I'm married! I'M BYOODIFUL!!!

Muriel's Wedding, The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, and Strictly Ballroom. An unofficial trilogy of films from the early '90s that are known as small cult items elsewhere but were absolutely massive hits here in Australia, and are regarded as classics; I think you're actually legally mandated to watch them all in succession if you're applying for citizenship here.

Also, every Australian, more or less without exception, can quote the TV series Kath and Kim on command. ("Kimmy, look at moi." "I'm gropable!" "It's noice, it's different, it's unusual", etc.)

It's the vibe.

Big, big fan of the two vanity projects made by transcendently untalented starlet/belly-dancer Nai Bonet in 1979 and 1980, Nocturna and Hoodlums. Especially Nocturna, an achingly unfunny disco-era "comedy" about Dracula's granddaughter, in which the reason Bonet never achieved stardom becomes immediately apparent the minute she opens her mouth. ("Good ev-en-ing The-o-dore have-you-seen-my-grand-fa-ther.") The only good thing about it is the immortal Brother Theodore as Nocturna's lust-wracked Renfield, and that's because he improvised all his dialogue ("Am I never going to be her little yum-yum? Is she never going to invade my bed and abuse me carnally?!").

William Wyler, best-known for directing glossy romances and melodramas during Hollywood's Golden Age (Roman Holiday, Mrs. Miniver, The Heiress, Ben-Hur) took a sharp detour into horror/thriller territory with 1965's The Collector, set in gritty postwar Britain, and it's fantastic. He went back to lighter territory with his subsequent films (How To Steal A Million, Funny Girl), so The Collector really is the big outlier of the bunch.

Similarly, Michael Powell (A Matter of Life and Death, The Tales of Hoffman, The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Col. Blimp, etc) with 1960's Peeping Tom - a film acknowledged as a masterpiece of horror and suspense now, but so utterly reviled at the time it more or less entirely killed his previously-respected career. One reviewer even compared Powell to the Marquis de Sade, which seems a bit much.

Mika Ninagawa's Helter Skelter (2012), a superb, surreal Japanese film about a surgery-addicted model starting to fall apart. I believe you can find it on Netflix (and mind you don't confuse it with either of the two films about Charles Manson bearing the same title).

From Beyond, Stuart Gordon's immediate follow-up to Re-Animator, in which Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs effectively swap their Re-Animator roles: this time she's the obsessed mad scientist, and he's the helpless victim. It's a delight.

Jesus, yes. The first season is almost verbatim Atwood, and it works great...as a miniseries. The minute they ran out of book, the entire thing collapsed like a poorly-made souffle. (I gather Offred is now a Katniss-style rebel leader and Serena Joy her archnemesis, which, fucking hell.)

The Undoing. It basically already is an upmarket '90s erotic thriller, but the key to those films' success was that they told their story in about 90-100 minutes and got out before you started to really think about the plot and how little sense it made; The Undoing took six hours to reach more or less the same conclusion as Jagged Edge or Primal Fear, and I think people would've been a lot more forgiving of that non-twist ending had it not taken them so damn long to get there.

The Fall is wonderful, too. But yeah, I think he's been kind of hobbled professionally by his disinterest in the actual content of his scripts (by his own admission, all he cares about is whether or not they'll afford him the chance for interesting visuals); every so often, you have to make an actual good movie to remind people why they should keep giving you money to do this. Hopefully, this one will be that actual good movie?

It's a fun little flick! I think coming out at the same time as Snow White and the Huntsman kind of hurt it, even though their respective approaches to the subject matter couldn't possibly be more different.

Yep. The key to understanding Aeon Flux is to grasp that the war between Monica and Bregna absolutely does not matter one little bit: it's a pretext by which two perverts explore their sexual fascination with one another and play endless games of sadomasochistic one-upmanship. It's a kinky Spy Vs. Spy, a satire of Star Wars-like SFF morality plays; trying to actually make the Monica-Bregna thing important just turns AF into that which it's satirizing.

(And don't even get me started on turning Trevor into an unambiguous good guy, because Jesus Christ.)

He's not a bad person in M. Butterfly, the less-celebrated of his two Cronenberg collaborations. Flawed, yes, and filled with inner conflict and self-loathing, but ultimately more sinned against than sinning. His final scene is absolutely heartbreaking.

My favorite bit of oddball trivia about this film is that all the neon in it - and if you've seen it, you know that's a lot of neon - wound up getting repurposed for Blade Runner. It's kinda funny to think that something of this mad, grand folly is running through BR's veins.

Yeah, agreed. I think they're judged a lot more harshly when compared to his '70s work (I mean, we're talking about some of the greatest American films ever made, so that there's a pretty high benchmark), but if any other director had Peggy Sue Got Married, Rumble Fish, The Outsiders, Gardens of Stone, Tucker: The Man and His Dream and, yes, even visual marvels/noble failures like The Cotton Club and One From The Heart under their belt over the course of a decade, most would agree that's not too shabby.

>Julian Rhind-Tutt pretty much always plays strange characters. I don't think I've ever seen him play a normal character, I just expect his characters to be strange at this point.

Weirdly, he is the most normal character on Britannia (a truly insane show that I absolutely love and which, being on HBO Max, I fear for the future of).

Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock's self-presented guided tour of the Bates Motel. It's perfect.

I admit, I'm intrigued by Mummy Maniac. My hope is that the serial killer's process for "turning girls into mummies" consists entirely of wrapping them in toilet paper and then leaving them alive and unharmed but deeply confused.

What did I ever do to him?

There's a really fascinating version from 1958, performed and broadcast on live television, starring Boris Karloff, Roddy McDowall and Eartha Kitt. The set is deliberately surreal and artificial, like a school play production of Where The Wild Things Are (or an adolescent's anxiety dream, which it is sort of framed as), and there's a heavy emphasis on then-fashionable Freudian psychology and sadomasochistic overtones. Obviously not super-faithful to the source material, but I think it's a really strange, interesting, almost fairy-tale interpretation of the story.

(It's rendered even weirder by the occasional ad breaks. Roddy McDowall writhing half-naked in chains as he succumbs to his repressed desire for colonialist brutality is brought to you tonight by LUXO SOAP [TM]!)

>I know a remake is in the offing but there's no way it will come close, surely?

There was a remake in 1979, by Werner Herzog, and - I say this as someone who counts the original as one of her favorite films - it is an absolute masterpiece. (The upcoming one is by Robert Eggers, of The Witch and The Lighthouse fame; he's talented, but the fact that he's been publicly slagging off Herzog's astonishing film does not fill me with confidence.)

And Love At First Bite, and the Frank Langella Dracula. I can't help but wonder if the vampire resurgence of that year might've had something to do with this being roughly the point where the very first instances of AIDS (though not yet recognized as such) began to show up in the US.

(Possibly worth noting: the novelization of Herzog's Nosferatu is by Paul Monette, who would later go on to become a major chronicler of the AIDS era. His novelization is superb, gorgeous and scary and sad, a great book in its own right and well worth seeking out.)

>One is a horror movie where a bunch of street punk teenagers are killed on a roller coaster. The person operating the coaster seemed to want to kill rowdy teenagers.

Could this be The New Kids (1985)? It's about a bunch of delinquents who terrorize two nice teens who just arrived in town, and the climax takes place at the nice kids' uncle's amusement park.

I am utterly obsessed with Desiree Gould's amazing, all-caps performance as Aunt Martha ("I MADE YOU SOME COOKIES FOR THE RIDE HOME!!1!"). Everyone else is more or less going for naturalism in their performances, but she's got this, like, John Waters/David Lynch thing going on wherein the performance is just so much that all concepts of "Good Acting" or "Bad Acting" just become wholly irrelevant. Absolutely iconic, either way.

>2 & 3 stars Bruce Springsteen's sister.

And she's great, legitimately the best thing about those films. Her Angela isn't the sad-eyed lost soul Felissa Rose created - to such an extent that it's really hard to buy them as the same character - but she's so darn likable and peppy that she's fun to watch no matter what the hell she's doing.