In theory, John Cameron Mitchell's gender-bending rock musical about a transsexual's doomed love affair with a soon-to-be superstar should be a Rocky Horror-style goof. In practice, it plays like The Wall, Quadrophenia, and every other visionary art-pop film that ties a lust for music to an impulse toward outsider-dom. When the blonde-wigged Mitchell connects polysexuality to Plato in the rousing, beautiful Stephen Trask song "The Origin Of Love," his call for a new romantic order unifies the kinds of transgressive loners who'd be at a midnight movie in the first place.
12. Series 7: The Contenders (2001)
As a satire of reality TV and its appeal to our bloodlust, this mockumentary about organized televised manhunts isn't all that toothy. But writer-director Daniel Minahan at least gets the look and feel of reality TV creepily right, including the nagging sense that we aren't being told all we really need to know. And the cast—led by dewy-eyed neurotic Brooke Smith—nails the genre's "types" without lapsing into broad parody. The movie's also funny and exciting, and spiked with crowd-inciting violence. What was that about bloodlust again?
13. The Happiness Of The Katakuris (2001)
Ridiculously prolific Japanese art-pulp director Takashi Miike has been touted as the new master of the midnight movie for at least five years now, but his films tend to be so slow-paced, inscrutable, and uneven that even hardcore midnighters have to fight off the urge to take a nap in the middle. Not so with The Happiness Of The Katakuris, a brisk, bright black-comedy musical about a family protecting the viability of its resort-hotel business by quietly disposing of the guests who "accidentally" die there. Whenever the violence gets too gruesome, Miike switches from live-action to claymation, which somehow makes death simultaneously cuter and more unsettling.
14. The Devil's Rejects (2005)
In his short filmmaking career, Rob Zombie has been trying so hard to make a neo-midnight movie that his work has been too self-conscious. But even given its carefully applied retro-grime, The Devil's Rejects still works as a vulgar, corrosive revenge thriller, about a family of serial killers who look down the other end of a shotgun for a change (while "Freebird" plays, loud and true). This is one ugly movie, but watching it in a multiplex at a time when the U.S. is undergoing an escalating moral lockdown can be perversely liberating.
15. Bad Santa (2003)
Some Christmas movies affirm the basic decency of the human spirit. Then there's this one, which takes the long, long route to a similar destination as an alcoholic thief (Billy Bob Thornton) poses as Santa in order to steal as much as possible before the holiday season ends. Only a brain-dead fat kid and a Santa-fixated bartender (Lauren Graham) appeal to what little of his better self remains beneath all that booze. It's the perfect thing to sneak off to once the miserable bastards are tucked in and waiting for Kris Kringle.
16. Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle (2004)
Not exactly the most challenging or intellectual film to come out of the past decade, Harold & Kumar is a dopey, good-natured stoner-quest movie, a sort of multi-ethnic Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure or Dude, Where's My Car? Two stressed, seriously buzzed dudes get the munchies and decide (after a zoned-out viewing of a food-porn commercial) that only White Castle will do, but getting there proves difficult. Dude director Danny Leiner gives the proceedings the expected laid-back feel, but excellent performances and genuinely funny incidents (particularly the one involving a strung-out Neil Patrick Harris) make this movie a genuinely fun time even for the non-altered.
17. 28 Days Later (2002)
George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead was an early midnight-movie staple, and it has a worthy 21st-century successor in 28 Days Later, an apocalyptic zombie movie that trades the horrors of the walking dead for the guilty pleasure of getting to run around a virtually abandoned England where nobody can tell you what to do. It's an invitation to the kinds of creepy thoughts that often sneak in once the sun goes down. Also highly recommended: Shaun Of The Dead.
18. Kung-Fu Hustle (2004)
Stephen Chow's previous martial-arts-and-CGI extravaganza, Shaolin Soccer, held together better as a coherent story (not to mention a conscious genre satire), but his 2004 goof Kung-Fu Hustle goes further over the top in every way. Chow stars as a gangster-wannabe in a town overrun with axe-wielding, dapper thugs whose takeover attempts encounter little resistance until they run across the unlikely martial-arts masters of a slum called Pig Sty. Then the ludicrous effects kick into place, the bodies fly like popcorn kernels, and the whole thing becomes a flamboyant, energetic, living cartoon, guaranteed to keep sleepy eyes wide with wonder.
19. I Heart Huckabees (2004)
Another entry on the "trippy" side of the midnight-movie divide, David O. Russell's "existential comedy" has less of a miserablist edge than his dark comedy Spanking The Monkey, or his less-dark comedy Flirting With Disaster. (Made, incidentally, back when Ben Stiller was tolerable. Funny, even.) Rushmore's Jason Schwartzman hires a pair of "existential detectives" (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) to follow him and determine the meaning of his life, and why it includes so many chance encounters with one particular stranger. That's just one thread in a complicated, playful, thoroughly surprising weave that lets Russell dole out the Woody Allen-style dry wit and his own flavor of visual games. No matter how late it is, no matter how sleepy you're getting, don't freak out when the screen starts coming apart in pieces. Just keep telling yourself "It's only a midnight movie."
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