Why Aren't These Movies Cult Classics?

WhatCulture Horror presents a selection of classy genre movies, which are all too often mistakenly overlooked. These 10 films should be classed as cult classics, the 13-minute featurette argues, but aren't.

It's an interesting selection, although I firmly believe that the number one film, Near Dark, is a cult classic. I certainly regard it as such.

"There Can Never Be Enough Blood!"

Rabid (2019)

After an argument with her best friend, vegetarian wallflower and aspiring fashion designer Rose (Laura Vandervoort aka Smallville's Supergirl) is hideously disfigured in a road traffic accident.

During her recuperation, she learns of an experimental private medical centre, run by the not-at-all-sinister Dr William (yes, I see what they did there) Burroughs (Ted Atherton).

After undergoing cutting-edge stem cell treatment and remarkable restorative plastic surgery, Rose emerges full-on Vandervoort gorgeous.

However, upon returning home, she is troubled by crippling stomach pains and increasingly gruesome nightmares.

Unfortunately, for everyone she comes into contact with, they are not nightmares and she is actually patient zero for an outbreak of superfast, mutated rabies which spreads through the city like wildfire.

A retelling of David Cronenberg's original 1977 body horror classic, Jen and Sylvia Soska‘s Rabid is a phenomenal and shocking tale that takes its audience to some surprising places along its visceral journey.

Featuring everything from Lovecraftian mad science to unstoppable plague zombies, this ticks a lot of boxes for me.

As the mayhem escalates - with the mutated strain of rabies engulfing the city - there's almost an In The Mouth Of Madness level of existential dread, which is then compounded by the film's bleak denouement.

The not-too-subtle critique of body-shaming and vanity is wryly amusing, with several of the supporting roles teetering on the brink of being arch.

Nicely paced and cleverly shot, blurring hallucinations (such as the Silent Hill/music video sequence) with gruesome reality, the action in Rabid may take some time to get going but the central performances never fail to draw the audience in.

As well as a number of the characters carrying over their names from the original, the Soska Sisters's Rabid is sprinkled with Cronenberg-related Easter Eggs, such as the use of  the name of William Burroughs alluding to Cronenberg's adaptation of his famous novel Naked Lunch and the red surgical gowns worn during Rose's operation are a clear nod to Jeremy Irons's gowns in Dead Ringers.

Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

Simply put, Tokyo Gore Police is quite possibly one of the craziest, most mixed-up movies I've ever enjoyed.

Merrily playing hopscotch along the line between genius and insanity, decorated with more severed limbs than you'd ever want to see and almost certainly the largest volume of free-flowing blood, there is no escaping the "gore" in the film's title.

Set in the near future, with a recently privatised police force controlling the city and freaky cybernetic mutants, known as "engineers", running rampant, Tokyo Gore Police tells the story of Ruka (Eihi Shiina) - the Force's top "engineer hunter".

The katana-wielding cutie is haunted by dreams of the death of her father (also a police officer) and is plagued by a penchant for self-harming.

The movie mixes the body horror of David Cronenberg with the dystopian future and dark humour of Robocop, but just as you think it can't get any more over-the-top it pushes the envelope that bit further like a live-action anime where literally anything is possible.

The engineers have a power which may be scientific or supernatural (but most likely somewhere in between) to transform any wound into a weapon, leading to such mind-hammering creations as phallus cannons and breasts that spray acid.

In pursuit of a particularly methodical serial killer, Ruka, begins to find herself turning into an engineer as she is simultaneously drawn into mystery of her father's murder and the police impose a major crack-down on engineers (and anyone who shows the slightest resistance to their investigations).

There are definitely shades of Buffy The Vampire Slayer in there as well, with an attractive protagonist raised to fight monsters that she discovers she has a dark connection with but as blood-splattered satires go, Tokyo Gore Police is in a class of its own.

Enduring images will be seared into brain - from the police chief's quadriplegic gimp pet to the physically re-sculpted prostitutes in the night club (the human chair is truly disgusting) - but Tokyo Gore Police isn't just about the shocks, at its heart is a solid (if a bit hackneyed) mystery-revenge story that allows the horrific action to evolve around it.

Add in some random TV adverts for self-harming knives, supersharp swords and the Tokyo Police Corporation, and you've got almost two hours of crazy that is quite happy to swing from extreme violence to the poignancy of Ruka surveying the aftermath of a slaughter by her fellow officers.

Be warned though, where Western films might cut away and fade to black, Tokyo Gore Police lingers that bit longer and, yes, the special effects are often quite primitive puppetry but that doesn't make them any the less suggestive. You don't need a multi-million pound CGI budget to get under an audience's skin.

Certainly not for the feint of heart or easily disturbed, Tokyo Gore Police makes Hollywood nonsense shock-horror franchises look like the silly little homemovies they are by not sacrificing plot and character on the altar of excess, using the gore instead to paint a picture that actually tells a story.

The Substance (2024)

How does writer/director Coralie Fargeat make a half-hour Twilight Zone/Tales of The Unexpected plot last a painful two hours and 20 minutes? By having everything in The Substance unfold at a glacial pace.

Past-her-prime actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is given a second shot at celebrity by a mysterious medical procedure - involving The Substance - that births a new, younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley).

The rules are, though, that each versions can only exist for one week at a time.

However, the younger iteration, calling herself Sue, soon starts to abuse the privilege with a predictably gruesome results for all concerned.

What could have been a solid David Cronenberg/William Burroughs/HP Lovecraft sci-fi body horror instead slowly slouches its predictable way towards an unearned Grand Guignol climax that's more a Troma parody than the clever arthouse genre subversion it seems to think it is.

I know it's supposed to be a parable about the inability to fight fate, but that doesn't excuse the multiple plot holes and inconsistencies in the story.

A pretentious horror flick for people who don't watch horror films, The Substance is one of the worst movies I've seen in recent years, pretty much on a par with that other example of Emperor's New Clothes that was the hugely overrated and oversold Poor Things.

Both of these movies seem to think the best way to subvert the male gaze is to give it exactly what it wants and have its lead actresses parade around in the nude for lengthy periods of time.

Really socking it to The Man!