1. Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
The midnight-movie tradition that gave second life to films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and El Topo thrived in the pre-video '70s and early '80s, then shrank as viewers increasingly just stayed home to watch weird stuff at ungodly hours on their own. But there's much to be said for the pleasures of staying up late in a theater filled with strangeness-seeking, possibly under-the-influence fellow moviegoers, and watching something that makes more sense under those conditions than on the other side of midnight. Name a better way to watch a movie about an old-folks' home in which an aged Elvis (Bruce Campbell) teams up with a man who claims to be John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis) to fight an ancient mummy curse? There isn't one, particularly when it's served up with this much panache, courtesy of the stars, writer-director Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, The Beastmaster), and colorful Texas author Joe R. Lansdale.
2. Donnie Darko (2001)
Classic midnight movies often fall into one of two categories: raucous crowd-pleasers that keep viewers' adrenaline pumped even after hours, and trippy think-pieces that seem all the more cosmic once sleep-dep starts to set in. Richard Kelly's sophisticated feature debut is unabashedly the latter: Its story about time-travel, apocalypse, and a 6-foot-tall rabbit named Frank has a lucid-nightmare quality that's eerie even by the light of day. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Donnie Darko, a teenager suffering from creepy visions that bring an unsettling surreality to his wholesome life in the '80s.
3. Office Space (1999)
Dumped into theaters by Fox (see also: Idiocracy, below), Mike Judge's dead-on assessment of industrial parks and cubicle culture includes scenes more devastating than a year's worth of Dilbert comic strips. Judge's cartoony sensibility leads to some inspiring casting choices, especially Gary Cole as the world's most passive-aggressive boss ("Mmmmmm… yeeeeeeaaahh, I'm going to need you to come in on Saturday…") and Stephen Root as a put-upon employee, but they're balanced out by Ron Livingston's perfect Everyman despair. Endlessly quotable and cathartic for the data processor in everyone.
4. Memento (2001)
A murder mystery told in reverse chronology, centering on a hero (Guy Pearce) whose short-term-memory loss causes him to retain only 15 minutes of experiences at a time, Christopher Nolan's mind-bending film requires repeat viewings, if not full-blown obsession. Though Nolan's script is completely worked out, the details are so complicated and the backward order so disorienting that it takes time to sort out the particulars. It sounds like a pain in the neck, but there's a reason why people keep returning to Memento over and over again, and it isn't because they're all masochistic puzzle-junkies.
5. Femme Fatale (2002)
After floundering for a decade in the Hollywood system, Brian De Palma scooped up some funding from his ardent French admirers and returned with the sort of florid, kinky, unashamedly trashy Hitchcockian thriller on which he made his name. The opening sequence at the Cannes Film Festival sets the tone: Paced to a score that shamelessly imitates "Bolero," it follows icy anti-heroine Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as she follows another impossibly beautiful woman into the bathroom and seduces her out of a diamond-encrusted serpent-shaped designer top. And it only gets sleazier from there.
6. Alone In The Dark (2005)
God bless Uwe Boll. With today's big budgets and competitive exhibition markets, it would seem impossible for a director of Ed Wood-like ineptitude to make movies, but thanks to a loophole in the German tax system, he's been able to make video-game adaptations that make Super Mario Brothers look like the Marx Brothers. Alone In The Dark stands out from the pack for several reasons, including the longest, most baffling opening crawl in cinema history, plus a cast of C-list stars (Christian Slater, Stephen Dorff, Tara Reid) that looks like it was assembled at a rehab facility. Reid is a special delight as a brainy archaeologist who's brilliant in nerd glasses and sexy when she lets her hair down.
7. Idiocracy (2006)
Midnight-movie audiences frequently adopt quirky little cinematic orphans abandoned by the short-sighted, bottom-line-oriented studios that produced them. That will hopefully be the case with Mike Judge's Idiocracy, a brilliant combination of lowbrow comedy and smart social satire that was unceremoniously dumped by Fox, but should enjoy a healthy afterlife as a midnight movie.
8. Wet Hot American Summer (2001)
USA Films didn't seem to know what to do with Wet Hot American Summer, but fans of Stella and The State flocked to it. Director David Wain and his co-writer Michael Showalter insist that they didn't set out to spoof '80s summer-camp comedies, but the film works equally well as a parody of Meatballs knockoffs and as a high-spirited showcase for the Stella fellas and their talented pals. The filmmakers nail the period details, right down to the font used in the opening credits.
9. American Psycho (2000)
Director Mary Harron lent a Kubrickian perfection to her darkly comic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' sledgehammer satire of yuppie nihilism taken to its murderous extreme. In a career-making performance, Christian Bale savagely spoofs Tom Cruise's all-American cockiness in a cult classic that looks more slyly subversive with each year.
10. Waking Life (2001)
Richard Linklater's hypnotic animated sleeper raises dorm-room philosophizing to the level of pop art. Like Linklater's Slacker, the film is powered by dream logic and stream-of-consciousness weirdness rather than a conventional plot, and the lovely rotoscoping pushes things deeper and deeper into the realm of the subconscious. Is there any better time to experience Linklater's masterful fever-dream of a movie than when much of humanity is already asleep?
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