From Cult To Classic
The most underrated genre flicks of the 1990s.
      by David Rosiak

In every generation, there will be a chosen one. Okay, there will probably be more than one, but they alone will stand up against the drudgery of Julia Roberts and the bombastic explosions that accompany Steven Seagal. They will hold the night against the forces of darkness wielded by Jon Peters and Joel Schumacher. These happy few will invariably meet with critical disdain and audience apathy, only to rise up as high water marks in a genre which finds its followers in the thoughtful masses that hold Blade Runner, Evil Dead, Buckaroo Banzai, Brazil, and Escape From New York in the same regard as gospel. They are the genre films, brimming with ideas and energy, that become the cult icons of horror and sci-fi fans the world over, inspiring like-minded filmmakers to join in the fray.

You were expecting something else?

While many view the first three quarters of the nineties as a veritable film wasteland, fan reaction speaks differently. Sure, flicks like Armageddon, Independence Day, and the Scream trilogy have continually broken box office records, but what have they done to further enhance the genre, aside from creating a slew of imitators intent on making millions in the wake of marketing extravaganzas? A classic is never defined by numbers -- just look at Blade Runner, a box office failure on its initial release that nevertheless went on to become an all time bestseller on video while providing visceral visuals and subject matter meaty enough to fuel the works of cyberpunk author William Gibson and wunderkind directors Larry and Andy Wachowski. Take a look at Evil Dead, a shoestring horror opus funded by a group of dentists (hey, at least the living dead will always have perfect teeth), panned by Siskel and Ebert, that now finds its creator, Sam Raimi, preparing to helm a big screen adaptation of Spider Man.

Filmmaking for the sake of passion was easier in the eighties, before profit-busting smashes like Rambo and Aliens convinced studios that larger spectacles produced larger earnings. And though the nineties saw a frankly frightening move away from provocative genre films, a few artists have remained on the fringes, constantly pushing for richer examinations of the genre. These are the guys that fight back tears after spilling every ounce of their integrity on the screen only to see abysmal returns just before being told that their work isn't mainstream enough.

John McNaughton is one of these guys, and he kick-started 1990 with Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, a vicious, violent film that has already attracted an avid cult following. Loosely based on the true-life exploits of Henry Lee Lucas, a barely intelligent psycho who rocketed to notoriety after he confessed to the murders of over a hundred people, the film gives a gritty portrayal of events that seem so genuine as to leave the casual viewer shocked and disgusted. Taking realism to the extreme, McNaughton increases viewer tension to the breaking point during a sequence in which Henry and his sociopathic former cellmate videotape the rape/murder of a victim and then constantly play it back to study their technique (the actress in this scene was so traumatized that she spent several days in recovery). Fans that walked into the auditorium expecting a by-the-numbers fright flick were instead treated to an utterly brutal embrace of amorality that made even the bloodiest gorefests seem tame by comparison. The casting of unknowns heightens the film's ferocious veracity, and that's probably what led to its poor showing at the box office. Audiences felt like voyeurs peeping in on the real deal, and they were shocked. More popular efforts like Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers dealt with their ideologies in fashions far less subtle, opting to glamorize their subjects as heroes of the counterculture. Henry offers no simple solutions, and its fans rightly see it as exploration, rather than exploitation.

The exploration of time itself led Terry Gilliam to 12 Monkeys, a movie that depicts an anarchic, grungy future in which animals have reclaimed he Earth's surface after ninety-nine percent of mankind has been eradicated by a deadly plague. Freed from prison, Bruce Willis' Cole is picked for a crucial mission that finds him time traveling back to 1996 in an effort to rewrite history. Upon his arrival, present authorities quickly classify him as a loon and toss him into the nearest asylum, and he must fight for both freedom and the future. By no means, however, is this a straightforward sci-fi actioner. The Cole character goes against type in that he spends much of the movie confused, uninformed, betrayed, and wounded. Rather than being granted viewer omniscience, we are instead put in Cole's shoes, ever wondering what lurks around the next damp corner. Characters and villains come and go, paradoxes form in the nature of time, buckets of blood are spilled, and we discover that there are no logical solutions to the problems at hand. And there's even a hint, given toward the beginning, that Cole already knows how the story is set to end. This is deep, dark stuff -- the future is as cold, dead, and merciless as the present, and what little romance can be had is fleeting. The plot has a more intellectual than visceral appeal. Surprisingly, 12 Monkeys was more than a moderate success, due in most part to the marketing campaign, which advertised the film as a Bruce Willis vehicle instead of a unrelentingly grim glimpse of the future. Fans who went in expecting Die Hard meets Terminator 2 emerged with a sense of abject desolation -- precisely what Terry Gilliam intended.

Peter Jackson intended Braindead (aka Dead Alive) to be the ultimate in Grand Guignol, gore-o-rama parody, and, in that, he pretty much succeeded. Billed alternately as a love story (it's there if you look hard enough) and an exploration of family values (bear with me, here), it's really just the story of a guy whose overbearing mother is bitten by a possessed rat monkey who venomous fangs make her over into a flesh-hungry zombie. Soon enough, everyone is becoming flesh-hungry zombies. It made bottom dollar bank in the U.S., barely hitting the $250,000 mark, and why is that, you ask? Well, this is, after all, a movie in which the elderly munch casually on one another, more body parts get torn off than in any Thursday Night WWF Smackdown, rat monkeys bite huge chunks out of people's legs, and, ultimately, someone experiences (get ready) death by lawnmower. A mainstream success it was not, unless you count the rising sales experienced at John Deere dealers across the nation. What it did do was turn director Peter Jackson into a Hollywood player. His next picture, Heavenly Creatures introduced the world to Kate Winslet, and Jackson himself is getting set to reintroduce the world to the works of fantasy novelist J.R.R. Tolkien -- that's right, he's directing all three Lord of the Rings flicks. Hopefully, none of them will feature Gandalf getting taken out with a weed whacker or Frodo pulling a Fargo in a Mulch-o-Matic. Time will tell.

Time has been kind to Rupert Everett, the oh so "out" star of My Best Friend's Wedding and the Madonna vehicle, The Next Best Thing. But Everett likes to forget that his first real claim to stardom came in the Italian-made Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man), a seminal genre work that begins as B grade zombie flick, but quickly mutates into a phantasmagorically beautiful meditation on life and death and love that defies the grave. "I'd give my life to be dead," Everett notes wryly, mere moments before he blows off the back of a zombie's skull with his trusty .45. Everett's companion, a bald troll called only Gnaghi, elicits more emotion with his single-word vocabulary (he says "Nyaahh" a lot) than most actors get with page-long soliloquies. And then there's She, the omnipresent female played by Italian model Anna Falchi, the woman who keeps on living no matter how many times Everett kills her. The movie's director, Michele Soavi, was a protégé of Italian auteur Dario Argento, and, in this case, the student has eclipsed his master with a sense of style and aesthetics that left the Scream audiences scratching their heads -- if they could actually find one of the twelve or so theaters in which it played.

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