When Was the Last Time You Lost It with Everyone in a Movie Theater? | MrCroxx's BlogHome/Posts/<br>When Was the Last Time You Lost It with Everyone in a Movie Theater?<br>#Niu Lai<br>#Cult<br>#Movie<br>“When was the last time you lost it with everyone in a movie theater?”<br>When my friends asked why I would pay to see something as rough and amateurish as Niu Lai at the cinema, this was my answer.<br>You’ve probably already heard about Niu Lai from the news, social media, or conversations with friends. Its animation looks like something made by a preschooler. In its first nine days in theaters, only 236 people saw it, bringing in a grand total of ￥7,169 (about $1,000).<br>Then clips from the film started circulating online, and they were so hilariously bad that Niu Lai suddenly went viral. As of now, its box office has surpassed ￥10,000,000. Screenings have gone from single digits (or even none at all in many cities) to hundreds, even more than a thousand.
BBC News on Niu Lai
People are now flocking to theaters, whether out of curiosity or simply to join the trend, to “appreciate” an animated film that looks like it was made by the kid next door. I was one of them too, just for a different reason.<br>I’m a cinephile, and I’m also into cult film culture. Sadly, since I was old enough to start going to the cinema, China has had almost no cult movie culture as America does. My first time going to a cult movie event was actually pretty recent.<br>A month ago, my girlfriend and I went on a vacation in southern Europe. While we were wandering around Paris, the posters on the wall of a little cinema caught my eye right away.
Posters of Studio Galande
Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of my favourite cult movies. Since no cinemas back home ever showed it, I’d only seen the film on my laptop. So I immediately looked up the cinema and that day’s screenings. To my surprise, this unassuming little place on the street, Studio Galande , turned out to be a real cult-movie shrine: it has been screening The Rocky Horror Picture Show since 1978, complete with live shadow casts.
Studio Galande in Paris
I got to the cinema pretty early that evening. At first, I was a little worried that maybe not many people still came out for Rocky Horror these days. But as showtime got closer, more and more people arrived, until the little street outside was almost completely packed.<br>The shadow cast that night was performed by Panic Babies. They also have account on IG @rhpspanicbabies. They were awesome. Even though I don’t speak French and missed some of the jokes, I still had a great time.<br>As one of the few Asian faces in the audience and a also “virgin” (anyone who’s never seen Rocky Horror live before), I joined the rest of the crowd in the classic “cult rituals”: throwing rice and splashing water along with the movie and the performers, dancing the Time Warp, and chasing the casts around in a conga line. The show also confirmed what I had previously read on Wikipedia about cult movie fans: they really had watched the film over and over again. They could sing along to almost every song and shout out the lines at every iconic moment. There, it didn’t really matter who you were. What mattered was that you were part of the cult.<br>Rocky Horror may be outrageous for many audiences, but it has genuinely great performances, production design, and music. Niu Lai, on the other hand, is nothing like that. The way Niu Lai caught on is actually much closer to The Room.
Rocky Horror Pictuer Show (1975)
When The Room came out in 2003, almost nobody cared about it. The acting was awkward, the dialogue was bizarre, and the story often seemed to make very little sense. By most normal standards, it was simply a bad movie.<br>But somehow, that became the fun of it. A random man Michael Rousselet happened to walk into a nearly empty screening. He thought the movie was so bizarre and unintentionally funny that, before it had even finished, he started calling his friends and telling them they had to come see it. Over the next few days, he kept coming back with more and more people. By one of the later screenings, more than a hundred of them had shown up. That was also when some of the traditions started. The movie inexplicably has framed pictures of spoons all over the apartment, so audiences began shouting “Spoon!” whenever one appeared. Eventually, people started bringing plastic spoons into the cinema and throwing them at the screen. A movie that almost nobody wanted to see had somehow started becoming something people wanted to experience together.<br>The whole phenomenon around The Room is just so fascinating that its bizarre production story was even turned into a movie: The Disaster Artist (2017). Even today, The Room’s influence still shows up everywhere. You may have never seen or even heard of the movie, but you’ve almost certainly come across this meme on Twitter or in the comment sections of countless websites.
You are tearing me apart Lisa! –...