This is a spotlight on “undercinema” from the 1970s to the 1990s: these are great, wild, unusual, surprising films that have fallen through the cracks and that deserve a new life in contemporary film culture.
In the 1970s, cult cinema finally hit it big, and both filmmakers and audiences wanted to see stuff that was weird, kooky, and unusual. This meant that genre cinema was allowed its time in the spotlight, and a whole new world of cult classics was born.
But as multi-international co-productions started to become more common in the late 1990s and more and more studios needed to make sure that they profited off of their investments in film projects, wannabe cult classics started to get less wild and the mainstream public lost its appetite for the strange and unique. This hasn’t just had an effect on contemporary film culture – it’s also had consequences for how film fans think about movie history, about what they seek out and what they have access to.
This article is an effort to shine a spotlight on pieces of “undercinema”: movies that I think have been underseen and underdiscussed but that are ripe to be reintroduced to modern audiences looking for something fresh. Some of these movies are cult favorites, but they aren’t known to a larger audience; some of these movies are beloved in their home country, but aren’t popular anywhere else; some of these movies were famous and maybe even well-regarded at the time of their release, but they are underappreciated and mostly forgotten today; and finally, some of these movies aren’t really being discussed at all, by anyone.
I want to bring these films back from the dead or – in the case of certain movies that are lauded, but only by a small group of devoted fans or by folks with specific cultural knowledge – out into the light for everyone to enjoy. My hope is that even if you’re such an advanced film buff that you’ve already seen most of these movies, this list will help you discover at least one new film that you’ve never heard of.
You can find examples of undercinema from any era of film history, but I’ve focused on the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s because this is when weird, savage, new movies really flourished, before the cost of making films ballooned and lots of countries got involved in the cultural and economic game of international co-productions.
1970s
Wake in Fright | 1971 | Australia
Once you’ve watched a lot of movies, you’ll be able to recognize the common patterns and narrative techniques that many screenplays tend to share. You’ll be able to generally guess what will happen by the end of most film stories. But then something like Wake in Fright will come along that subverts your expectations and leaves you baffled about where it may go next.
The film is deeply unpredictable, following its own brand of nightmare logic that takes us from one bizarre scene to the next. Wake in Fright is like going on an acid trip: you start out wide-eyed and hopeful, wondering where this will take you, but you end up in a pool of sweat, disoriented and trying to piece together what happened, with a nagging feeling of horror and guilt in the back of your mind.
It would be a crime to say too much about the story; it’s enough to know that it is driven by a palpable sense of tension, a touch of horror, a whiff of Western-style frontier adventure, and a thin layer of sinister eroticism. Wake in Fright is a vital experience for anyone who feels that they have seen it all or that it’s been a long time since they’ve been surprised by a film (even if those surprises are too unique and idiosyncratic to inspire many imitators). It’s an act of imaginative film-making that operates at the weirdest, wildest degree of white heat.
The Deluge (Potop) | 1974 | Poland
In a perfect world, The Deluge would be as beloved and famous as Star Wars or Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a panoramic work of political upheaval and national destiny, but don’t let that distract you from its chief goal: it is a swashbuckling adventure of the highest order, filled with sword duels in the rain, royal audiences, star-crossed lovers, and horseback battles. The film’s adventurous nature isn’t light and swift, but epic and massive (it’s over five hours long), never wanting to leave out a single detail or skimp on a scene’s proper pageantry.
In 2014, the film was edited down by about two hours and re-released as Potop Redivivus, a well-meaning exercise that honored the original release’s fortieth anniversary; this edit makes a much more manageable demand on the audience’s time, but it also loses some of the out-sized enormity that makes the original such a grand occasion. We need more epic, large-scale efforts that go for broke, and that sort of ambition should be celebrated, not truncated. If you can only find the edited version, go ahead and watch it, but there’s something special about the original cut’s massive scale.
Phantom of the Paradise | 1974 | United States
It’s not easy to make a truly weird film. If you don’t have the luxury of creating a movie for purely artistic purposes, you’re always going to be pulled in a thousand commercial directions, trying to appeal to the audience’s demands while also satisfying your own interests. Phantom of the Paradise is a strange miracle: its core elements are so palatable and easy to sell (catchy songs, classic horror movie tropes, a soap opera tale of love and revenge), and yet everything about their presentation is completely deranged.
The film’s nightmarish logic, strange costumes, and drugged-out atmosphere are plastered over its commercial foundations to create an effect that is truly hypnotic. The whole project feels like a very specific piece of fetish pornography that was created to appease the desires of exactly one person on the entire planet. It’s a wild cinematic salad that is both audience-friendly and intimately bizarre.
Phantom of the Paradise’s double consciousness means that it can satisfy both sides of your viewing brain at the same time; if you want to enjoy the film as a spectacular display of rock musical fun, you’ll have a great time (the ace songs were composed by songwriting icon Paul Williams, who also stars as the film’s diabolical villain), and if you’re looking for a slice of unusual madness, you’ll get more than your fill.
Deewar (The Wall) | 1975 | India
For a few years in the 1970s, Amitabh Bachchan may very well have been the coolest guy in the entire world (and he probably still is, but back at the height of his popularity, there would have been no doubt). Deewar, one of the movies that made Bachchan famous, is a lot like other Bollywood movies in that it is three hours long, melodramatic, and at times punctuated by musical numbers. But it is also darker and tougher, with a streetwise and apocalyptic energy that aligns more with Hong Kong action flicks and the grim intimacy of neo-noir more than it does with traditional candy-coated Bollywood music spectacles.
Deewar is one of the decade’s great crime sagas, with a huge scope that includes both the personal portrait of a fractured family and a panoramic vision of a turbulent society that is ripe for underworld conquest. But while Deewar would be a classic film no matter the cast, Bachchan’s performance as Vijay – melancholic, Byronic, smoldering – elevates it to something transcendent. Bachchan is equally celebrated for his starring role in Sholay, a Western-style adventure musical that also released in 1975 and which was also written by the screenwriting team Salim-Javed. I’m giving Deewar the nod in this article because it’s a personal favorite, but Sholay is also absolutely fantastic. You should watch both.
House (ハウス) | 1977 | Japan
Horror comedy is one of the toughest genres to get right: if it’s too scary, it won’t be funny, and if it’s too funny, it won’t be scary. House is a unique slice of craziness that defies the odds and wildly succeeds on both fronts.
The film is constantly creepy and even disturbing, but it is also hilarious and filled with little jokes. One of the reasons that House’s genre mash-up works so well is that its seven heroines are not quite real people and yet not quite cartoon characters; their inner lives are simple and flat, entirely built around a couple of catch phrases and a funny gimmick (each of the girls is named after their defining trait, like studious Prof and martial artist Kung Fu), but they are so likable and have such strong emotions that we take them seriously and we care about what happens to them.
This flexibility makes it easy to put the characters in all sorts of situations, because they are just as at home with silly gags as they are with getting devoured by demonic ghouls. The film’s special effects are a vital part of selling these wild tonal shifts: they are otherworldly and creepy, but also child-like and eerily two-dimensional, like they leaped right off the fabric of an ancient scroll. These elements combine into an incredibly unusual experience that has never really been equaled in terms of surreal, entertaining weirdness.
Rolling Thunder | 1977 | United States
Rolling Thunder starts out like a sensitive drama about a Vietnam veteran and the struggles he faces when he returns home. It seems like it will be a fragile, sober character portrait, and if you were to judge the film based solely on this first impression, it would appear to be of a piece with other similarly serious films about Vietnam and its effect on the American cultural consciousness. But then, about a third of the way through the film, Rolling Thunder takes a turn that is so wild and insane that it completely changes everything that we thought was true and sends us off in an entirely different direction.
The film is still about Vietnam’s impact on the country, but its approach becomes violent, manic, and even downright surreal. This shift is so intense and unexpected that it’s like you fell asleep during the actual movie and the rest of it played out in your dreams, where it mixed together with your own anxieties and hang-ups to become something more uncomfortably potent.
Rolling Thunder suggests that most films about war and trauma aren’t telling you the whole story; trauma isn’t something polite and harmless, and it isn’t easily dealt with by coating it in artful direction and award-winning acting. If you want to make a film about trauma, you need to explore it in unhealthy ways, because that’s often how it comes to the surface.
Ecce bombo (Behold the Bumblebee) | 1978 | Italy
In the 1990s, Generation X discovered that they were alienated from society and dissatisfied with modern life, imprisoned by the choices made by their parents and adrift in an idle search for direction (all while trying to look as cool and detached as possible, of course). But Nanni Moretti, working fifteen years earlier, had already taken the measure of the cultural atmosphere that would produce Gen X. The result is Ecce bombo, his second film, made at the wizened and world-weary age of 25, and it is both a diagnosis and a ruthless parody of self-involved slackerdom.
Ecce bombo’s heroes – including callous and listless Michele, played by Moretti himself – are too old to get involved in student politics, too immature for romantic relationships, and too disaffected to devote themselves to anything. What do they do with their time? Well…nothing, really, but they do nothing with a vague sense of purpose. They visit intellectual communes but are completely bored the entire time, take exams that they aren’t prepared for, and make meaningless jokes (even the film’s title is a nonsense gag). These episodes are conducted with a mixture of self-hating amiability and ironic whimsy that never lets on whether we’re supposed to laugh with or at these characters. The film probably hopes we’ll do both at once.
The Driver | 1978 | United States
The Driver cuts away anything unnecessary to its central values of action and reaction: motivations, passions, even names. It strips the idea of an action film right down to the bone, intent on running as clean and tight as possible. What we’re left with is just pure impulse and instinct: characters steal because they are supposed to steal, drive because they are supposed to drive, and chase because they are supposed to chase.
We’re told what we need to know and that’s it. The film’s hero is a driver, he’s known as The Driver, and he’s good at driving; learning more would just be adding on extra fat. The Driver is a stoic man of few words, and so are most of the people in his world, but there are a couple of characters with plenty to say; The Detective, for instance, is a jerk who loves to talk a lot of crap. Even in these cases, however, their personalities are simply and sharply sketched, without a lot of personal history and baggage.
The car chase scenes follow this same principle, shot with a hair trigger sense of focus that keeps the action cold and lean. The result is so spartan and tight-lipped that it feels like the film is a high stakes criminal enterprise and its viewers are co-conspirators. We’re expected to not ask too many questions, to stay calm and collected, and to help make sure that this big score goes off without a hitch.
Camera Buff (Amator) | 1979 | Poland
Krzysztof Kieślowski, much like Ingmar Bergman, has a reputation as a filmmaker of the utmost profundity and seriousness. It’s a valid reputation – his films are interested in the Big Questions, the sort of topics that we try not to think about too much for the sake of getting through the day with our mental health intact (Kieślowski’s 1985 film No End is, in particular, one of the most depressing works of art that I’ve ever experienced). But he could also demonstrate great wit and moments of humanistic humor, as evidenced by the cunningly bitter and uncomfortably hilarious Camera Buff.
The film is about a man who discovers a sudden and increasingly obsessive interest in amateur filmmaking, ignoring his responsibilities as a husband, father, and employee. This brings up all sorts of serious issues like identity, the role of art in our lives, and state censorship (which Kieślowski experienced in his own right during his early career), but these weighty questions and existential concerns are baked with so much muted humor and surreal interpersonal energy that it could very well have starred (in an admittedly muted capacity) a comic actor like Jim Carrey or Robin Williams. I’d categorize the film’s attitude as something along the lines of emotional slapstick; it’s not as blatant as a clown slipping on a banana peel, but I think we cringe and laugh in much the same way.
1980s
Tree of Knowledge (Kundskabens træ) | 1981 | Denmark
Tree of Knowledge is a nakedly authentic film about the ups and downs of that part of childhood when you are kind of, sort of, almost on the verge of becoming an adult.
The whole movie feels entirely natural and true, without any orchestrated drama, and it is tender and cruel only in the ways that actual childhood is tender and cruel, declining to add any extra spice. It is so realistic that it can seem like a documentary at times, and the fact that it was filmed over the course of two years means that we really do see the children grow up in front of our eyes, nearly in real time. We may recognize some of these characters from other stories about school life – the class clown, the outcast, the gossipy clique – but they are stripped of all their stereotypical trappings to leave behind something that is raw and bitterly honest.
The film doesn’t have a strict beginning and end, and it doesn’t try to tell a neat and tidy story; like real life, it’s made up of a series of events that are interconnected but that don’t build up to some grand realization or finale. If the result leaves you with an unsatisfied pang, this is certainly the intended point, because unsatisfied pangs are the dominant affective mode of young teenagers and the film is intimately guided by their lonely, wounded, unsettled sense of emotional logic.
Trances | 1981 | Morocco-France
Trances follows the folk band Nass El Ghiwane as they travel across Morocco on a concert tour; the film records them on stage, where they deliver rich, exciting performances, and we also get time with each member of the band, hearing about their hopes, ambitions, and individual philosophies on life (Omar, something of a practical joker, and Laabi, a self-serious dreamer, are the two standouts and make for great foils). The film gives its concert scenes a lot of time to breathe, so that we see a full picture of the passionate atmosphere at these shows; in this environment, it’s easy to get caught up in the band’s hypnotic rhythms and to understand why they inspired such devotion in their fans.
But what makes the film really special, beyond its portrait of a great band, is its snapshot of Moroccan society. The film inter-cuts its musical numbers and band interviews with little peeks at city life, coastal life, life on the streets, worshippers, beggars, old ladies, merchants, locals, and mischievous kids. In this way, the movie is both a concert documentary and a cultural ethnography, helping us to understand the world that produced Nass El Ghiwane’s music and ultimately suggesting that a story about a folk band is really a story about the local people who populate their songs.
They All Laughed | 1981 | United States
They All Laughed is rooted in the attitude and culture of the 1930s, filled with nostalgic pop songs and driven by a screwball energy siphoned from classic comedies like The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby. But though the film is inspired by old things, it feels completely fresh. They All Laughed wears its influences with a graceful touch that strikes a pitch perfect balance between the old and the new.
In fact, the entire film is imbued with this breezy sense of balance: the characters are sleazy enough to have an edge and charming enough that we can’t help but like them; the atmosphere is world-weary and optimistic in equal measure; physical comedy is married to sharp repartee; and witty words are bound up with bittersweet passions. The whole affair is serious enough to tug at a few heartstrings and make you a little wistful, and light enough to leave you feeling playful and ready for an evening out on the town.
The film is probably best known for its unusual production history (Gazzara and Hepburn had an affair in real life, and newcomer star Stratten, then dating director Bogdanovich, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend after the film was completed); seen from afar, it’s an inspired fling that achieves the sort of tone that so many romantic comedies shoot for but fail to realize because they are too affected.
Possession | 1981 | France-West Germany
Possession takes place in a nightmarish, alternate version of reality where conventional rules of logic and behavior don’t apply. Everything about the film is off and wrong, as if we have accidentally wandered into a dimension that is like our own but operates according to processes that we can’t quite understand. It feels like all the characters are on drugs; when they talk to each other, they seem to be reading lines from different scripts, and it sometimes sounds like they have been dubbed by other actors, though they are clearly speaking with their own voices. Through it all, a line from the opening credits – “Special Effects for The Creature” – looms large, building up an ominous, alien tension in what appears to be an extremely odd but otherwise earthbound story about a couple’s break-up.
Possession never allows you to settle down and get comfortable; even its simplest scenes, the scenes that would be mundane in any other film, are dominated by paranoia, madness, and existential dread. The film’s stars, Sam Neil and Isabelle Adjani, navigate these dark waters in a state of frenzy that suggests they are participating in an occult ritual instead of acting in a movie, and the entire project has this same ritualistic quality, like it’s an attempt to express something that can only be achieved through human sacrifice.
Style Wars | 1983 | United States
Style Wars doesn’t necessarily *support* graffiti, and it gives fair time to critics – politicians, concerned moms, irritated locals – but there’s no doubt that the film is deeply fascinated by the spirit and energy of these artists and their need to be seen and heard. The film’s style is just as spirited and energetic as its subjects, attuned to the ballet of noise and movement that makes both hip hop and city life so alive and exciting. But what really cements the film as an essential cultural profile is that it records the exact moment when this movement was co-opted by big money art galleries, which had the mercenary sensibility and financial savvy to recognize the potential for profiting off this new sense of “cool”. It’s an invaluable document that manages to preserve all that grassroots passion before it was ossified into corporate buzzwords.
100%の女の子 (A 100% Girl) | 1983 | Japan
This little movie, barely over ten minutes long, is an espresso shot of pure energy. It condenses an entire feature film’s worth of sad, funny, bittersweet romantic comedy misadventure into the most compact and essential form possible, losing nothing in the process. It’s something like La Jetée for the lonely-hearted – a quick, catchy, heartfelt and effervescently hip little guitar riff of a film that makes a surprisingly lasting impression. You can watch the entire film here; while this version doesn’t have English subtitles, you don’t necessarily need to understand what’s being said. The film was based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, which you can read in translation here, and that’s enough to get what’s going on. The important thing is the vibe, the feel, and man, that ending.
Kin-dza-dza! | 1986 | Soviet Union
This is one hell of a koo movie. It’s an absurdist fantasy in which a pair of good (though extremely different) Soviet comrades are inadvertently whisked away to the titular Kin-dza-dza galaxy, where the residents are governed by a bizarre set of etiquette guidelines. The film has a hilariously dry tone that presents wild, ridiculous ideas as stone-cold facts that you can’t really argue with, even though you’re certain that they don’t make any sense.
Kin-dza-dza! is especially funny because its weird code of galactic behavior – who gets to wear what color pants, who must sit down when, where you can do what, and so on – isn’t entirely byzantine. There is a crazy logic to the whole thing, and we share in the heroes’ search for meaning as they try to figure out how to navigate this network of structured madness.
Aside from its brilliant tone and surreal picture of an otherworldly society, the film’s most ingenious invention is an alien vocabulary that includes unforgettable words like pepelats (spaceship), ketse (matchsticks), ku (a curse word), and, of course, koo (which can mean just about anything). These alien words are presented so naturally and with such compelling insistence that it really feels like we’re being taught a new language, and you might just find yourself slipping the words into everyday conversations.
Terrorizers (恐怖分子) | 1986 | Taiwan
Modern life was supposed to bring us all together, packed tightly into dense cities where we’d get to know each other more intimately and where we’d never need to be lonely. But things haven’t really worked out that way, have they? In fact, urban spaces can seem incredibly proficient at finding ways to keep us apart and distant from each other. Edward Yang’s films are all about this problem, in one way or another, following people who want to connect but who just can’t seem to make it happen because the rapid growth and unstoppable speed of city life gets in the way. Terrorizers is Yang’s toughest, darkest, and most mysterious essay on this theme; it’s a puzzle box that starts out as a series of fragments but that slowly reveals an intricate and complex sense of logic.
When these pieces come together, Terrorizers doesn’t reassure or comfort us – it doesn’t suddenly reveal that urban life may look disconnected, but we’re all really bound to one another in mysterious and secret ways. Instead, its message is this: given the speed and energy of the urban ecosystem, with its twisting highways and layers of skyscrapers and labyrinthine back alleys, there will come a point where a group of disparate residents get caught in the same current. When this happens, it isn’t intentional or the work of fate or destiny, but a testament to a city’s ability to chew us up and spit us out at such a large scale that some of us will inevitably get mashed together at the same time.
Bony a klid (Coupons and Peace of Mind) | 1987 | Czechoslovakia
Bony a klid is a tough, sassy, smutty, and sweet crime comedy, but what makes it so especially compelling is that it is specifically, precisely local. It captures a very particular place at a very particular time: Prague in the late 80s, as the suffocating grip of the Soviet Union was thawing out and the looming appeal of the West created a flash market for hustlers and con artists to make an ill-gotten fortune. It’s a situation that wouldn’t have existed if the movie had been made a few years earlier and would be moot in another few years when the Soviet Union collapsed.
This brief period had its own slang, misadventures, and icons, and Bony a klid chronicles that ephemeral culture with a confidently playful swagger that uses local lore to an effect that feels somewhere between anthropology and jazz. Even the film’s title is a layered inside joke: “Bony” was a sort of coupon used in Czechoslovakia’s Tuzex stores, which sold Western goods, and “klid” means peace of mind, with the two words combining into a phrase that puns on the classic American crime film Bonnie and Clyde.
The film’s sense of specificity, focused in on a cultural moment that vanished almost as quickly as it arrived, gives it an immediate, off-the-cuff feeling, like a scruffy little piece of street poetry cooked up on the spot for a few select listeners.
Yeelen (Brightness) | 1987 | Burkina Faso-France-Germany-Japan-Mali
Fantasy doesn’t need to be visually spectacular to create a fantastic effect; it can be as simple as raising your hand in front of an enemy and causing him to stop in his tracks, completely unable to move. This doesn’t require an ounce of special effects, and yet it feels as otherworldly and surprising as any feat of CGI artistry. Yeelen’s conception of fantasy is entirely based around this sort of magic – making someone freeze up, summoning a sudden flash of fire, producing a blinding light. The film is set in an ancient world where magic is a given, where every part of life can be influenced by rituals and the right combination of chants. It is also a world where symbolism is literal, so that metaphorical events and transformations actually occur.
Yeelen’s story is about Nianankoro, a young sorcerer who is hunted down by his powerful father, but it doesn’t move at the speed of a conventional adventure movie and it never feels like a desperate chase; instead, we take our time as Nianankoro wanders through the world, pausing to consider the mountains and dunes that surround him. This watchful pace, so steady and hypnotic, gives the film a truly mythic feel, as if we have found ourselves in a prehistoric age when time moved more slowly, and the world operated by a different set of mystical laws.
Yeelen won a Jury Prize at Cannes and it has plenty of admirers, but it’s rarely discussed in modern film circles; if more modern fantasy films took inspiration from this film, recognizing that magic doesn’t need to equate to tacky CGI overkill, we’d all be much better for it.
1990s
Metropolitan | 1990 | United States
In the 1990s, Whit Stillman was one of the brightest voices in American film writing, and then he fell off the face of the earth. His movies lost some money and they didn’t garner enough mainstream interest, so he couldn’t find a studio to bankroll his work from 1998 to 2011; it was a real loss to film culture, because while some of Stillman’s interests – cute, precocious young people, retro style, witty dialogue – were inherited by directors like Wes Anderson, these inheritors didn’t pick up on his acidic bite, his bittersweet irony, and his unapologetic literary taste.
Stillman has, thankfully, returned to semi-regular filmmaking. Metropolitan, his first film, is the best introduction to Stillman’s cinema. Its fresh, sharp screenplay is a true delight: politically-minded in the breeziest way possible, loosely romantic, and funny. The film’s preppy characters would be obnoxious if handled without an artful touch, but they are sketched with just the right amount of gentleness while being skewered with such an exactly precise degree of mocking pressure that it results in a delicately ideal balance of warm affection and contemptuous parody.
American movie comedy would take a turn for the Tarantino just a few years after this – ironic, detached, too cool for school – but Metropolitan proves that the 1990s could have felt a bit brighter, smarter, and more bemusedly sentimental if we’d been in a different mood.
Rebels of the Neon God (青少年哪吒) | 1992 | Taiwan
Video game arcades are filled with buzzes, blips, and bright lights, and so it’s easy to think that they are hives of activity and movement. But they are more like the games themselves: dark mazes of overwhelming sound and flashing neon that you can get stuck in for hours or even days on end. Arcades and games are a constant presence in Rebels of the Neon God, Tsai Ming-liang’s first film, and they represent the lonely, confused, self-defeating lives of its disaffected young heroes – they have nowhere to go, so they always wind up back at the same place. Tsai has built his career on films about characters who are trapped in some way, literally or figuratively, and here we already find these thematic obsessions in full bloom.
But while Tsai’s later movies, like Stray Dogs and The River, can be cryptic, bleak, and unforgiving viewing, Rebels of the Neon God vibes with an unusually stylish and cool electricity. It is an alienated film, yes, but it is also punctuated by rain-logged streets, the foggy buzz of urban nights, a hint of city pop dreaminess, and a memorable pair of jean shorts. It’s a Michelangelo Antonioni riffs on Wong Kar-wai type of jam. This is a mix that Tsai never indulged in again, preferring to edge into a more mysterious and nearly plot-less autuer cinema, and so this film should be cherished all the more as a one-of-a-kind and tantalizingly ephemeral project.
Green Snake (青蛇) | 1993 | Hong Kong
When film fans think of producer-director Tsui Hark’s work in the 1990s, what are the first movies that come to mind? They’ll probably mention his Swordsman series or Once Upon a Time in China starring Jet Li, and some especially hip film buffs will gush about The Blade. But who remembers Green Snake? It’s a shame that Green Snake isn’t as lauded or discussed as Hark’s more famous movies, because it is an absolutely mind-blowing, delirious act of fantasy imagination.
This is Hark working at white heat: totally unbound from any constraints, outrageous, rebellious, and fiendishly entertaining. The film is a sustained war against boredom and everything about it is a delightful, often shocking surprise. Many movies are content with giving us one or two original ideas, and once in a while we might get lucky with a film that has a whole handful of new things to show us. Green Snake, on the other hand, is the rare miracle that refuses to rest until it’s delivered something fresh with every single shot.
Cyclo (Xích Lô) | 1995 | Vietnam
Cyclo, about an emotionally scarred young man, his poor family, and the surreal underworld life that they orbit, is almost unrelentingly bleak, but it is saved from being an expression of despair because it is a dream. It operates on a dream logic that isn’t rational or linear, like a kind of tone poem. This keeps the pressure of the film’s haunted voice from becoming too crushing for us to bear. It’s close enough for us to feel disturbed and hurt, but distant enough for those feelings to be somewhat dulled and frosty, like an old wound that aches somewhere on our body, though we can’t quite remember where we got it. If Cyclo sometimes skirts a bit too close to its ethereal images of pain, so that we suddenly feel their sting much more deeply than what the film had led us to expect, it’s a reminder that dreams and fantasies can be a mask for traumatic experiences, and that something beautiful may only be beautiful because of the terrible and mysterious things that it needs to conceal.
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride) | 1995 | India
If you’re from India or a fan of Indian movies, you probably think I’m crazy for calling Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge a piece of “undercinema”.
After all, there’s a theater in India that has screened Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge every single week for the past 24 years. That’s just one small testament to the film’s mythic status in its home country, where it reigns as the Bollywood experience par excellence. Outside of India, however, many film buffs have never heard of or seen Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.
Let’s change that. The film is funny, sweet, shocking, and over-the-top in the best possible ways; it recognizes that melodrama is not a dirty word, but something to be embraced and cherished in all of its absurdity and outsized emotion. It made a megastar out of Shah Rukh Khan and became the blueprint for pretty much every romantic comedy drama music that India has made for the past two decades. If you want to get a good picture of what Bollywood cinema can do and why it’s so beloved, this is the place to start.
The Day of the Beast (El día de la bestia) | 1995 | Spain-Italy
The Day of the Beast is a fresh, funny, ridiculous horror comedy with a great cast of unforgettable characters. The story is hilariously sacrilegious: a holy man named Father Angel learns that the Antichrist will be born on Christmas Day, so he decides to commit as many sins as possible. Angel’s logic is that these sins will convince the devil that he is an evildoer, and so the devil will therefore allow Angel to attend the Antichrist’s birth (giving him a chance to kill the evil child). He is helped in his quest by a LSD-popping heavy metal fan and a Walter Mercado-like TV psychic.
Not exactly the sort of film you want your priest to catch you watching. But in a very strange way, it’s actually kind of respectful of its hero and his quest. It’s respectful in a Looney Tunes sort of way, sure, but respectful nonetheless: the movie takes Angel’s mission seriously, and it believes in God as devoutly as he does. The Day of the Beast has a type of belief that feels a little more wild and crazy than what we’re used to in polite society, but the whole nature of faith is a little wild and crazy, right? The film loses steam at the end and the final minutes don’t quite capitalize on the promise of the rest of the movie, but it remains an extremely memorable and fresh experience, and it”s nearly a must-see for anyone interested in cult cinema.
The Hunted | 1995 | United States
If you have any affection at all for sweaty, violent, direct-to-video-type action flicks of the ’90s, filled with cult favorite actors and needless sex scenes, then The Hunted is a must-see. It’s a genuinely exciting, tense, moody film with a memorable cast and a number of great set pieces. The taiko soundtrack by Japanese drum group Kodō is killer, and the bullet train sequence – wherein modern-day ninjas prowl from car to car, slaying passengers and hunting down their targets – is one of the decade’s best and most unheralded action scenes. The Hunted also features a grimly macho turn from Yoshio Harada, one of the coolest actors in Japanese film history, who proves that you look really awesome when you swing around a katana while wearing a suit and tie (well, I guess we already knew that, but it’s good to have confirmation).
The film is quirky and it has some odd miscalculations (John Lone, who plays the evil ninja boss Kinjo, isn’t Japanese, so his scenes are in English while the other Japanese characters actually speak Japanese), but in some ways, this just adds to The Hunted‘s offbeat charm. The Hunted also wins some bonus points for somewhat subverting the “white savior” storyline; star Christopher Lambert doesn’t suddenly evolve into some sort of samurai god in the nick of time to save himself, and his story is handled with a certain degree of realism, albeit realism that is tempered by ’90s action movie logic.
If you don’t consider “B-grade thriller” to be an insult, you’ll probably love this.
Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (ガメラ3 邪神〈イリス) | 1999 | Japan
Everybody loves Godzilla, of course – he’s the indisputable king of the monsters. But if you want the toughest, coolest, most epic movies in the giant monster canon, turn to Gamera. He didn’t start out all that hip: in the 1960s, Gamera was a family-friendly giant turtle, battling silly enemies and being a friend to children everywhere. But in the ’90s, director Shusuke Kaneko and special effects master Shinji Higuchi decided to resurrect Gamera into something bigger, bolder, and much darker.
Their trilogy of Gamera movies – usually referred to as the Heisei Series, as they were released in the Heisei era of the Japanese imperial calendar – is a high point for giant monster movies. Gamera is no longer a wacky turtle, but a force of nature: muscular, ferocious, and primal. He gets scarier and scarier as the films go on. In the first entry, Guardian of the Universe, he still has a slight hint of his kinder, conventionally heroic old school roots; but by the third film, the savage and metaphysically intense Revenge of Iris, Gamera is as as terrifying and indecipherable as a mythic god of power.
All of the movies in the series are great, but Revenge of Iris is the best and most memorable entry. It’s deeply interested in the symbolic nature of Gamera and his wider, cosmic implications, ultimately making a psychoanalytic statement about the giant monster genre and what it would actually mean to have an unstoppable creature living among us. How would ordinary people react? Where and how would we live? What new traumas would we need to confront? Giant monster movies have been a bit heady and emotionally intense at times – see 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destroyer – but Revenge of Iris is the first time they reached such intimately apocalyptic heights.
Pelisky (Cosy Dens) | 1999 | Czech Republic
Most films about families spending time together during the holidays are buffoonish (think the National Lampoon movies) or mawkishly sentimental (think the Hallmark originals). Pelisky, however, does something completely different, and the result is so much more realistic; it captures the elusive chemistry of awkwardness, tragicomedy, and bittersweet warmth that is produced when it is cold outside, all of the stores are closed, and family members are forced to look at one another – and even *shudder* talk to each other – all day and night.
The characters seem like lightly-sketched caricatures at first, but they quickly deepen into real people we can recognize from our own lives: flawed, proud, sad, funny, and intensely human. Pelisky knows how to be hilarious without absurdity and how to be gentle and emotional without resorting to cloying melodrama. There isn’t a false note in the film, and it’s the sort of thing you’ll want to revisit as the years go by, realizing with each viewing that you’ve chosen a new favorite character. It’s become a holiday classic for my own family, so I hope that you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.
Notes
- Do you love any films that might qualify as “undercinema”? Leave a comment and tell us about it!
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