SCALA!!!: A Documentary Ode to a Bygone Age of Cult Moviegoing (2024)

Posted in: Documentary, Movies, Review, Streaming | Tagged: Ali Catterall, cultural history, documentary, evil dead, film history, Jane Giles, john waters, LGBTQ, London history, metrograph, Pier Paolo Pasonlini, russ meyer, Salo, sam raimi, Scala!!!, streaming

SCALA!!! is an exhilarating documentary about the legendary London cult movie theatre was at the centre of the social upheaval of England

SCALA!!! is perhaps the most unexpected and welcome documentary about recent Film History to come out in years, a celebration not only of cult movies and a legendary London movie theatre but also of a bygone time. (Full disclosure: I spent a lot of time as a kid in London going to the Scala Cinema in its last years every week and witnessed a fraction of the craziness the interviewees of the documentary describe, and what they recall is even more insane than what I saw.)

SCALA!!! is an ode to a lost era of movie-going and a part of London history on the verge of becoming forgotten. The cinema was home to cult movies, arthouse movies, experimental movies, grindhouse movies, and movies banned by the British Board of Film Classification (which could be shown under the aegis of it being a membership-based club – the membership fee was incredibly cheap that even a student could afford it). It helped turn Sam Raimi's Evil Dead into a cult classic alongside Russ Meyer movies, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo, and too many other movies to list here. What really made it more than just a place for outsiders, Punks, teenage rebels, and LGBTQ people to gather was also its location and a time in London when culture and social events bled into each other. The crumbling music palace was a gonzo gothic monument that encapsulated England while the cinema lasted. The documentary lays everything out, with the interviewees happily recalling their memories as audience members and staff members who saw the most insane things that happened there that weren't on the screen. All of it is true, some a combination of surreal, awful, outright hilarious, and utterly exhilarating. John Waters, whose films were regularly shown in rotation at the Scala and is interviewed in the documentary, described the theatre as "a country club for criminals and lunatics and people that were high, which is a good way to see movies."

If anyone were to make a documentary about the Scala Cinema, it would be Jane Giles. How could it be anyone else? She was a film historian, academic, journalist, and programmer of the cinema from 1988 to its eventual closure in 1993. She was a defendant in the court case brought against the theatre screening Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (that's a long and complicated story) and would know the whole story, warts and all. Giles and her co-director Ali Catterall have succeeded in doing what didn't seem possible: recapturing the thrill of Punk transgression, the surreal experience of going to the Scala, and sitting in an audience there. Kings Cross might be gentrified now, but it was a seedy, sleazy area of London back then, with drug deals, streetwalkers, and trash on the streets outside. It was nowhere as seedy as the grindhouse movies of New York City or Los Angeles in their heydays, but it was the closest that London and the UK had to that scene.

SCALA!!! Is now streaming on Metrograph. It will be available on Blu-Ray in the Autumn with extra interviews and material from Severin Films.