Few words in the cinematic sphere are misappropriated as frequently and as flagrantly as “cult” (no, friends, “Mean Girls,” a pop culture phenomenon as well as critical and commercial success upon its initial release, is not a “cult classic”), so one of the many refreshing pleasures of the streaming service Cultpix is that the titles it streams are honest-to-God cult movies.
And what exactly is a cult movie? Definitions and explanations vary, of course; Danny Peary, who literally wrote the book on the subject, defined them as “special films which for one reason or another have been taken to heart by segments of the movie audience, cherished, protected, and most of all, enthusiastically championed.” This is a generously broad definition, however; most blue-blood cinephiles consider low budgets, outsider status, commercial indifference, critical hostility or obscurity to be important factors as well. When the question is posed more directly on Cultpix’s FAQ page, the answer is even simpler: “We decide what is a cult film. This is not a democracy, this is a cult.”
Cult movies and the internet have gone hand in hand since the latter’s beginning — in fact, the first feature film ever streamed online was the 1992 cult film “Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees” — and while the click-of-a-button ease of online interactions (from streaming to torrenting to disc rental and purchase) has reduced the obscurity factor, it has also allowed online communities of cult film fans to flourish.
Our monthly spotlight on lesser-known but worthwhile streaming services has included a fair amount of fringe programming for viewers tired of the same titles rotating between Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Max and Hulu, but Cultpix (which launched in 2021) offers the wildest variety of options to date: long-forgotten crime thrillers, horror oddities, cheapo fantasy flicks, documentaries of dubious merit, women-in-prison pictures, weirdo westerns, drug dramas, kung fu galore, kaiju city-smashers, and erotica of various shapes and styles. (Consider yourself warned: There are plenty of firmly adults-only titles.)
Other collections are even more specialized. To honor the recent loss of Roger Corman, the king of exploitation cinema, the service has re-upped its birthday tribute to the filmmaker. There is a spotlight on “Video Nasties,” films of extreme violence targeted and banned in England in the 1980s and 1990s. The “Background Films for Parties” section offers exactly what it promises — collections of trailers, shorts, adult film “loops,” “soundies” (jukebox musical shorts that were, put simply, the first music videos), and other cinematic ephemera. They also boast a wide enough variety to present a handful of genuinely amusing sub-sub-genres, including “Juvenile Delinquent,” “Fake Gorilla Suit,” “Mad Scientist” and “Women in Fur Bikini”; if you don’t have to have those explained to you, well, you’re the target audience.
Cultpix is a bargain at (snicker, snicker) $6.66 per month, or $59 per year (which reduces the monthly cost to $4.92). The only real downside to the service is that, primarily because of its mature content, it’s only available on browsers; there are currently no Roku, Fire or Apple TV apps, which means you’ll have to watch on your computer or stream to your TV. If you want to take the plunge, here are a few recommendations:
‘42nd Street Forever, Vol. 1’: There’s no better introduction to the world of cult cinema than vintage trailer compilations, and this is one of the best. Exploitation trailers are frequently better than the films they’re advertising — a sales pitch that only shows you the good stuff, the explosions and jump-scares and pretty ingénues and roaring monsters, without all (or most) of the bad acting, worse dialogue and other filler that pads them out to feature length. It’s a hoot from start to finish, and a fringe film school to boot.
‘Massage Parlor Murders!’: New York-set grindhouse movies of the ’70s and ’80s captured the seedy underbelly of the city with an up-close verisimilitude that Hollywood carpetbaggers could only dream of, and this story of a serial killer terrorizing Times Square massage parlors is loaded with firsthand sleaziness and tantalizing location photography. The plotting is frequently nonsensical, if not unhinged — but the run-and-gun, guerrilla energy is undeniable (there’s a breathless car chase in which every shot feels stolen), and it so carefully sidesteps the conventions of professional filmmaking, consciously or not, that it becomes a weird object of outsider art.
‘The Hitch-Hiker’: Ida Lupino was not only an actor-turned-director but a female filmmaker, in an era where both were rarities. She refused to be boxed in to directing so-called “women’s pictures”; the B-movie realm she dwelled in concerned hard-boiled stories of tough guys and crime, and this 1953 thriller is no exception. William Talman is chilling as the title character, thumbing his way across the Southwest on a crime spree when two buddies (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy, both stellar) make the mistake of picking him up. Lupino builds dread in each frame, and stretches every dollar of her low budget to create a rough-edged mini-masterpiece.
‘Rock, Rock, Rock!’: The less said about the plot of this 1956 jukebox musical (concerning Tuesday Weld’s prom dress and the financial horse-trading required to attain it), the better. The draw here are the musical numbers, overseen by the famed disc jockey Alan Freed and featuring the likes of Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, the Moonglows, the Flamingos and especially Chuck Berry, whose performance of “You Can’t Catch Me” — alone onstage, just a man and his ax — is utterly electrifying.
‘The Spook Who Sat By the Door’: The highlight of Cultpix’s Blaxploitation section is this 1973 thriller from the director Ivan Dixon (“Nothing But a Man”), which offsets the low budget and low-fi production values of the subgenre with a gripping story of genuine radicalism. It concerns the C.I.A.’s first Black agent, a seemingly mild-mannered token hire who leaves the agency and uses his knowledge to light the fuse on a Black nationalist urban uprising. What could have been mere wish fulfillment becomes a thought-provoking meditation on the meaning (and cost) of freedom itself.
