Can you believe that we are nearly a full generation removed from Reservoir Dogs? It has been eighteen, long years since Quentin Tarantino burst onto the scene with his mishmesh gulash of characters in suits arguing about pop music and casual dismemberment. It was a grimy, visceral little bastard of a film that was a controversial alternative to that years more conventional, popular films like Beethoven, Newsies, or Sister Act, and its unstructured, controlled chaos approach was something cinema fans were craving.

To the current crop of film fans, who may have only experienced Reservoir Dogs as a wikipedia article, an Itchy and Scratchy parody, poorly received Playstation 2 game or BEST BITS montage on youtube, it would be easy to judge the film on age and circumstance. Remember that an entire generation of artists raised on and inspired by Tarantino films are now making films of their own, daring to go bigger and bolder with each subsequent gunfight or explosion, causing big daddy RD to be considered a big nothing by comparison. Just an angsty response to kidsy fluff now relegated to the Wednesday, 2pm time slot on VH1.

But unlike many of his constituants, Tarantino’s debut had a certain authenticity and energy behind it that appealed to both hardcore genre fans and casual people just looking for a cool movie; both at the same time. Because he was armed with the zen like knowledge of 100 years of filmmaking before him, and he was gifted with convenient access to the first wave of something the kids were calling “home video” he became the poster boy for a generation of VCR filmmakers. A shining example of a man who got to grow up in an unprecedented age of film preservation, archiving, and distribution. As he’s said before: “he didn’t go to film school — he went to films”

Despite all of his awards and fanfare, Quentin Tarantino’s greatest achievement is undoubtedly in being the greatest video store customer service representative of all time. A former clerk at the now defunct Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California, you can bet ‘ol QT won his share of daily bundle awards and up-salesman of the week honors just by having an insatiable love of film. You can just picture his eyes lighting up when someone would plunk down a VHS of Hard to Kill on the counter and he’d immediately vault into his “OH HAVE YOU SEEN JACKIE CHAN’S POLICE STORY…” monologue as he takes someones hand down the genre film yellow brick road. Your own personal hyperactive, friendly enough narrator who more assuredly knew more than you but who was so excited to share his knowledge on hundreds and hundreds of genre films in the hopes you’d join his band of cinemaniacs. In the interest of saving you time, I paired it down to ten.

1. Where Eagles Dare (1968)

Nestled in between more heralded “men on a mission” classics The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen is Where Eagles Dare. A 1968 Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood picture that finds them as a couple of GI regular Joes who parachute behind enemy lines as part of a rescue mission in Nazi Germany and end up embroiled knee deep in layers of espionage and deception.

It’s easy to see why Tarantino would love an intimate, dialogue meaty film like this full of characters secretly plotting a secret plot TO COUNTERACT the secret plot that they’ve been plotting all along. Add in that it also stars Eastwood fresh off of the Leone westerns and was scripted by Alistair MacLean, famous for another Tarantino favorite The Guns of Navarone. Back in 1992, Tarantino was quoted as saying “if I was going to make a war movie where a bunch of guys get blown up by a Nazi gun, that would be my Where Eagles Dare” showing it to be his go-to prototype in the years where he was fordging what would become Inglourious Basterds.

2. Enter the Void (2009)

Gaspar Noe’s 2010 psychedelic float through a night of semi-consciousness begins with an unapologetic full-frontal assault on your eyes and ears with a 2 minute and 26 second bombardment of technical credits pieced together in more fonts and styles than a kidnapper’s ransom note while a cruel mashup of EDM and metal machine music makes you question if your equipment is working properly. Say what you will about Noe and his divisive film, but he certainly knows how to get your attention. It got Tarantino’s, as he said in his Best of 2010 list: “Hands down best credit scene of the year … Maybe best credit scene of the decade. One of the greatest in cinema history.”

3. Fort Apache The Bronx (1981)

Controversial and considered outdated in tone and in its depiction of both Hispanic and African-American individuals, FATB isn’t considered a particularly moving picture by Tarantino, but rather an acting showcase for one of his all time favorite actors: Pam Grier. And listening to Pam document her process while promoting her book, Foxy, getting into character by purposely staying awake for 48 hours, existing on a diet solely of coffee and cherry pie, and showing up at her audition in full haggard, desperate costume; it’s hard not to fall in love with her effort and willingness to show vulnerability. Her role in the film is indeed minor, but it’s a graphic turnaround from catchphrase spouting asskicker to a desperate, circumstantial killer. A great showcase of her range and a lesson in appreciating the many layers of Pam Grier.

4. They Call Her One Eye AKA Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

Touted by Tarantino as “the roughest revenge picture ever made” (and you’d have to think he’s seen some rough and tumble work) They Call Her One Eye is a Sweedish revenge thriller that is a direct inspiration to his Kill Bill villainess Elle Driver: outfit matching eyepatch and all. In hindsight, it adds quite a bit of depth to the Elle character if you imagine her untold backstory to be as fueled by abuse and torment as Christina Lindberg’s titular heroine is, and she becomes tenfold more of a sympathetic character caught in cruel handler Bill’s clutches as opposed to just another miniboss for The Bride to take out on her quest. In the vacuum of the They Call Her One Eye-iverse, it’s impossible for your heart not to go out to One Eye here as her constant mistreatment and belittlement simultaneously makes you sad and bloodthirsty at the same time.

5. The Sell Out (1976)

Not so much of a specific film recommendation by Tarantino, but more of a happy accident and an experiment you can try at home. He reminisced about watching a low quality print of this Richard Widmark/Oliver Reed film years ago and realized it was missing a rather large chunk of the movie in the middle. Once he figured out the foible, QT said: “I like having to figure it out. Widmark has this girl, and you can’t tell if Oliver Reed had sex with her in the missing reel or not. Maybe he did, and that’s why they’re all mad at each other. I don’t even want to know what happens in the missing reel. I’ve come to like it that way.”

While the idea made its way into his 2007 flick Death Proof, the concept is something uniquely Tarantino where you are tasked with the idea of coming to your own conclusions and choosing which characters you see as the villian or the hero. A kind of choose your own adventure when it comes to an otherwise upfront and straightforward film. So while this one takes a little work from you, the viewer, to facilitate looking beyond the surface and into the subtext, it’s a neat trick that can breathe new life into otherwise underdeveloped films. Looking at you: Freddy Got Fingered.

With the rise of streaming platforms, downloadable purchases, and Blackbeard levels of internet piracy, along with pedantic debate amongst cineastes and cultural scholars regarding its definition, the term ‘cult movie’ has kinda been eroded to the point of non-existence.

In a time where most films with the historical designation of ‘cult’ can be watched through the website of trillionaire egghead Jeff Bezos, as you wait for him to deliver a u-shaped memory foam toilet mat via his prime delivery service, the modern world has a feeling of being one giant gelatinous cultural gloop that we’re all kind of stuck in, with very little way of getting out.

And although there are still small sub-cultures that exist, that independently make / unearth / distribute / champion films they love, even most of those end up high-jacked by hipsters and violated by a sort of cavalier voguish fandom that surely must have some metaphysical impact on all involved.

Bottom line is this: I think we can all agree that the term ‘cult movie’ is a vaguely amorphous one – it means different things to different people. There’s probably some films on the list below that some people would not even define as cult ones. But in the words of the American writer Audre Lorde:

‘It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.’

So with that in mind, here’s my list of 10 great cult movies you’ve probably never seen …

Celebrate it.

1. Shock Treatment (1981)

Following the overwhelming success of 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Richard O’Brien began development of what would eventually become 1981’s Shock Treatment, a not-really-a-continuation-more-of-a-spiritual-sequel type film, that took The Picture Show’s normie protagonists Brad and Janet (now played by Cliffe De Young and an incendiary Jessica Harper) and plunked them into the nightmare squaresville town of Denton, USA, to argue (post-matrimonially) about toasters, before being catapulted to diva stardom and crackpot infamy by blind game show host Bert Schnick (played by Australian character actor Barry Humphries AKA Dame Edna).

Less a film, more a kind of fever-dream that happens at you, Shock Treatment was released to a commercial and critical dirge of dis-enthusiasm. Sometimes, box office bombs and critical duds are retroactively redeemed and forgiven as being misjudged or misunderstood at time of release, vindicated and lionized ; other times, you sit back and reassess something that was both commercially and critically lacking and go: fair dos.

The film’s a kenetic mess, and its narrative is borderline incomprehensible; but it has a cracking cast (including British comedian Rik Mayall, who stars as a kind of demented version of the pub extra he plays in An American Werewolf in London), the sets are a terrific fifties kitsch, and the musical numbers are loud and camp and fun, belted to the rafters by an on-point Jessica Harper, stunning as always.

2. Nightbreed (1990)

Horror meastro Clive Barker’s follow up to the Hallraiser series Nightbreed was originally conceived as a trilogy, but after the one-two punch of studio interference and tepid reviews / box office floppage, the series was abandoned; and what’s left is a muddled also-ran that canters precariously between gnarly 80s slasher film and a monster of the week episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – an amalgam that when rendered to text, doesn’t sound too bad at all.

Nightbreed follows confused every-man Aaron Boone as he sweats his way through tenabrious LA sheets with fever dreams of mutilated bodies, and the hidden demon world of Median, whilst under the malignant care of Doctor Decker, played with smoldering dour by body horror mage David Cronenberg (in a role that surely must have influenced Scarecrow in Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight series), in a film that pits the kind of self-to-them-self demonic pariahs of Median against all manner of ignoble and authoritative beasts of the human realm

You get the sense that the whole thing just didn’t manage to get the whole way to being fully realized, and came about in the time before the existence of the longer form of the ten-twenty part narrative series. (Maybe some show-runner somewhere will see potential in it and commission a series?)

Still though, it’s dumb, bloody 80s fun, with a whopping creepoid of a villain. There also exist three cuts of the film, so if you’re into it, you can go digging.

3. Cruising (1980)

What would happen if you took the burgeoning S&M scene of late 70s New York and injected it with the narrative plot of a softcore video nasty? … Cruising is what.

William Friedkin’s adaptation of 1970’s Cruising was a three-fold cultural flop when released in 1980: the LGBT community thought it’s message homophobic, and that it stigmatized the queer experience; the critics had an apolitical bee in their bonnet about narrative ambiguity and that it differed from the Gerald Walker novel; and the final cultural blow was received in the form of a dreaded raspberry – when it picked up two nominations in the 1st Annual Golden Raspberry Awards (or Razzie) for Worst Film and Worst Director respectively. The film did okay money, but the people weren’t too hot for it; people have warmed to it over the years, but it’s still a bit of a weird one.

The film stars (a pre hoo-ah) Al Pacino as NYPD officer Steve Burns, who goes undercover in the West Village leather bar scene in search of a killer who is picking up patrons for ostensible trysts before offing them. Pacino stalks the clubs in search of the killer, gazing ambiguously upon scenes of bondage and homoeroticsm, over a culturally disparate but narratively understandable frenetic punk soundtrack.

4. Society (1989)

Society takes for its premise the late-adolescent notion that the modern world is a vapid, class-obsessed, paranoid nightmare (where even your own family seem complicit) and carries that premise to its nauseating conclusion. It’s an ugly film (in content and aesthetic) that kinda just sits there creeping you out until it leaves you feeling deeply sick, over-thinking everything in that good horror movie way: perfect for normalizing the hollow existential despair of compound hangovers or comedowns.

Set in the always suspicious Beverly Hills of the 1980s, it stars Baywatch’s Billy Worlock as a wealthy pubescent who begins to suspect that his family (and everyone around him) is part of the same sick and horny incest cult. It’s the first time directorial effort of producer Brian Yuzna (The Re-Animator, From Beyond), with special effects by famed effects guru Screaming Mad George, who creates within one of the most gnarly body horror finales ever put to film.

If you ever had the nagging suspicion that you missed that one day of school where everyone conglomerated in the gym to be taught secret life lessons before having a massive orgy, I’d suggest skipping this one, as it will leave this suspicion in no way abated.

5. Out 1 (1971)

Long before the ubiquitous prestige of the modern miniseries, before Kieślowski’s Dekalog, Tarr’s Satantago, and Shoah, there was Out 1 (1971): filmmaker and Cahier du Cinema alumnus Jacque Rivette’s thirteen hour paranoiac art happening opus – one of the many end-level-boss-challenges facing those driven by fevered visions of
reigning cinematic geek supreme.

Set in the Pynchonesque world of multi-character cross-arching kismet and coincidence, Out 1 ambles loosely between various groups of post-uprising Paris of the early Seventies – two theoretically differing theatre troops rehearsing different plays from the same Grecian playwright; and a young philosophical grifter (played by 400 Blows star Jean-Pierre Léaud) who believes he’s unearthed the hidden messages of a secret society.

Divided into ten feature length episodes, the film is a scriptless study of collective actions eternal tussle with the ever vascillating wants of the modern individual; rendered through a long drawn out organic verite style collaboration of the philosophical artists of the 1970s French cinematic tradition. Of its time, but thought provoking and – if you can avoid the unfortunate lean towards seeing within the films the parody accounts that followed – a worthwhile affair.

Quentin Tarantino is one of the most prominent movie directors working today, but before Reservoir Dogs hit the big screens, he already had numerous jobs that led him to be around movies all the time. From working at an adult cinema to the best place for any cinephile: Video Archives. Because he has been so involved with film for all of his life, Tarantino might be a cine-buff first and a director second, which really shows in all of his films. It’s clear that he doesn’t shy away from referencing pop culture in the form of music and other movies.

When scouring through interviews and YouTube videos featuring Tarantino talking about movies, you will find a lot of great recommendations; maybe even too many to handle. This list exists to shine a light on some of the best of his recommendations. Since he loves exploitation and the obscure, this list limits itself to cult movies, although even with only cult movies we could have made a list with dozens of his recs. There isn’t even a cult western on here, like Django, The Great Silence, or one of Leone’s, but that might make for a good list of itself one day. For now, here are 10 cult movies recommended by Tarantino.

1. Coffy (1973)

It’s no secret that Tarantino has a soft spot for Blaxploitation cinema. Django Unchained has similarities to the genre, but more notably; Jackie Brown is an homage to the genre. It even stars Pam Grier, the face of plenty blaxploitation films including Foxy Brown, the name inspiration for Jackie Brown, and one of Tarantino’s all-time favorite movies: Coffy.

Director Jack Hill was approached to make Coffy in a hurry in an attempt to beat Cleopatra Jones to the market after the head of production lost the rights to that story. With the phenomenal Pam Grier in the leading role, Coffy ended up succeeding and came out on top. The success was partly thanks to the depiction of the strong black female lead, which wasn’t a common sight at the time. Coffy goes from nurse to vigilante when she wants to seek revenge on the drug-dealers that are responsible for her sister’s addiction. She’s tough as nails and doesn’t hesitate to kill any bad guy that crosses her path.

So besides being a great piece of action cinema, we have Coffy to thank for spawning a string of similar female-led exploitation films and of course for inspiring Tarantino to make one of his nuanced films.

2. Band of Outsiders (1964)

Jean Luc-Godard’s Bandé a Part or Band of Outsiders is another film with a huge influence on Tarantino. He even named his production company A Band Apart in honor of the film. Besides this, the famous Pulp Fiction dance scene was partly inspired by the dance scene in Band of Outsiders, although it shares more similarities with Fellini’s 8½.

In this charming French new wave classic, the beautiful Odile, played by icon Anna Karina, tells film-loving friends Franz and Arthur of a big amount of cash stashed at the villa where she lives with her aunt. The three friends romanticize the idea of being outlaws and plan to steal the money.

Although Band of Outsiders is not Godard’s most popular film, it might be the most accessible. It has less experimentational aspects than other Godard films, but instead follows a little more straightforward path. This doesn’t mean it’s less of a masterpiece than any of his other works. The film has a bunch of scenes that are iconic (think of the minute of silence or the Louvre run) and inspired many filmmakers to this day.

3. Danger: Diabolik (1968)

When talking about Italian cinema of the 60’s, Sergio Leone is the first name mentioned. Although he is a well-known inspiration for Tarantino as well, the 60’s have a lot more to offer. Dario Argento is the most well-known name regarding Giallo, but Mario Bava must not be forgotten. Bava’s style has inspired many big names including Tarantino, Tim Burton, and Edgar Wright.

Diabolik is not Bava’s only cult movie that’s recommended by Tarantino. Kill Baby, Kill and Planet of the Vampires have been mentioned in interviews as well, but Diabolik is the most distinct one. It feels like a movie based on the best and most eccentric Bond villain that could ever exist. The movie is based on the Italian comic-series of the same name and follows the evil deeds of master thief Diabolik. Bava’s approach does the comics justice, with over the top schemes and equally over the top visuals. Upon release those visuals were called too unrealistic, but now they’re the main reason for the praise the movie gets and deserves.

4. Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

There had to be a cult revenge movie on this list and there were plenty of possible contenders to include here. Lady Snowblood, Last House on the Left, Dogville, and Audition are all highly spoken of by Tarantino, but Thriller: A Cruel Picture takes the crown. “The coolest actress in Sweden in the roughest revenge movie ever made” according to Tarantino. Thriller was once banned in its country of origin Sweden due to the excessiveness of it all, but since has gained a cult-following. The cult-following might have even started with Tarantino himself, whom later based the eye-patch-wearing Kill Bill character ‘Elle Driver’ on Thriller’s protagonist.

Christina Lindenberg, or the coolest actress in Sweden, plays Madeleine, a girl gone mute after being sexually assaulted as a child. If that wouldn’t be enough, when she’s older she’s kidnapped and forced into prostitution. Horror after horror comes upon this innocent girl, making it so satisfying when she finally decides to take revenge on all the ones that wronged her. A true gem of the revenge genre.

5. Hot Fuzz (2007)

For the cult-comedy entry in this list, Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz takes the crown over classics like Young Frankenstein, Bottle Rocket, and Airplane. The second installment in the ‘Blood and Ice Cream’ or ‘Cornetto’ trilogy must be the most popular film on this list, but the mutual respect between the two directors must be highlighted. After Tarantino (among many other great directors) showed his appreciation for Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, the two became friends and made good use of each other’s knowledge. From Wright directing a fake-trailer segment for Grindhouse, reading each other’s scripts, and a special thanks mention for Tarantino on Wright’s Baby Driver, to one special director’s commentary on the Hot Fuzz DVD.

In this fantastic action comedy, comedic duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost portray a buddy cop duo investigating a series of mysterious deaths in the peaceful British village of Sandford. When watching the director’s commentary featuring Quentin Tarantino you won’t follow much of this plot, since you most likely will be in awe of the constant exchange of old and new movies between the two directors. With nearly 200 films mentioned during the 2-hour conversation it should be a mandatory watch in film school, since there is a lot to learn from two cine-buffs turned great directors talking about their passion.