Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

I don’t know if I can explain the seismic shift in my film consciousness before and after Reservoir Dogs. Sure, I’d been obsessed by the grimy crime movies of America and the kinetic gunplay of movies in Hong Kong, but I had yet to delve into the worlds of poliziotteschi. I did not know how important the Shaw Brothers were. I knew the films of regional and direct to video filmmakers mattered to me, yet I was certain they were worthless to nearly everyone else. The films of video store educated Quentin Tarantino changed all that.

Today’s viewers have grown to live in a world where Tarantino is available for acerbic interview, to weigh in on what movies matter and to create controversial films yet ones that endure. Yet in 1992, this did not exist. He existed, but he was a different Tarantino. He was about to go from someone working to being a filmmaker to someone the world would pay attention to.

Tarantino was working at Manhattan Beach, California video store Video Archives, a video staffed by film experts like Tarantino, Roger Avary and Daniel Snyder, all of whom would make movies someday. When the store closed four years after this movie came out, Tarantino had grown so powerful that he could buy its inventory and remake it inside his house.

The original plan was to make this movie with friends for $30,000 in black and white 16mm. Producer Lawrence Bender was to play a cop chasing one of the gang’s members, Mr. Pink, but when he gave the script to his acting teacher, that teacher’s wife gave it to Harvey Keitel who became a producer, raising $1.5 million in funds and casting the movie in New York City, where they found a different cast than they’d have in Hollywood. Director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!) also helped by cleaning up the screenplay and securing from Live Entertainment (which is now Lionsgate, who released this 4K UHD). He was originally picked to direct but Tarantino lobbied hard to make this. As a result, Hellman was the executive producer.

Even in his first major film, Tarantino was smart enough to not make a traditional story. We never see the actual robbery, only the aftermath. Some of that decision is budgetary. Yet it works, as the story is less about what has happened instead of what happens.

He was also smart about who he cast as his characters. Each is named for a color — taken from The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three but then again, the entire story could be said to be stolen from Ringo Lam’s City On Fire — with Keitel’s Mr. White as the main character, if there can be one, the one that we’re supposed to identify with. Tim Roth is Mr. Orange, a man with a secret. Michael Madsen is the sociopathic Mr. Blonde (also Vic Vega, the brother of Pulp Fiction‘s Vincent Vega, as well an inside joke as Madsen is the real-life cousin of musicians Tim and Suzanne Vega). Mr. Pink is Steve Buscemi, while Tarantino himself appears briefly as Mr. Brown and Edward Bunker is Mr. Blue. While both are killed in the heist, Bunker informed so much of this film, as he was a real-life convict turned writer and actor, appearing in movies he wrote like Straight Time, Runaway Train and Animal Factory. Beyond the gang, other actors include Chris Penn as Nice Guy Eddie, Randy Brooks as Holdaway, Kirk Baltz as police officer Marvin Nash and in real life maniac Lawrence Tierney as the boss who gets the gang together — and memorably names them — Joe Cabot. Steven Wright, who never physically appears, is a character himself as the DJ whose voice moves the tale forward.

After a diner scene that sets up each character — but mainly allows Tarantino the opportunity to unleash his pop culture heavy dialogue, mostly about Madonna — we catch up on a heist goen wrong. Orange has been shot and White is trying to save him. They meet Pink in one of Joe’s warehouses and everyone is sure the job was a set-up before Blonde went nuts and just started killing people. An argument over running with the diamonds or helping Orange ends with guns drawn. Then Blonde arrives with Marvin Nash, a cop that they all take turns beating.

Blonde waits until the others leave before the infamous “Stuck In the Middle With You” scene in which he attacks the man with a razor and slices his ear off. When this played Sitges Film Festival, Rick Baker and Wes Craven — of all people — walked out during this scene. Tarantino would say, at the time, “It happens at every single screening. For some people the violence, or the rudeness of the language, is a mountain they can’t climb. That’s OK. It’s not their cup of tea. But I am affecting them. I wanted that scene to be disturbing.”

Tarantino also said, “I can’t believe the guy who directed Last House on The Left walked out of Reservoir Dogs“. Craven replied, “Last House was about the evils and horrors of violence, it did not mean to glorify it. This movie glorifies it.” Yet another in my large list of reasons why I think Wes Craven is overrated.

But I digress.

What follows is death, more death, betrayal, Mexican standoffs and an ending that cements that this filmmaker may not be a force yet, but he was only getting started.

For what it’s worth, Bunker told Empire magazine that this was all pretty unrealistic. He would never pull a job with five people he didn’t know. He also said that they’d never dress up and eat a meal together before a crime, giving people something to remember when they heard about their crime. He had also met Tierney before before, as they had a fistfight in a parking lot in the 50s. Tierney didn’t remember that, but if he remembered every fistfight he was ever in, he’d be overwhelmed.

My favorite thing is that Tierney was literally Mr. Blonde for the cast. Everyone had a difficult time with him because he was easily distracted and kept forgetting his lines. On the second day, he’d arrived directly from a bail hearing as he’d threatened to kill his nephew. Finally, Quentin fired him on the third day of filming. The line where White asks Pink, “I need you cool. Are you cool?” is a real line Tarantino said to Tierney after he got in a fight with Madsen and was holding up shooting. Tarantino rehired the actor, who went drinking afterward and ended up firing a gun into the walls of his Hollywood apartment later that night. He spent the weekend in jail only to be bailed out by his agent so that he could finish the film. These may all be carny BS stories, but when you lived the life that Tierney did, these stories end up getting told.

This is the kind of movie that I find myself watching every few years to remind myself just how good it is. The most amazing thing is that Tarantino’s films would get so much better.

Angel Falls — not Bedford Falls — is where Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) lives. Over the holidays, her father David (Joel McHale) and his boss, Henry Waters (Justin Long), are trying to get Roger Evans (William B. Davis, the Cigarette Smoking Man!) to sell his home, as he’s the only person standing in the way of progress. Or a shopping mall. Roger wants to give his house to his granddaughter Cara (Hana Huggins), who happens to be Winnie’s best friend.

The Angel, a giallo-looking villain, kills Roger and Cara before narrowly killing Winnie’s brother Jimmy (Aiden Howard). When she unmasks him, it’s Henry.

One year after this and Winnie is depressed. Her boyfriend Robbie has been sleeping with her friend Darla (Zenia Marshall). She misses Cara. And she decides to jump off a bridge, wishing that she had never been born, like some kind of banker who feels like he ruined his hometown. She sees lights in the sky and suddenly finds herself in a world where she never was, a place where The Angel lives and has killed her brother.

The only person who she feels like she can trust is Bernie (Jess McLeod), an outcast she met at a party just before she made her wish to the stars. In this new world, The Angel is killing the teenage children of homeowners whose properties Henry and David’s company wanted to buy. Except it turns out that Winnie’s father is the one under the mask. There’s more to it than that, but perhaps my holiday gift to you is asking you to watch this story for yourself.

Directed by Tyler MacIntyre (Tragedy Girls) and written by Michael Kennedy (Freaky), this movie is set in 1988 and has character names that show the creative team’s love of Scream and Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. In fact, it’s so indebted to Ghostface that The Angel’s costume is based on the original white costume that wasn’t used in that movie.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Before he made gigantic budgeted movies, Peter Jackson directed, wrote, shot, produced and co-starred in this movie that sees aliens using our planet for fast food.

After the New Zealand town of Kaihoro disappears, Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) agents Derek (Peter Jackson), Frank (Mike Minett), Ozzy (Terry Potter) and Barry (Pete O’Herne) are assigned to see what happened, finding aliens that love to eat humans. A battle breaks out and Derek falls off a cliff, but survives with his brain leaking out, covered by a hat.

An insurance adjuster named Giles Copeland (Craig Smith) is taken by the aliens and put in a bathtub stew before being saved by the men. What follows is non-stop violence, as Derek’s brain keeps pouring out of the hole in his head, leading to him grabbing a chainsaw and killing the space monsters, including boarding their ship to home, replacing his brains with an alien one and sawing their leader Lord Crumb (Doug Wren in the suit, Dean Lawrie as the double and Peter Vere-Jones as the voice, as Wren died during the four years this took to make) to bits as he flies directly at the alien homeworld, ready for war.

Using a 25-year-old 16mm Bolex camera, inspired by Tom Savini and wild enough to shoot a scene where he fights himself in two different roles, Jackson went wild on this, even baking the alien masks in his mother’s oven. He’d follow this with Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead, two more movies that are out of control compared to the rest of his movies. He wouldn’t have to invent his own steadicam for the movies that followed after this.

When this came out, it was a hard to find film and you know, it still is — at least in the U.S. — today. While there’s almost no budget, this movie is incredibly inventive and still worth watching today, so long after it was originally made. These aliens don’t have a glowing finger, as the movie says, but in the U.S., the VHS box came with an extra finger sticker so that people wouldn’t be upset that the alien was flipping them off.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

I was ten years old when Blade Runner came out and it played theaters so briefly in my small hometown that I never got the chance to see it. Also, ten year olds didn’t get to see R rated films in 1982. So my first experience was reading the Archie Goodwin/Al Williamson Marvel Comics adaptation, a book of which I literally read until the cover came off.

I must have read this issue a thousand times.

Steranko cover!

I also asked my uncle, a librarian, for a copy of Philip K. DIck’s Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? Perhaps a ten-year-old was not yet ready for the complexity of Philip K. Dick, but he never dumbed it down for me.

The first time I finally saw Blade Runner on HBO it was after a year of reading about the film in Starlog, obsessing over the comic book and the source novel, so my experience was so alien to anyone else that saw it in theaters in 1982.

For a movie seen as a failure — it made $41.6 million on a $30 million budget, so I have no idea how that is failure — this is a movie that literally changed the world and has grown to become our world.

And yet, this is a movie that has seven different versions thanks to all of the changes from studio executives. Even the voiceover, which was added by them, has star Harrison Ford reading the words as if he has no interest, perhaps hoping if they were bad they’d never be used.

The blade runner is former police officer Rick Deckard (Ford), who is charged by Gaff (Edward James Olmos) and Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) with doing what he does best: hunting down robotic humanoids and retiring them. Now, he must stop four Nexus-6 replicants: Leon  Kowalski (Brion James), Zhora Salome (Joanna Cassidy), Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).

Yet within this film noir story set in a neon-filled future straight out of a Moebius drawing, the real tale is about whether Rick and his lover Rachael (Sean Young) are humans or machines themselves. In fact, of all the characters, Batty is the most human of them all, a character of both deep menace and surprising tender thoughts.

Blade Runner arises from pain. Ridley Scott had left Dune and lost his brother in short order and wanted something to take his mind off life. Dick had no idea it was even being made, but his initial distrust was saved somewhat when he saw the script revisions and special effects footage. Ford and Scott also fought throughout.

Neither can agree if Deckard is human or replicant, even if they’ve made up.

I think about Blade Runner a lot. I think about Pris flipping across the room, how her face paint looks, how deadly these killing machines are with such grace. I think of Rutger Hauer ad-libbing “All those moments will be lost in time…like tears in rain” and caressing the dove. I remember the spinner police car and Deckard’s car that I had as a kid and played with constantly. And I wonder, does Gaff leave the silver unicorn after not killing Rachael as him telling Deckard to pursue his dream or is Deckard’s dream of the unicorn just one programmed into him?

Most of all, I’m so thankful for this movie because without it, I may not be so fascinated by Philip K. Dick, a person who I quote or reference every day. My uncle knew what he was doing.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Directed and written by Jan Švankmajer, this dark take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland looks like nothing else. This was Švankmajer’s first full-length movie after twenty years of making shorts.

Instead of writing the entire plot out, let me explain as best as I can what I remember of this: the White Rabbit coming back to life, shaking off its taxidermy and being a real animal again, breaking through the glass of his case, leading Alice on a journey that takes her past doors and on elevators to another world. Alice drinks ink and becomes a doll, then emerges from that same doll as a human again. Alice’s tears being so plentiful that she fills a room with them and swims away. A mechanical tea party, a pig dressed in baby clothes and so many other images that it goes into overload.

You know that people got really stoned or dropped acid and watched this. I’d like you to know that this could be one of the most dangerous movies to watch on substances. This is pure movies drugs, a film ready to take you on a bad trip all on its own. 10/10, no notes.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

This was written in two and a half days by Werner Herzog, who was inspired by a book his friend gave him and what he read about Lope de Aguirre. He was on a trip with a football team at the time and someone got so drunk on the bus that they puked all over the script.

Herzog knew who he wanted to be Aguirre: Klaus Kinski. Years ago, as a child, he met the actor when he rented a room in Herzog’s family apartment and proceeded to destroy it in three months, reducing a sink and toilet to dust. He sent the script to the actor and a few days later, at four in the morning, Kinski called him screaming.

Kinski wanted to play Aguirre as a madman. Herzog wanted him to be a quiet menace. So he would enrage Kinski before each shot and wait for the actor’s anger to work itself out and then yell for the camera to roll. This may have backfired, as Kinski was so upset at the noise extras were making while playing cards that he shot a man’s fingertip off, which was soon followed by Kinski trying to leave the set, only for Herzog to claim he would murder-suicide to stop that from happening.

Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) sends Don Pedro de Ursúa (Roy Guerra), Don Lope de Aguirre (Kinski), nobleman Don Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling), Brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro), Ursúa’s mistress Doña Inés (Helena Rojo) and Aguirre’s teenage daughter Flores (Cecilia Rivera) along with forty slaves down the river to find El Dorado, the city of gold. Of course, things don’t work out that way, leaving us with Aguirre starting a mutiny that ends with him clutching a monkey and yelling, “Who else is with me?” but everyone is dead.

I wish someone had filmed the making of this movie, as Herzog chopped down a tree and was attacked by hundreds of fire ants, Kinski nearly killed an extra by hitting them in the head with a sword, Herzog filming with a camera that he stole from the Munich Film School, the monkeys biting Herzog fifty times and Kinski a few times as well and no regard for history, only the movie that Herzog wanted to make.

Look, we live in a world where there’s a Werner Herzog action figure. Also: Just seeing Kinski’s insane face, brooding on a raft that everyone was really in danger riding, all in the literal heart of darkness making a movie that Herzog almost lost the film for makes me realizing that magic can be real.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, this finds Holly (Helen Rogers), Cali (Alexandra Turshen) and Mel (Lauren Molina) — girls home from college for the holidays but also representations of Freud’s id, ego and superego — going to party at Cali’s uncle’s house.

It’s only after they’re there for some time that the girls realize that she lied and that she has no idea who owns the house. That’s when Arthur (Larry Fessenden), the groundskeeper, arrives and tries to kick them out. He falls down the stairs and appears to die, so the girls decide to tell the cops that he showed up and attacked Holly, but fell down the stairs. They make up evidence by Cali ripping out some of Holly’s hair and Holly scratching herself with the man’s fingernails. That’s when they find out that he’s not dead but paralyzed.

The girls also learn that Cali is probably mental, as she smothers Arthur with a pillow and tries to kill Holly, thereby eliminating the person that Arthur attacked and allowing her to get away with the crime. I won’t ruin the end of this, but this is certainly one brutal holiday film.

Berk and Olsen have since made another movie about a burglary gone wrong, Villains, and Significant Other.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

I despise the notion that Ed Wood was a horrible filmmaker. Sure, his movies aren’t technically proficient and are often pretty maudlin in moments, but he’s an actual auteur. For this movie, he didn’t just direct and write, he also starred as Daniel Davies. Who else could? After all, Wood convinced producer George Weiss that he was the perfect director for this movie as he was a real-life transvestite.

In this movie, Wood takes pains to emphasize that a male transvestite is not automatically a homosexual. He swore that he had never had a single homosexual relationship in his life and was considered a womanizer. He also was given to directing his adult work in full drag and claimed that his greatest fantasy was to come back as a gorgeous blonde. Yet he still would say that he was comforted by the feel of angora.

So while the Golden Turkey Awards may give Wood the title of Worst Director of All Time and Leonard Maltin may say that this is “possibly the worst movie ever made,” it has heart. An inept heart, but heart.

A transvestite who has been to prison four times for cross-dressing has killed themselves, saying “Let my body rest in death forever, in the things I cannot wear in life.”

This leads Dr. Alton (Wood player Timothy Farrell) to seek out Glen, another man who loves to dress as the other sex, often stealing the clothing of his fiancee Barbara (Dolores Fuller, Wood’s girlfriend at the time). Glen is struggling between being honest with Barbara before their wedding or telling her afterward. Through extended dream sequences, he finally comes to terms with who he is and his other side, revealing it to her. As she hands him an angora sweater, she accepts every side of him.

The doctor then learns of another person, Alan/Anne. Anne was born a boy, but her mother wanted a girl and raised her that way, which left her abused throughout school. Despite hiding her true self during the war, she has since had an operation to become “a lovely young lady.”

Let me tell you, this kind of movie is incendiary in 2022. This was made in 1953.

A movie with these words, which we should live by: “Give this man satin undies, a dress, a sweater and a skirt, or even the lounging outfit he has on, and he’s the happiest individual in the world. He can work better, think better, he can play better, and he can be more of a credit to his community and his government because he is happy.”

So yes, Ed Wood isn’t someone with a cinematic eye. But he put himself — all of himself — on the screen. That’s worthy of celebration.

The inclusion of Bela Lugosi is as well. That’s what takes this movie from message movie to true oddity, as Bela plays The Scientist, a character unconnected to any narrative that begins the film and is not even the narrator, much like how Encounter with the Unknown decides to have a second uncredited voice take the role because just having Rod Serling is not enough.

“Beware. Beware. Beware of the big, green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys, puppy dog tails and big, fat snails. Beware. Take care. Beware.

Wood would bring back Glen/Glenda again in two of his novels. Killer in Drag has Glen/Glenda becoming a serial killer while Death of a Transvestite has Glen/Glenda being executed.

You can watch this on Tubi.