Cult

synopsis
Set in Los Angeles two days before the end of 1999, Strange Days introduces us to Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), an ex-cop turned sleazy hustler who hawks the newest underground thrill on the black market: a “squid,” a headpiece that allows one to transmit digital recordings of other people’s thoughts, feelings, and memories into their brain; as Lenny describes it, “this is real life, pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex.” Lenny deals “clips” (the software) as well as “squids” (the hardware) for this new and illegal entertainment system, and while sex and violence are the most popular themes, Lenny refuses to deal in “blackjack” — slang for snuff clips. Lenny is nursing a broken heart after his girlfriend, punk singer Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis), left him, and he spends a lot of time with clips he recorded when they were together.Read More »

If any Jess Franco films truly lives up to its title that would be “El sexo está loco”…

Synopsis:
Life starts to imitate art when aliens in search of fertile women to help repopulate their planet impregnate an actress. The plot as it progresses then focuses around two couples and their sexual adventures. Then we’re back to the weird alien vibe it all started with only to briefly abandon it again until the films ends. So were there really aliens or where they just a fantasy of Lina Romay’s character’s imagination?Read More »

Quote:
Miguel is a successful economist until his father’s death plunges him into a strange obscure world of fears, strange sounds and psychological isolation. He quits his job, drifts away from his wife and initiates a process of physical disintegration. He will reach the bottom before he starts seeing the light. As an echo to his journey, we follow, faraway in the countryside, the story of a crime and its redemption, the story of Antonio and Cecilia. From death to the miracle of life, here on earth.Read More »

Before carving out a niche as one of the most distinct voices in nineties American cinema , Allison Anders made her debut, alongside codirectors and fellow UCLA film school students Kurt Voss and Dean Lent, with 1987’s Border Radio. A low-key, semi-improvised postpunk diary that took four years to complete, Border Radio features legendary rocker Chris D., of the Flesh Eaters, as a singer/songwriter who has stolen loot from a club and gone missing, leaving his wife (Luanna Anders), a no-nonsense rock journalist, to track him down with the help of his friends (John Doe of the band X; Chris Shearer). With its sprawling Southern Californian and Mexican landscapes, captured in evocative 16mm black and white, Border Radio is a singular, DIY memento of the indie film explosion in America.Read More »

IMDB
Poor teenager Tommy isn’t having a good time of it. His mother just passed away at a tragically young age. Tommy starts seeing a ghostly white apparition of her unrestful spirit. He also experiences scary nightmares of an evil devil cult. Plus a couple of close friends of the family meet brutal untimely ends. Could it be mysterious new housekeeper Darminah who’s behind the freaky and troubling events that have befallen Tommy and his family? Director Sisworo Gautama Putra does an expert job of ably creating and sustaining a powerfully eerie and unnerving otherworldly atmosphere. Moreover, Putra does a totally convincing job of evoking a thoroughly believable mundane everyday reality that’s ripped asunder by bizarre and inexplicable supernatural phenomenon.Read More »

Quote:
One of the great punk films anywhere (let alone canada), starring Jello Biafra (of Dead Kennedys fame) and never commercially released, soundtrack on alternative tentacles (with a nomeansno song!) Actually this movie kind of reminds me of Max Headrrom.Read More »

In 1989, Stephen Sayadian, aka Rinse Dream, released one of the most iconic and fantastical works in American exploitation cinema. For the first time since its release, thanks to a new restoration, it will finally find its audience, and retroactively be appreciated as the underground masterpiece that it is. Bizarre, stunning, goofy and unsettling, DR. CALIGARI embraces the avant-garde in its exquisite and hilarious exploitation of America’s repressed libido. As the film’s title might suggest, the film is a loose remake of the German Expressionist classic, following Mrs. Van Houten, a woman who seems to be losing touch with reality, and her treatment under Dr. Caligari, who diagnoses her with a “disease of the libido”. Far more than just narratively similar, Sayadian’s background in set design and art keeps with the silent classic’s highly stylized design, updated with the bright, disorienting commercialism of 1980s Americana. DR. CALIGARI might be one of the American cinema’s most incisive and unique portraits of national excess ever to grace the screen.Read More »

Shot on location in West Beriln, Nordstrand and Heiligensee, Sept/Oct 1986 and March 1987

Quote:
Cult movie ‘Nihil oder Alle Zeit der Welt’ from 1987, featuring the members of Einstürzende Neubauten as actors. It’s a film about a group of young ‘Terrorists’ (Neubauten), fighting desperately against an obscure ‘professor’, that represent a personification of all things bad and ugly in today’s civilization.
-tarantullashop.comRead More »

From Steven Holden in The New York Times:
“Praying With Anger” is a standard male rites-of-passage film with one fascinating difference: Dev Raman (M. Night Shyamalan), a hotheaded exchange student who endures assorted trials on his way to responsible manhood, is an American-born Indian who goes all the way to Madras to grow up.

The film, which opens today at the Village East, is the cinematic debut of Mr. Shyamalan, a 22-year-old director, who wrote and produced the movie in which he also plays the leading role. Sumptuously photographed on location in Madras, it offers a vision of contemporary life strikingly different from that shown in most films set in modern India, which tend to dwell on the mystical and the exotic.Read More »