Kult Film [DVD] (English subtitles)

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The campy, kitschy, OTT excessiveness of it all makes Lady Terminator a lively, sexually charged, and silly pisstake on gender politics, Western beliefs, and irresponsible Western ideology. Oh, and did I mention that Lady Terminator has lethal eye lasers?

F: You said that you’ve been shooting this film for more than six years. Were there any scenes that you really liked that didn’t make it to the final cut? One of the most celebrated of Indonesian trash cinema from the 1980s, Lady Terminator intentionally bears many similarities to James Cameron’s 1984 hit The Terminator. Ostensibly the well-told tale of an indestructible cyborg stirring up trouble amidst an urban landscape, director H. Tut Djalil’s does add a few wrinkles of it’s own as well as lifting heavily from the Indonesian myth of the South Sea Queen –– a sexually insatiable and emasculating succubus-like legend.No one sets out to make a cult film. Not really, anyway. No matter how low their professed ambitions, if someone is going to go through all the trouble of writing, casting, directing, financing and shooting a movie, somewhere in their auteurist heart, they’re wishing to score a leftfield hit – the next ‘little low-budget indie that could.’ Most of the time, cultdom is the best they can settle for. But hey, there are much worse fates for any piece of art. In fact, as time has gone on, and the phrase has become more commonly understood, filmmakers have started to wear ‘cult’ as a badge of honour. And well they should – especially given the company they keep. The cult film experience differs from conventional cinema by appealing to unique sensibilities, be it the counterculture, genre films, or niche audiences that joyfully zero in on taboo content and proscribed subject matter that deliriously upends convention with razor-sharp satire, exploitation, and/or legitimate ideological dangers or controversial content. Armed only with a treasure map, some Baby Ruth candy bars, a few zany inventions, their wits, and a bag of marbles, will the Goonies be good enough to find the fortune, and with it save their neighborhood from demolition? And will the image of a tormented Chunk (Jeff Cohen) doing the “truffle shuffle” at Clark “Mouth” Devereaux’s (Feldman) mean-spirited request ever fade from your memory? This is a nostalgic grab bag of funhouse s and thrills that meant a lot to audiences as kids and may mean even more to them now as sentimental adults.

Perhaps more than any decade before or since, due largely to the home video market, the 1980s was a great time for cult films. Part of the attraction with these movies designated with cult status is that they are decidedly different and much more provocative than mainstream populist fare. Impressed by his strange stage show at the Groundlings theater, Warner Brothers contracted Paul Ruebens to write a feature based around his quirky, child-like überbrat persona, Pee-Wee Herman. Inspired, strange as it sounds, by Italian neo-realist innovator Vittorio De Sica (specifically his celebrated 1948 film, The Bicycle Thief), Reubens wrote one honey of a nonconformist comedy and found the ideal director, a former Disney animator looking to leap into live-action features, Tim Burton.O: Yes, I had that. For the first month; then it was gone. I used to do the band's feature movies and that’s all scripted. You know what everything is doing and wearing and what is around them. But in documentaries you need to know what you want to display on the screen and then find it. You need a little bit more patience and you need to avoid trying to force it happening.

Bogdan Balla is a Romanian experimental film director and freelance film critic based in Bucharest. He studies film directing at the National University of Theatre and Film and writes for FILM MENU. Besides directing and producing his own films, he also works as an independent freelance film critic. He reads bell hooks and is passionate about queer cinema. He has a preference for working with archival footage for his films. Svetlana Semenchuk is anauthor of such publications on cinema as “Seanse”, “The Art of Cinema”, “Cinema TV” and other.The author-composer of the books “S. M. Eisenstein: pro et contra: Sergey Eisenstein in national reflection: anthology” and “E. F. Bauer: pro et contra. Eugene Frantsevich Bauer in assessments of contemporaries, colleagues, researchers, film critics. Anthology”. Teacher of the St. Petersburg New Cinema School, and at the St. Petersburg State University of Cinema and Television. Tommaso Tocciis based in Italy, where he works as a film critic and translator covering film festivals across Europe for international publications. He has also worked for Berlinale Talents and for the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and he currently serves as Co-Programmer for the Saas-Fee Film Festival in Switzerland.

Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1987)

O: Many. I have around 217 hours of footage, that’s a lot. 217 hours of material shot by us and around 50 hours of archival footage. It’s what I’ve collected from people’s private shelves. Much of the stuff in there belongs to the band members. Nothing is bought from television and it was first shown in this film. It took one year and a half to complete the final cut and that’s the 6th version of it. With a funny and fast-paced script by Chris Columbus, from a story by Steven Spielberg (who executive produced), this idiosyncratic and very Scooby Doo-like actioner set in Astoria, Oregon, pits a group of young misfit kids (including Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green, and Martha Plimpton) against a family of criminals (including Joe Pantoliano and Anne Ramsey) in a race to retrieve the long-lost treasure of fabled 17th-century pirate, One-Eyed Willy. More akin to Hill’s comic book colorful, overtly stylish, and extravagantly violent fare like The Warriors (1979), this singular and strange pastiche of 1950s biker films and then contemporary 1980s music videos is a fun, fast-paced, and fist-pumping ride that’s worth it not only for the dreamy Lane, but for Madigan’s tenacious tough girl (she also gets all the best lines), Dafoe’s scenery-chewing, and early roles from Bill Paxton and Ed Begley, Jr., amongst others.

FIPRESCI Young Critics: Kult seems like such a tightly knit musical group. How was the process of getting them to feel comfortable with the camera? I was ten years old when director Richard Donner unleashed his silly, pre-teen adventure epic The Goonies and I fully admit that, as a result, my mantra for a time became: “Goonies never say die!” Leading the way, is vocalist and saxophonist Kazik Staszewski, now in his mid-fifties but seemingly with no intention of slowing down. He co-founded the band with Dariusz Gierszewski and they, plus the other members of the group happily talk about the ins and outs of the band's dynamic as they travel about or socialise between gigs. The emotional heart of the story is provided by one of their most faithful fans, Rafa? "Didi" Diduch, who after following them around to gigs with so little money he even spent a night in the cells found himself taken under Staszewski's wing. It’s also fair to say that this is a film for extreme fans but, that said, admirers of David Cronenberg (particularly 1983’s Videodrome) and David Lynch (shades of 1977’s Eraserhead are ample) might dig some of the surreal strangeness as well.

Night of the Hunted (1980)

You have to be patient to make this kind of film because of the amount of footage you have to skim through. So, yeah, there are many scenes I would have loved to add but I have to separate what I love about them and focus on what the audience wants to see. Mladen Pechevski is a film industry freelancer currently based in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2019, he was a jury member of the Giornate degli Autori section at the 76 th Venice International Film Festival and was subsequently heavily involved in organizing the autumn edition of the Sofia International Film Festival for Students. In 2020, he worked as an assistant consultant for the Giornate degli Autori section at the 77 th Venice International Film Festival. Mladen is passionate about European cinema and would like to further acquire first-hand experience covering international festivals as a film critic. With great gags, stunningly silly production design, and overflowing quotable quips, it’s no wonder discriminating audiences ate it up. Although not fully spelled out, alcohol issues are hinted at - not least in the random breath testing the band all undertake periodically before gigs. A no-alcohol rule it seems they instigated after problems sprang up. Denisa Jašová is a PhD student of Audiovisual Studies at Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. As a Film Studies and Archival Science graduate, she specializes on archival research in film and TV history, especially on Czechoslovak amateur film and TV non-fiction programmes from 70s and 80s. She also works as aresearcher for TV documentaries, as alibrarian in the Central European House of Photography and as atalk show host in student radio talk show called Cinefil. She frequently writes for magazine Film.sk, IFF Cinematik Piešťany and her first paper about the history of Slovak amateur film will be released in October 2019 in Kino-Ikon magazine. She simply loves film archives.