The January Canon: 20 good movies released during Hollywood’s worst dump month

Historically and annually speaking, January is a bad month for Hollywood movies. It’s a “dump month,” that time of year when the major studios offload the projects in which they have no faith. Sandwiched between the holidays and the Super Bowl, these four weeks are generally treated like a write-off season, as bad comedies, bad action flicks, and bad horror movies are slipped quietly into theaters to fulfill contractual release obligations, under the assumption that they’ll basically be ignored in favor of December’s holdover hits or expanding Oscar hopefuls. There are, of course, exceptions. Every once in a while, a Hollywood studio will drop something genuinely good onto the winter wasteland, either hoping to capitalize on the dearth of new competition or failing to recognize a special movie when they have it. These are the diamonds in the rough, the silver linings in the New Year clouds, the true January gems.

Hollywood has always reserved its winners for every season but winter, but the practice of getting the worst stuff out of the way early arguably didn’t go from trend to tradition until the early 1980s. So we’ve culled the best movies released before February over the last four decades and listed them in chronological order. To qualify for inclusion, a movie had to open wide (on more than 600 screens) in January. That means leaving out Silence Of The Lambs, for instance, because it only got a limited release in January of 1991, before expanding into wide release the following month. Also missing from the list below are titles singled out in The A.V. Club’s previous rundown of “salvageable flops” from January and February, so consider Matinee, Cabin Boy, The Pledge, and Haywire additions to what we’re affectionately calling The January Canon.

(January 14, 1981)

David Cronenberg, the cerebral Canadian prince of body horror, took a circuitous route into the mainstream. He started his career with a couple of sci-fi art films, moved into the genre grindhouse, and finally conjoined the two (in unnerving Cronenberg style) in the post-modernist —fittingly, a film about mind-altering transmissions coded inside violent, sadistic trash. Rushed into production without a finished script so the producers could claim it as a tax write-off, 1981’s Scanners would be his last real B-movie—a pulp sci-fi horror film in which telekinetic rivals try to (literally) blow each other’s minds. Although the ambiguous, indifferent mystery plotting in many ways presages Videodrome, the film’s true claim to fame is the vein-bulging, blood-boiling, head-popping special effects. A memorable transitional film for Cronenberg, Scanners hit theaters at a transitional moment in North American moviegoing. As the rise of the blockbusters and studio horror and sci-fi films spelled the end of the drive-in season, it also solidified the status of January (already considered an off month) as Hollywood’s dumping ground. But even then, there was gold in the dross. Released in mid-January, the low-budget Scanners became a modest commercial hit, setting Cronenberg on a path that led to , , and beyond. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]