Swedish cult film streaming service Cultpix, which launched in April, continues to beef up its catalogue while expanding deals with distribution partners.
Company co-founders Rickard Gramfors and Patrick von Sychowski will be attending the Lumière Festival’s International Classic Film Market (MFIC) in Lyon, France, where they will be on the lookout for new acquisitions.
“This is the first time that either of us are attending and we are already in discussions via email with other market participants,” von Sychowski said. “We are hugely impressed by the caliber of companies attending MFIC and the rights libraries that they represent and we are confidant about making several deals there.”
Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee re-teamed in Eugenio Martín’s 1973 train thriller “Horror Express.”
Cultpix
Cultpix has increased its offering from an initial 400 titles when it went online to some 600 films and TV shows, adding an average of five to six new titles a week, von Sychowski said.
Specializing in classic genre and vintage cult films and TV shows, Cultpix’s growing library offers slasher pics, monster movies, erotica, sword and sandal epics, horror and action from around the world.
The streamer’s latest pickups include Christopher Monger’s 1983 U.K. drama “Voicer Over,” from the British Film Institute (BFI); Ernst Hofbauer’s “What Schoolgirl’s Don’t Tell” from Austria’s Lisa Film; and Hans Hatwig’s Swedish sci-fi romp “Little Green Men from Outer Space.”
It also showcases little known films by renowned actors, such as the early works of Stellan Skarsgård (“Dune”), among them Mikael Ekman’s 1972 erotic drama “Strandhugg i somras,” known internationally under several different titles, including “Raid in the Summer” and “I-a Summer Lover” (pictured above are Skarsgård and Annie Birgit Garde).
Among Cultpix’s most watched films is “Project: Kill,” William Girdler’s 1976 action pic starring Leslie Nielsen.
Cultpix
Cultpix has just expanded its deal with Seattle-based distributor Something Weird Video (SWV). The exploitation cinema specialist has launched its own branded genre section on the platform with such films as “Battle Beyond the Sun,” a 1959 Soviet sci-fi pic by Mikhail Karyukov and Aleksandr Kozyr that was bought by Roger Corman and re-edited by Francis Ford Coppola in 1962 for the U.S. market.
Other SWV titles include Erwin C. Dietrich and Richard Kanter’s 1969 frolicking spoof “The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood”; Lee Frost’s 1965 “The Defilers”; John H Auer’s 1935 horror pic “The Crime of Dr. Crespi,” starring Erich von Stroheim and Dwight Frye (“Dracula,” “Frankenstein”); James L. Wolcott’s 1958 adventure-comedy “Wild Women of Wongo”; the anonymously directed 1967 psychedelic orgy drama “Wild Hippie Party”; and Joseph F. Robertson’s 1969 “The Love Feast,” featuring an uncredited Ed Wood as an erotic photographer.
Cultpix is available globally and the platform aims to make its content free of geoblocking, but that’s not always easy.
“Currently only one TV show on Cultpix has geographical restrictions and everything else is available globally. The titles being older often helps in them being available for all territories, though even here we come up against geographical restrictions more and more in our negotiations.”
In addition to shopping for new titles in Lyon, Gramfors and von Sychowski are also representing approximately 90 films owned by Cultpix parent company Klubb Super 8. They are also representing the Nordisk Tonefilm library, which has several Swedish classics (including three Ingmar Bergman films), Swedish distributor Kungsfilm and individual filmmakers such as Hatwig.
“Most of these 150-plus titles are available for global rights,” von Sychowski said.
optional screen reader