Being an inquisitive cult movie enthusiast required a lot of effort in the 1980s.
In that pre-internet age when information wasn’t just a mouse click or phone swipe away, finding out about the seamier sides of cinema history required trawling diligently through film magazines for the occasional mention of Withnail And I or Pink Flamingos. Getting to actually see anything outside of the mainstream was even harder.
Belfast, of course, had the Queen’s Film Theatre where foreign films and cult classics were always on offer but if you wanted to sample the really hard stuff you had to look a little further afield. That’s where an establishment like the Scala cinema in London comes in.
Offering a rough and ready refuge for movie fanatics, late night revellers and more often than not the capital’s lost souls and loners who would avail of the cinema’s open all hours attitude to bed down for the night, it screened oddball movies of all sorts from 1981 until its enforced closure in 1993.
The exclamation mark heavy Scala!!! or, to give it its full title, Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits, is a new documentary that pays loving homage to that venue, the often outrageous but never less than entertaining films that played within its walls and the weird and wonderful people who frequented it and came to call it a kind of home.
Utilising the same DIY punk ethos visible in the cinema’s famous flyers and programmes of the time, former Scala programmer Jane Giles and film critic Ali Catterall have crafted a brilliant documentary that works as a study of a pre-gentrification London and also a love letter to a long lost cinema-going experience.
There’s lots to enjoy as patrons recall the King’s Cross venue’s famously uncomfortable seating and worryingly sticky carpets and reminisce on how the very walls would shake with the passing Northern Line trains that would thunder through every screening endlessly.
There are enticingly grainy film clips of some of the big hitters from the cinema’s golden era to wallow in and contributions from both film makers like John Waters and regular visitors such as Adam Buxton and Stewart Lee to savour along the way. We hear of epiphanies experienced to screenings of Eraserhead and unlikely tales of copulating couples and even the occasional death on the premises that gives the film an emotional heart amidst all the madness.
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Eventually it was a legal spat over illicit screenings of A Clockwork Orange that would see its doors closed forever in 1993 but Scala remains loved by many still.
In a film full of memorable soundbites I’ll leave the last word to a prim little middle-aged woman called Mrs Reeves who turns up in an archive clip commenting on the Scala’s often horrific output. “I don’t see any harm in it at all” she says calmly “I mean, I don’t go out of here wanting to chainsaw somebody.” Spend some time with Scala!!! this weekend and hopefully you won’t either.
