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Cult Film Review: American Movie (1999) – a bittersweet documentary profiling the ups and downs of a low-budget filmmaker!

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Cult Film Review: American Movie (1999)

Directed by Chris Smith

Produced by Sarah Price & Chris Smith

Main “Cast”: Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank

Cinematography by Chris Smith

Edited by Barry Poltermann & Jun Diaz

Music by Mike Schank

*** MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS ***

Given I am a low-budget filmmaker myself I am amazed I had never seen, American Movie (1999) before. Thankfully The Nickel Cinema in London screened it at the weekend and I really enjoyed it. Filmed between 1995 and 1997, this cult classic documentary American Movie (1999) chronicles Borchardt’s heroic, chaotic, and deeply Midwestern quest to finish his indie horror short Coven (pronounced ‘COH-ven’, and yes, he will correct you). The short is meant to raise money for his real passion project, a feature called Northwestern. But first? He has to survive reality. And reality is brutal.

Mark has not just zero money; zero organization; a rotating cast of confused friends and relatives as crew; functioning alcoholism; mounting debts, but also has the gift of the gab and a never ending passion for filmmaking. What unfolds is less “behind-the-scenes documentary” and more Shakespearean comedy AND tragedy staged in Milwaukee houses, static caravans, cars, junkyards and local woods.

Borchardt is equal parts Ed Wood and tortured auteur — passionately explaining his artistic vision one minute, begging his elderly uncle for production money and picking up his editing assistant from prison the next. His crew ranges from loyal-but-clueless to openly skeptical, yet somehow the production lurches forward. Barely.

The documentary crew shot over 90 hours of 16mm footage, capturing every awkward take, every blown line, and every moment of Mark’s delusional optimism. We watch as Coven repeatedly derails thanks to bad planning, worse luck, and the universal law that says: if something can go wrong on an indie film set, it absolutely will. But here’s the twist — it’s weirdly inspiring. Because underneath the chaos is something pure: a guy who just refuses to stop making movies. No money. No resources. No safety net. Just pure passion and obsession.

What’s most hilarious is the double act comedy exchanges between Mark and his best friend and Mike Schank. Mike, a very capable musician, has a permanent grin and the look of an acid-trip casualty, yet almost-perfect comedy timing. He clearly loves Mark’s passion and helps as best he can. I was sad to read Mike had passed away in 2022 from cancer.

If you stumbled into American Movie (1999) blind, you’d swear it was a proto-sitcom about delusional dreamers armed with a battered 16mm camera, a camcorder and misplaced confidence — a spiritual ancestor to Trailer Park Boys and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It plays like a painfully funny hangout comedy about a self-proclaimed auteur and his band of well-meaning screw-ups trying — and repeatedly failing — to make something “serious.” The arguments are petty, the ambition is sky-high, and the incompetence is operatic. You laugh, you cringe, and somewhere along the way you realize this isn’t scripted chaos — it’s just raw, unfiltered obsession captured on camera.

Mark: 9 out of 11

Cinema, Cult Cinema, Nickel Cinema

Cult Film Review: Entertainment (2015) at The Nickel Cinema, London

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Cult Film Review: Entertainment (2015) at The Nickel Cinema

The Nickel Cinema in Clerkenwell feels like a hidden temple for London’s true film obsessives — a grindhouse gem tucked into the city’s polished heart. It’s the kind of place where the air hums with cigarette ghosts and celluloid dreams, where the screen flickers with everything from outlaw art films to midnight slashers and sleazy euro-thrillers. The décor has that lived-in, clandestine vibe — red velvet worn thin, neon bleeding through the dark, and an underground bar serving the kind of cocktails that taste like trouble.

It’s not just a cinema — it’s a refuge for the subversive, the cultish, the weird and the wonderful. You’ll find Anger next to Fassbinder, Fulci, Lynch, Jodorowsky, Korine, Ferrara, Argento, Waters, Kern, Miike, Ferrara, Korine Noe, Cohen, Breillat, Refn and many more bleeding into audiences who actually cheer when the projector rattles. The Nickel doesn’t chase trends; it worships the offbeat, the forgotten, and the dangerous. While feeling still quite new, the place somehow still feels gloriously dirty — and absolutely right up your alley. If not there is a strip club next door if that kind of business takes your fancy.

Check out their website for the latest screenings here: https://thenickel.co.uk/

Last month I watched Rick Alverson’s Entertainment (2015) at The Nickel Cinema.

Entertainment is like watching the American dream rot in real time — a hypnotic, desolate odyssey through the dust and despair of the open road. Gregg Turkington is excellent as he plays “The Comedian,” a hollowed-out version of his Neil Hamburger persona, trudging through a series of soul-scorching stand-up gigs in half-empty bars, bowling alleys, and desert motels. Each performance is a small act of self-immolation — jokes that fall flat, laughter that curdles, a man dissolving behind the microphone as his identity blurs into the toxic sludge of showbiz delusion.

Director Rick Alverson shoots it all with a slow, clinical beauty — wide, frozen frames that turn America’s forgotten corners into alien landscapes. “The Comedian” drifts from neon-soaked diners to sulfurous desert plains, to prisons, to dead Western towns. Further, it contains some incredible locations including an unforgettable sequence at an aircraft graveyard — rows of dead machines basking in the sun, like monuments to ambition and decay. While low in budget the film makes use of such stunning locales, plus impactful acting interludes from John C. Reilly, Michael Cera and Tye Sheridan.

The film is not a comedy, not really — more anti-comedy or like an autopsy of one. Entertainment (2015) is a brutal, mesmeric study of loneliness, alienation, and the sick joke at the heart of performance itself. It’s the road movie as existential purgatory — unbearably awkward, strangely poetic, and utterly unforgettable. It doesn’t so much as have a beginning, middle and end, but a series of events which we are dropped into and experience until the credits suddenly roll. I like to ponder “The Comedian” is still out there, living and dying, on and off stage.

Mark: 8 out of 11