The “beautifully putrid” 1979 movie Quentin Tarantino walked out of: “How wrong I was”
Of all the people in Hollywood that you’d call the least likely to walk out of a movie, no matter how bad it is, Quentin Tarantino would be near the top of the list. When he did, though, he came to regret it.
As someone who actively enjoys more than a few objectively terrible films, you’d think that Tarantino would persevere to the bitter end, regardless of what he’s watching. That’s mostly true, but in this case, his walkout had nothing to do with the quality of the picture, as he discovered years later.
Then again, ‘quality’ is both stretching things and oversimplifying them, with the brutal 1979 thriller earning the ire of the British censors, who categorised it as one of the dreaded ‘Video Nasties’ they were so desperate to stamp out to avoid the impressionable youths having their fragile little minds warped.
This being Tarantino, he loves a ‘Video Nasty’, or their American equivalents. He was raised on a diet of exploitation flicks, blood-soaked B-movies, and near-the-knuckle thrillers that prioritised action and violence over plot and character, so, if anything, it’s surprising that he was too tired to stick it out.
Co-written and directed by Peter Maris, 1979’s Delirium is about as by-the-numbers as gore-heavy films from the decade get: Nick Panouzis plays Charlie Gunther, a traumatised Vietnam War veteran employed by a shadowy council to eradicate as many drifters and vagrants from the face of the planet as he can.
From there, the protagonist embarks on a brutal murder spree, which is why Tarantino referred to it as a “beautifully putrid hidden gem,” one that he also noted, “Blew my fucking mind.” However, the first time around, when he was in the perfect position to catch Delirium, he decided to turn around and leave.
After sitting through the first two chapters of a triple-feature, the filmmaker was growing weary, and because the third “looked like the same thing I’d seen a zillion times before,” and he was no stranger to watching one man wage a violent war on the streets of a major metropolis, he’d decided he’d had enough, telling himself, “Fuck this.”
Years later, when someone told him to watch Delirium, it activated a latent memory. “Oh, this is that movie, I walked out on this,” he recalled during his second attempt. “I drove out on this. I drove out at the bottom of the triple-feature. That’s when I realised, ‘Holy shit, little did I know how wrong I was.”
At first glance, Tarantino thought there was no point in sitting through the movie, and he had no reason to believe otherwise until he eventually found himself watching it, at which point he was annoyed at himself for missing out on the opportunity to have experienced that “beautifully putrid gem” during its original run in drive-ins and dive cinemas.
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