Cult Movie Bracket: The Final Final!

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By Hampus Eckerman: For each pair, vote for the top cult movie. Vote for what is rememoralizable, what is fun, what is interesting, what is cult. You will have at least 24 hours to answer, but after that it depends on when I have time to count the votes.

1. QUOTABLE QUAGMIRE
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
The Princess Bride (1987)

2. What movie should have won?

3. Which movies were voted out too early or were never in the bracket in the first place?

4. Which would be your favourite mashup between two of the cult movies?

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67 thoughts on “Cult Movie Bracket: The Final Final!”

  4. Ijust now remembered that I wanted to nominate Kung Fury.
    If you havent seen it – watch it. Its for free on you tube.

  5. Kung Fury was eligible (too recent, too short), but yes, see it! It is wonderful!

  7. @Hampus
    Adding my thanks for running this bracket.

    @Cassy

    Cora, forgive me for misgendering Winnetou; as I said, I was entirely unfamiliar with, erm, HIM, as it turns out. I found the reference back to the Karl May books on a quick google but sadly didn’t look far enough to see anything about the character. Karl May’s accidentally-alternate-reality-Westerns novels were mentioned in From A High Tower, one of Misty Lackey’s “Elemental Masters” books. The plot involves a traveling Wild West show, a copy of Buffalo Bill’s show, touring Europe sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s. It runs head-on into the preconceptions of the American West fostered by Karl May. (The owner of the show doesn’t understand why their audiences doesn’t like seeing the Indians (in this case, real Pawnee) portrayed as the bad guys until a local German girl explains it to them….) Lackey wrote an explanatory forward about May in the book, for we Americans who had never heard of him….

    Wow, that video clip is… something.

    Actually, a pretty common reactions of Germans reared on the Winnetou books and/or movies and/or stage plays (There are Karl May festivals in Germany, performing Winnetou plays live on an open air stage) to American westerns is “Wait a minute, why are the Native Americans the bad guys here? And why does everybody seem to think that the craggy-faced jerk is the hero? What is this shit?”

    Like I said before, I have massive issues with Hollywood westerns (and the ones I like are usually dismissed by US critics as “not a real western”). I do not have the same issues with Italian westerns, probably because no one in an Italian western is under any illusion that they’re the good guys.

    And don’t worry, I actually found the misgendering of Winnetou funny due to the very slashy nature of the Winnetou/Old Shatterhand relationship, which was supposed to be an intense cross-cultural friendship between two men.

    That clip I posted looks like a slashy fan vid, but it’s actually a clip from the actual movie and was shown that way back in 1965, complete with romantic pre-death flashback scene, and yet no one in the 1960s seemed to be able to see how slashy the whole thing was.

    BTW, beneath all the unintentional slashiness, noble savage clichés and a Wild West that has next to nothing to do with the real thing (Karl May famously never visited the places he wrote about, though he made it to the US towards the end of his life, to New York City and New Jersey), the underlying message of peace, tolerance and friendship across cultural boundaries spoke to a whole lot of young readers/viewers, myself included. True, there is also a heavy dollop of Christian moralizing in the original novels and even the movies (in the death clip, Winnetou talks about hearing church bells – in the middle of an obviously deserted valley), but spiritually Winnetou is closer to the original Star Trek than to any Hollywood western.

  10. @ Winnetou fans — he’s one of the answers in the trivia game the German soldiers are playing in the basement scene of Inglorious Basterds, which I recently rewatched. I looked him up because I was a little curious about the reference, but I didn’t go as far as looking up the actual film clip. Now that I’ve seen it, it was every bit as awesome-silly as I anticipated 🙂

    @Hampus — thank you very much for this! I had a blast!

  11. I suspect Tarantino has seen the Winnetou movies, since a) he seems to have seen a lot of obscure movies few Americans have ever heard of and b) he once mentioned in an interview that he admires Harald Reinl, who directed several of the Winnetou movies. He’s right on that account, since Reinl is a massively underrated director, though his best work are the moody black and white thrillers he directed for the Edgar Wallace and Dr. Mabuse series.

    Though German soldiers in the 1940s would only have been familiar with the novels, since the movies weren’t made until twenty years later. Though maybe things are different in whatever alternate universe Inglorious Misspelled Illegitimate Persons is set in.

  15. Thank you so much, Hampus. All of the brackets have been amazingly fun; yours dial it up to 11.

  16. Thank you, Hampus, for your hard work, and thanks everyone for suggesting and talking about your fave cult movies. The household Netflix to-watch list has griwn considerably!

  17. Adding my voice to the general acclaim, as we are a varied bunch of cats to herd.

    Thanks, Hampus.

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