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If you’ve never seen The Decline of Western Civilization, you don’t need to know anything about punk to get pulled into it.
Released in 1981 and directed by Penelope Spheeris, the documentary drops you into the Los Angeles punk scene at the end of the 1970s, when bands like Black Flag, X, the Germs, Circle Jerks, Fear, and Catholic Discipline were playing small clubs to crowds of kids who looked like they might either start a band or start a fight before the night was over.
There is a specific kind of bad movie that becomes interesting precisely because nobody involved understood it was bad. Ed Wood knew he was working with limitations. Tommy Wiseau seems to exist in a parallel dimension where sincerity and delusion have fused into something approaching outsider art. But The Conqueror (1956) is a different animal entirely. The Conqueror was made by competent people, with real money, backed by a major studio, and starring the most bankable actor on the planet. Everyone involved believed they were making a prestige epic. And what they produced was John Wayne playing Genghis Khan.
I need you to sit with that for a second.
Every action movie has that one death scene where you don’t know whether to scream or laugh. Maybe you do both. Maybe you rewind it three times. Maybe you show it to your friends at a sleepover and someone’s mom calls your mom.
That scene is Emil Antonowsky’s death in the original 1987 RoboCop.
It’s guaranteed at this point that no matter what kind of satirical take on the United States or the world comes out, there are going to be people who misunderstand and misconstrue it. Starship Troopers wasn’t the first, and it damn well wasn’t the last movie to have the point get lost in orbit over people’s heads.
Rosemary’s Baby is a horror movie, sure, but it’s not the kind of horror that’s going to shock you with buckets of blood or grotesque imagery. It’s not a slasher flick. There’s no hockey-masked villain silently stalking some random babysitter through the woods. In fact, Rosemary’s Baby is more of a slow-burn psychological unraveling, the kind of film that makes you question whether or not you’re losing your mind right along with the protagonist.
Jacob’s Ladder isn’t just a movie—it’s an experience. And not in that pretentious, “you have to see this on the big screen” kind of way. It’s the kind of film that gets under your skin and messes with your perception of reality, not because of what it shows you, but because of what it makes you feel.
Stephen, Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Django Unchained, isn’t great in the way you typically describe a character as “great.” He’s not the kind of character you want to grab a beer with, or the guy you secretly root for when things go sideways.
What’s so great about The Lighthouse? Honestly, it’s like nothing else. It’s one of those films that defies easy categorization—part psychological thriller, part horror, part dark comedy, and all kinds of weird.
But that’s what makes it great. It’s a film that dares you to get comfortable and then immediately pulls the rug out from under you, over and over again.
What’s so great about Hellbound: Hellraiser II is that it takes everything Hellraiser started and cranks it up to eleven. If the first movie was about opening the door to another dimension, Hellraiser II is about diving headfirst into that dimension, tumbling down the rabbit hole of chaos, suffering, and surreal, twisted horror. It’s like director Tony Randel took Clive Barker’s concept, looked at the box, and thought, “Why stop at opening it? Let’s get inside this thing and see how far it really goes.”
What’s so great about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the 1974 version, let’s not even talk about the sequels or reboots) is how it just refuses to let you feel comfortable.
It’s not just that it’s a horror movie, but that it’s the horror movie, the purest form of that genre’s DNA boiled down into 83 minutes of gritty, unrelenting tension.
