10 beloved cult movies that don’t live up to the hype
There needs to be a reassessment of what ends up being considered under cult films.
The definition of a cult classic has never been spelt out, which might be why the term is often used so erroneously. In general, a cult classic is a film that developed a strong following from niche viewers after it didn’t get the attention, acclaim, or success that it deserved.
There are some films that moved beyond being ‘cult’ hits and have been widely accepted as classics in their own right, such as Fight Club or The Big Lebowski. There are also films that are legendarily terrible and have earned a cult following because of the ironic viewership that they get, such as Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space or Tommy Wiseau’s The Room.
The internet has found a way to ruin this categorisation by associating it with films that simply don’t fit. This year’s Cannes Film Festival saw some critics proclaiming that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma was an ‘instant cult classic’, even though that can’t possibly be the case until it is actually released. Similarly, films that were broadly successful when they first came out can’t be considered cult classics, even if a lot of teenagers want to claim that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is. However, there is nothing more disparaging to the label than simply trying to reclaim a bad film as being better than it actually was.
Sometimes films are just not successful, and attempts to develop a cult following around them are disingenuous to how the process naturally occurs.
10 movies too overrated to be cult classics:
‘Lisa Frankenstein’ (Zelda Williams, 2024)
Frankenstein is a character and story that has been adapted to the screen countless times; within the past year, there was an Oscar-nominated Frankenstein film from Guillermo del Toro and a calamitous box office disaster in The Bride! But a year prior, in 2024, Diablo Cody wrote a reimagining of the mythos created by Mary Shelley with Lisa Frankenstein, a supernatural high school horror comedy about a teenage girl who tries to turn a reanimated corpse into her boyfriend.
Lisa Frankenstein steals its aesthetic from better gothic horror films, and neither feels accurate to contemporary teenage life nor committed to the actual gothic roots of the character, standing as a slapdash comedy that takes big swings and misses them all. The film bombed at the box office and earned negative reviews because it wasn’t good, and not because audiences and critics ‘didn’t get it’.
‘Pitch Black’ (David Twohy, 2000)
Vin Diesel might be the worst living actor to have found mainstream success, and a majority of the films he’s starred in outside of The Fast and the Furious franchise have been complete disasters, but Pitch Black was a fairly low-budget science fiction horror film that turned a profit and gave Diesel the opportunity to expand his ego by making two sequels with The Chronicles of Riddick and Riddick.
Pitch Black is a pastiche of better sci-fi horror films, and has aged particularly poorly due to the low quality of the early 21st-century visual style and laughable attempts at worldbuilding. That the film has somehow managed to sustain itself as a franchise, as Diesel has promised that a fourth film is on the way, is completely ridiculous, given how little there is to the story and how boring Diesel’s performance is.
‘Crimewave’ (Sam Raimi, 1985)
Sam Raimi made a genuine cult classic with the original The Evil Dead, a completely independent film that he financed and shot with his best friend, Bruce Campbell, that turned into the first instalment of a franchise that continues to this day. It was shortly after the film became a surprising hit that Raimi was offered the chance to direct his first studio film with Crimewave, a crime thriller with a demented sense of humour.
Raimi obsessives may have tried to claim the film as an underrated gem, but it’s an absolute mess that completely fails as a throwback and feels cheap in a way that The Evil Dead did not. It’s also not representative of his talents, as he has been very open about the fact that he didn’t have any real creative control, and the entire experience of making Crimewave was completely miserable.
‘Project X’ (Nima Nourizadeh, 2012)
It’s natural that each generation will have its coming-of-age film that is misunderstood by older generations, only to be beloved as a cult classic by its intended audience, but there’s also a need for these films to be genuinely good, as simply reflecting the interests of teenagers is not a sign of quality.
Project X is a morally reprehensible story about a group of obnoxious teenagers who start a party, only to blare music, take drugs, and completely wreck their neighbourhood, lacking a plot or any recognisable character arcs, thereby ending up revealing its themes to be shallow and insulting to the audience. If anything, Project X is the type of film that would be used as an indictment about the problem with ‘kids these days’; it’s one of the many films that tried and failed to find the mix between raunchiness and reality that made Superbad so great.
‘Friday the 13th’ (Sean S Cunningham, 1980)
Friday the 13th is one of the most iconic horror franchises of all time, which saw Jason Voorhees become a pop culture icon on the level of Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Leatherface, and while none of the entries in the franchise has been particularly well-received by critics, many of the sequels have earned cult followings based on how strange they are.
The original Friday the 13th is a cheap ripoff of Halloween that is painfully boring and doesn’t feature many good kills or memorable slasher victims. When people think of the franchise, they only refer to the sequels; Friday the 13th Part 2 is when Jason actually became the killer for the first time, and it wasn’t until Friday the 13th Part III that he put on his famous hockey mask. There are legitimately good movies in the saga, but the original is not one of them.
‘Street Fighter’ (Steven E de Souza, 1994)
Hollywood has been trying since the ‘90s to make adaptations of video games viable, and a vast majority of them have been completely terrible. Although there have been some recent examples that have turned the tide, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Exit 8, pretty much any video game film from the ‘90s was a cheesy, cheaply-made embarrassment.
Street Fighter doesn’t even succeed at being a guilty pleasure because it doesn’t capture anything that was cool about the game, as there are surprisingly few actual ‘street fights’. Jean-Claude Van Damme was clearly not engaged at all in the film, and Raúl Julia’s wonderful performance can’t make up for how terrible the rest of the actors are. There is a new Street Fighter film coming out later this year, and it’s hard to imagine that it could possibly be any worse.
‘Jupiter Ascending’ (The Wachowskis, 2015)
The Wachowskis have developed a fanbase who, similar to those of Zack Snyder or M Night Shyamalan, seems convinced that they can do no wrong, and that anything they make will automatically be brilliant. The Wachowskis made one of the greatest films of the ‘90s with The Matrix, but many of their subsequent efforts have been dampened by poor dialogue, overblown sincerity, and ideas that aren’t fully fleshed out, with Jupiter Ascending being their worst film to date.
It’s a surprisingly boring political drama that is obsessed with a confusing mythology and features performances devoid of any charisma or personality. The fact that the film was ambitious does not excuse its incompetence, and those who have defended it are in complete denial about the Wachowskis’ ability to recapture the same magic that they tapped into back in 1999.
‘Teen Wolf’ (Rod Daniel, 1985)
Michael J Fox became a massive sensation in 1985 when Back to the Future became the year’s biggest hit, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to the creators of Teen Wolf, a bizarre supernatural high school comedy, that would have been instantly forgotten had it starred someone less famous than Fox.
Even though the premise of Teen Wolf is inherently ridiculous, it doesn’t take advantage of all the fun to be had with werewolf comedy and features some of the worst onscreen basketball playing ever included in a film. Although it eventually led to the creation of a popular young adult show that starred Dylan O’Brien, the original Teen Wolf is a complete mess that isn’t even enjoyable as a ‘so bad it’s good’ watch.
‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ (Ted Kotcheff, 1989)
There is something slightly charming about the fact that so many titles in the 1980s seemed to get greenlit based on a fun logline, and the idea of ‘two employees faking that their dead boss is still alive’ is a humorous idea. However, it’s also a concept that might have been best saved for a Saturday Night Live sketch, as Weekend at Bernie’s is a chore to get through, even when compared to some of the other bad comedies of the decade.
The film also quickly abandons its original joke for the sake of digging into an embezzlement storyline that wasn’t well-written in the slightest. Although Andrew McCarthy has been the most outspoken about his involvement in ‘the Brat Pack’ out of any of the young actors associated with the group, he has what is by far the weakest track record when it comes to quality.
‘Varsity Blues’ (Brian Robbins, 1999)
Within the realm of sports films, there hasn’t ever been a definitive classic about American football, and while there are certainly entertaining hits like Any Given Sunday and the original The Longest Yard, it was the NBC series Friday Night Lights that explored the sport more thoroughly than any film could ever hope to. It might be because of how few high school football films there were in 1999 that Varsity Blues aged into a cult classic, given that it was raunchy and silly enough for an audience of teenage boys to enjoy.
While it did mint the late James Van Der Beek as a notable young actor during the Dawson’s Creek era, Varsity Blues features every cliché imaginable for both high school and sports films. It’s also filled with crude humour and has been relentlessly made fun of by Texans because of how terrible the accents are.
