Finding out about this stuff meant tracking down the places to hang out and listening to older men talk about what movies they did or didn't like, or sorting through the “Employee Picks” section at the video store. Especially as a woman and especially in a pre-internet world where the ritual of information sharing seemed to be passed down from the generation above (almost entirely male) and non-negotiable. It was like a clubhouse for anyone who liked weird shit and I wanted to live there.īeyond Blast Off, cult film was never easily attainable knowledge for me. Plastered along the walls were posters of cult movies, cutouts of aliens from 50’s sci-fi, pictures of Bettie Page. Part of the store was organized by these really specific sub-genres: Nunsploitation.
#Very old cult classic gay movies movie#
The whole place smelled like incense and the Herschell Gordon Lewis movie She-Devils on Wheels (1968) played on the television set hanging from the ceiling. The owner was a middle-aged man who looked like Manfred Mann in the 60’s, exactly the guy you’d think of owning a video store nowadays. She was the one who brought me to Blast Off Video for the first time, a very small VHS rental place in an alleyway in Little Five Points, a.k.a. That year, I was still in high school out in the suburbs of Atlanta but managed to make a friend in the city named Laura, who was untouchably cool. They’re a secret handshake the stuff that you discover as a young person that lead you down a long road of fucked up film.Ĭlimax takes place in 1996, when I was seventeen years old and really getting into fucked up things myself. I have seen these shelves before and have had these shelves before. In Climax, these movies sit beside each other as part of someone’s personal collection of transgressive art, possibly Noé’s own collection. It’s hard to even imagine these were all released in the same year considering their canonical status in the cult film community. Three movies from 1977: Dario Argento’s Suspiria, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. The VHS tapes to the right are more recognizable to fans of exploitation film, psychotronic film, underground cinema, whatever you want to call it. Most of the books are in French but a few author names pop out: Oscar Wilde, Kafka, Nietzsche.
#Very old cult classic gay movies tv#
The TV is on a shelf next to a giant pile of books and VHS tapes with the labels facing out. The opening sequence to Gaspar Noé’s new film Climax is a montage of interviews framed inside an old, 1980’s style television.