polanski was exploring the question of sexual abuse in his first English-language film, a theme that would recur in his more celebrated Chinatown. Though already seen in such films as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the 22-year-old Catherine Deneuve made a name for herself with British audiences, setting up the classic ice-maiden persona she would reprise in movies such as the housewife-as-prostitute flick Belle de Jour.

Plot: left alone in her sister’s London flat over several days, a repressed Belgian manicurist, Carole (Deneuve), suffers a mental breakdown. With her own tormented past hinted at, the delusional young woman is soon meting out violent ends to gentlemen callers.

Key moment: convinced she is an intended victim of rape, Carole imagines arms reaching out of the walls to grab her.



Witchfinder General (1968) d. Michael Reeves

Background: an overdose killed Reeves just months after Witchfinder General wrapped, cutting short a promising career. In a manner similar to Peeping Tom, the film disgusted many critics, but it has since come to be reg*ar*ded as one of the great British horror films.

Plot: it is 1645, and the civil war has split the nation. The breakdown in social order affords witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) the opportunity to torture suspects and wreak terror. After his assistant rapes a woman trying to save her uncle, he is pursued by her Roundhead fiancé, Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy). But Hopkins sets a trap and frames them as witches.

Key moment: the uncle and two old women are tied and thrown into a moat to see if they are witches. “They swim — the mark of Satan is upon them. They must hang,” Hopkins declares. But one of the women has drowned. “She was innocent.”



The Go-Between (1970) d. Joseph Losey

Background: another director blacklisted by McCarthyites, the Wisconsin-born Losey also fled to Britain, where he reinvented himself as one of the most interesting directors of his time, using his émigré eye to unravel the complex*ities of the class system. The three films he made with Harold Pinter — The Ser*vant, Accident and The Go-Between — are hailed as his best. This one, from the novel by LP Hartley, scooped the Palme d’Or in 1971.

Plot: a tale of tragic love in fin de siècle England, as a 12-year-old, Leo (Dom*inic Guard), becomes a courier of love notes between a betrothed aristocrat, Marian (Julie Christie), and her forbidden paramour, farmer Ted (Alan Bates). Sparse dialogue, sumptuous visuals: never has Norfolk been so sunny.

Key moment: when the ever-inquisitive Leo asks the inevitable of her ladyship: “Why don’t you marry Ted?” “Because I can’t.”



Theatre of Blood (1973) d. Douglas Hickox

Background: probably the funniest, and certainly the campest, of all British horrors. Vincent Price is in his scene-chewing pomp as the hammy Shakespearian actor Edward Lionheart, wreaking vengeance upon the critics who have damned him, aided and abetted by his daughter (Diana Rigg). Ian Hendry and Harry Andrews crop up here, as do Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley, Arthur Lowe, Eric Sykes, Madeline Smith and Diana Dors.

Plot: having lost out on a prestigious award, and presumed to have committed suicide, Lionheart emerges from the shadows to exact poetic justice on his reviewers — slaying his victims according to specially selected death scenes from the Bard’s works.

Key moment: echoing Titus Andronicus, in which Tamora is fed the flesh of her two sons baked in a pie, Morley is forced to gorge himself to death on his pet poodles. “Pity,” quips Price. “He didn’t have the stomach for it.”



The Hole (2001) d. Nick Hamm

Background: the pint-sized Thora Birch was hot property after starring in the Oscar-laden American Beauty, and came to the UK to appear with newcomer Keira Knightley in this disturbing chiller, set beneath the Somerset topsoil. Birch’s seven-figure salary overshadowed the production, but this film, by the Belfast director Hamm, has come to be regarded as a superior British mind-bender.

Plot: a three-day party in a bunker turns into 18 days of supply-free incarceration for Liz (Birch), Frankie (Knightley), Geoff (Laurence Fox) and hunky Mike (Desmond Harrington). With the teens missing, presumed dead, the reappearance of a traumatised Liz prompts an investigation into what really happened, with her inconsistent recollections analysed by the psychologist Dr Horwood (Embeth Davidtz).

Key moment: Birch’s enigmatic poser: “Have you ever loved someone so much, you didn’t care what happened to yourself?”

[DB7]

I'm not sure how The Hole made it onto this list as it's a pretty minor teen-horror, and Hell Drivers is hardly cult, but on the whole not a bad list - tho personally I'd have proposed the likes of Deep End and I Start Counting.

[batman]

name='DB7'] I'd have proposed the likes of Deep End and I Start Counting.

I'd agree with those two.



Pool of London and The Man Who Haunted Himself and getting quite a following too, but I don't know how 'cult' they would be considered to be.



It was nice to see Repulsion on the list. It is quite a remarkable film IMHO.

[CaptainWaggett]

A list of British cult films without The Wicker Man?

[DB7]

name='CaptainWaggett']A list of British cult films without The Wicker Man?

I chopped this bit off.

The Predictable Top 10 ‘Cult’ Movies

Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) Stanley Kubrick

A Hard Day’s Night (1964) Richard Lester

Blowup (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni

If... (1968) Lindsay Anderson

Performance (1970) Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell

Get Carter (1971) Mike Hodges

The Wicker Man (1973) Robin Hardy

Quadrophenia (1979) Franc Roddam

Withnail and I (1987) Bruce Robinson

Shallow Grave (1994) Danny Boyle

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) Guy Ritchie

[Windthrop]

Nice to see The Rebel getting in there, though The Punch and Judy Man would be closer to the mark as a cult movie IMHO.

[GRAEME]

Where's The Rocky Horror Picture Show - the ultimate cult movie. For cults.

[smudge]

Not a bad list - I'd have to go with Bats and give Sir Roger's MAN WHO HAUNTED HIMSELF a cult tag, but maybe not POOL OF LONDON - to me that sits in more of a 'film history' category; slightly more 'intellectual' than 'cult', albeit with a firm following of it's own.



I'd also be looking at ISC and DEEP END to be in there.



Smudge

[billy bentley]

Must say I wouldn't consider many of these flicks "cult". I would put "Bronco Bullfrog" in the cult classification - but Get Carter, If....,etc. no way !

[torinfan]

No Monty Python films made the list?!

[Brief Encounter]

Nothing from before the 50s....



that ISN'T Powell/Pressburger?

[torinfan]

No Monty Python, nothing from The Crazy Gang, no George Formby, nothing Arthur Lucan.......

[Joenoir]

name='billy bentley']Must say I wouldn't consider many of these flicks "cult". I would put "Bronco Bullfrog" in the cult classification - but Get Carter, If....,etc. no way !

I agree with you, Billy, the films listed are hardly cult - no sign of House of Whipcord or Cool it Carol!

[billy bentley]

Brief Encounter, it's interesting that you mention the '50's. When I frequented the London "Art House Cinemas" - Screen On The Green, The Gate, Electric, Rialto (I think) and a few others who's names I've forgotten right now, in the late 70's, there were hardly any 195O's pictures shown - certainly not on a regular basis. Those that were tended to be American.

[davidb]

i suppose they should have called it 10 less obvious cult movies ,not the usual wicker man ,quad ,performance etc



its nice to see theatre of blood getting a mention ,i like that film but pretty much every review ive read of it has slagged it off



why is there no mullberry bush or up the junction mentioned ?

[davidb]

name='Joenoir']I agree with you, Billy, the films listed are hardly cult - no sign of House of Whipcord or Cool it Carol!

yeah ! theyre great movies ! 2 pete walker explotation films that just have that something extra about them that put them above others in their genre

[Asgardian]

A new addition could be "Evil Aliens" from 2005



How can you not love a song about Combine Harvesters

[HUGHJAMPTON]

name='Windthrop']Nice to see The Rebel getting in there, though The Punch and Judy Man would be closer to the mark as a cult movie IMHO.

Wholeheartedly agree with that opinion.



Not so much the top 10, but that bottom half, looks like the survey was carried out by the team behind Family Fortunes. A Hard Day's Night????, no, How I Won The War. yes.

[James Fox]

name='DB7']I'm not sure how The Hole made it onto this list as it's a pretty minor teen-horror

I agree. It's an interesting premise, but ultimately not a great horror film.

[Rick C]

The definitions for a 'cult movie' can be quite various, but an all-embracing estimation can be 'a film intended to be be firmly a second-feature, saved from box-office disaster by the student community, where the director died early and tragically, and where can be no chance of a sequel (or shouldn't be=Wicker Man).'



But there will be exceptions...