Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream

2005, Canada/USA

Director: Stuart Samuels

Writer: Victor Kushmaniuk (additional writer), Stuart Samuels

Producers: Stuart Samuels

Genre: Documentary

Rating: Not Rated

DVD Distributor: Anchor Bay/Starz Home Entertainment

Website: Buy it here

Running Time: 86 minutes

I don’t want to tell you what movie I was watching yesterday at midnight. Partly, it’s because I like to cultivate a sense of mystery, an enigmatic aura that cloaks my personal life in inscrutable ambiguity. But mostly it’s because I watched King Kong Versus Godzilla. Alone. Again. But, when people with friends, taste, and social skills watch movies at midnight, their choice in movies tends to be more transgressive, intellectual, and artistic, like maybe  Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster.

And that’s what concerns Midnight Movies: From the Margin To The Mainstream. Well, not Godzilla, but rather the movies that really put cult film on the map, turning it from something projected onto the wall at a stag party to a full-blown cultural revolution. The documentary takes a look at six films that changed the way movies were exhibited in the 70s, by creating a whole new audience that appropriated film into a counter-culture experience. El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingoes, Eraserhead, The Harder They Come, and, of course, The Rocky Horror Picture Show are examined in detail, accompanied by fascinating interviews with the filmmakers.

Director Stuart Samuels’ film is straightforward and tame in terms of form, presenting its material in a very standard documentary format. But the interviews with the directors, actors, distributors and exhibitors that created the midnight movie scene are so energetic, spontaneous, and lively they infuse the film with as much energy as the films it spotlights, though not quite enough for me to move King Kong Versus Godzilla too far from my DVD player.

Rating: 8 on 10

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