Film Review: SCALA!!! 

You needn’t have attended London’s famed Scala Cinema during its 15-year run that began in 1979 to appreciate the new documentary SCALA!!! from codirectors Jane Giles and Ali Catterall. Any lover of cinema — along with aficionados of the late seventies and 1980s postpunk music scenes — is bound to get a lump in the throat while watching. 

Though many When It Was Cool readers may have relied most heavily on video rental businesses to get their film fixes back in the day, the heyday of repertory cinemas around those same years that the Scala Cinema began its run and that largely came to an end right around the boom of home video popularity is a much-cherished memory to me and many others who lived in cities that boasted them. Low prices and all-day features — running times were often a formality to their clientele — attracted cinephiles, scenemakers, and street people alike. 

And that sort of varied clientele was what helped make the Scala Cinema the glorious, notorious business that it was. Giles and Catterall interview past clients and employees of the theater, several of whom have gone on to wildly successful film or musical careers — John Waters, Mary Harron, Ben Wheatley, Adam Buxton, Thurston Moore, and Jah Wobble, to name but a few. The codirectors also present a bountiful amount of clips from films that played at La Scala, along with previously unseen archival footage.

SCALA!!! captures the highs and lows of the theater’s history, the latter of which include the controversy that led to the venue’s permanent closure. It’s a fascinating documentary that shows the importance of community, and of businesses that embrace counterculture movements. People didn’t go to Scala Cinema just for movies and concerts — there is a lot more history behind the place, and this documentary offers a fair share of jaw-dropping reasons why it was so important to people.

Having been a regular customer at various repertory cinemas in San Francisco and Sacramento that ran from the seedy to the spacious in my teens and twenties — there’s nothing like sitting through a first viewing of Last Tango in Paris in a large, hot Sacramento cinema with a broken air conditioner on an August night with temperatures outside above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and inside probably right around the same — I was fortunate enough to attend one of Scala Cinema’s famous (some might say infamous) all-night movie marathons when I visited London in 1985. The theme was films starring or directed by members of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus cast, and I remember a late-night egg sandwich not sitting so well. But as I said earlier, attendance at the cinema is not required for full enjoyment of the excellent SCALA!!!.

SCALA!!!, from Severin Films, is playing theatrically as of July 18, 2024.

Joseph Perry writes for the websites Gruesome Magazine (gruesomemagazine.com), The Scariest Things (scariesthings.com), Horror Fuel (horrorfuel.com), B&S About Movies (bandsaboutmovies.com), The Good, the Bad, and the Verdict (gbvreviews.com), and Diabolique Magazine (diaboliquemagazine.com), and film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope (videoscopemag.com) and Drive-In Asylum (etsy.com/shop/GroovyDoom). 

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