Little Big Screen: Films with killer soundtracks to see or stream this month

Here, take my hand — my strong hand — and let’s go back to the bicapped summers of LimeWire and MySpace. When I think about standing in the aisles of a Family Video or Movie Gallery, smack dab in the middle of windows-down weather, a movie’s music mattered almost as much as a movie’s movie. So, for this month’s streaming picks, we’ve got films with killer soundtracks. The only other criteria? The films have to be just as killer. Sorry, Scary Movie 2.

First up, a cult classic that first screened in Iowa at The Varsity Cinema a year ago, nearly 30 years after it was (barely) originally released. Now, a 4K restoration of that director’s cut is streaming for all to see/see again.

The Doom Generation (1995)

Directed by Gregg Araki

With your talking and your pills / Your messed-up life still thrills me

Slowdive’s “Allison” reaches out from the radio. The decapitated, plastic head of Jesus Christ watches from the rearview mirror. Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) and her boyfriend, Jordan White (James Duval), have left a club called Hell for a parking lot called Heaven. The pretty haze of the shoegaze standard plumes with their just-lit cigarettes. He’s clueless to the Diet Coked-out ride ahead. She’s as blunt as the symbolism.

“Like, yesterday, I was stuck in this humongous traffic jam on the 405 freeway,” she tells him. “And I just couldn’t wait to get to the dead bodies lying there on the bloody asphalt.”

Every line of McGowan’s is pure ’90s nihilism — notes of gasoline, acidic drip, etc. She’s so obnoxiously sooo over it in the driver’s seat of The Doom Generation that any smart-mouthed contemporaries seem cutesy in a catalog kind of way by comparison. But it works to iconic effect; a perfect complement to the cartoonish carnage that follows Amy, Jordan and their bad-news third. You don’t think twice when the threesome gets into a boss battle at a tinfoiled dive bar, and the scene intercuts between Mortal Kombat arcade screens and one of Amy’s former lovers (Parker Posey, who else) doing very real damage with a very real sword (what else).

In the absence of conscience, with so many frontal lobes stuck on the loading screen, punk and queer style become substance. It’s a lush look: Romance is D.A.R.E. red. Insert shots of gas station goodies stuff the frame full of junk-food hues. A hotel room has Vans checkerboard on the walls, lamps, towels. But behind the beauty and absurdity, there’s also legitimate danger. The highs are too high. The come down … yeah.

Stream it on Criterion Channel.

Belly (1998)

Directed by Hype Williams

Belly is bound to be one of the coolest things you’ve ever seen. The opening credits cue an a capella of Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life” as we meet Tommy (DMX) and Sincere (Nas) on their way into a New York City nightclub. The heist scene that follows is a mic drop of visual language — their leather trench coats are silhouetted in street lights, the whites of their eyes glow under black light and their stashed firearms are hit with strobe lights. Just within the first few minutes.

A couple other moments that caught my eye: 1) Early one morning, when we’re at home with Sincere, the lamps around his living room cast warmth all by themselves. The lack of “movie lights” helps us see him as a dad in the suburbs, up for work, not wanting to wake the baby. 2) Later, when we’re in Omaha with Shameek (Method Man), a strip club’s old-school stage lights dance together in a plaid pattern across the totally red frame. He’s dressed head to toe in citrus-flavored camo but still blends in with the other bodies … until a shotgun blast sends him out the front door, into the night, where the orange and yellow spots definitely don’t camouflage him from the cops.

Stream it on Paramount+.

Tenebre (1982)

Directed by Dario Argento

This disco giallo’s electronic score is so damn good that Justice chopped up the main theme for “Phantom” and “Phantom Pt. II”. My favorite set piece in Tenebre sees that theme turned into a literal needle drop. The camera prowls a house, and leers, floor by floor, window by window, through the use of a Louma crane. But the theme enters — when, in one of the windows, a woman places the needle on her own record player. The tracking shot continues to a different window, where the woman’s hater roommate tells her to turn it down. The camera watches as the hater roommate gets dispatched by the killer. Then the camera returns to the woman who’s got good taste in movie scores. She also gets dispatched by the killer, but hey, her head at least ended up on the poster.

Stream it on Tubi.

The Harder They Come (1972)

Directed by Perry Henzell

You couldn’t put together a list of killer soundtracks, and also killers, without The Harder They Come. Remember Tay-K? The 17-year-old Texas rapper who recorded and released “The Race” when he was on the run from police in the summer of 2017? Today, the music video has 245 million views on YouTube, while Tay-K is serving a 55-year sentence. That’s the tragic gist of this story, too, with reggae legend Jimmy Cliff starring on both screen and soundtrack. This film is so effortless in its beauty, brutality and heartbreak — it’ll forever breathe new meaning into these songs, even the ones you’ve heard a million times before, like “You Can Get It If You Really Want.”

Stream it on Pluto TV.