The release of the documentary Scala!!! has meant the old sleaze pit has been back in the news recently. With various singers and film-makers now citing the venue as a formative influence on them (and the NFT, once the enemy, now showing a season of Scala-inspired films), it’s a bit like a Velvet Underground gig where its said, only half-jokingly, that everyone in the audience went on to form a band. All we got when we went to the Scala was scarred for life (not just from the cats).

Though the cinema was justly famous for its sleazy, cult classics – where else would we have heard about Walerian Borowczyk, Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Waters, Russ Meyer and George Kuchar? – the Scala did also show respectable fare; black and white classics like Citizen Kane, John Carpenter and Hal Hartley films, and an all-nighter of Keanu Reeves movies, to name just a few.

The imaginative double and triple bills were thought-provoking and often inspired, and ‘ranged from Ginger Rogers to Pasolini, all-day punk, Peckinpah, Vertov or Kurosawa’, according to programmer Jane Giles. But there was also stuff like a ‘triple yuck’ with Society, Frankenhooker and Basketcase 2.

Looking back at a programme now (of say, September 1990), advertising films including Society, Repulsion, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carnival of Souls and Now, Voyager, it appears more like a list of my favourite films than a sleaze fest.

Most of these ten they pretty much had on repeat, except A Clockwork Orange, which they famously showed without Kubrick’s permission when it was still banned, and was partly responsible for the cinema’s closure when the director sued and won.

1. Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)

2. Thundercrack! (McDowell, 1975)

3. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Meyer, 1965)

4. Pink Flamingos (Waters, 1972)

5. Magick Lantern Cycle (Anger, 1947-1981)

6. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)

7. El Topo (Jodorowsky, 1970)

8. Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)

9. Cafe Flesh (Sayadian, 1982)

10. A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971)

I can’t recall how many of these I actually originally saw at the Scala but its always-eclectic programming meant that the films they showed influenced my viewing for years to come, and I have most of the top ten on DVD. 

Previously on Barnflakes
Quality criteria
Random film review: The Dark Backward
The lost art of the double bill
Scala Beyond
The films of George Kuchar, 1942-2011
Scala Forever!
Double Bill Me
The Barn Cinema
My top 5 DVD Box Sets