Now, I like Pulp Fiction. In the parlance of this series, I rate it. The problem is that I just don’t rate it as much as everyone else.  The old saying goes that hardly anyone bought the first Velvet Underground album, but those who did started a band. If that’s the case, I’m pretty sure that everyone who saw Pulp Fiction – and there are millions of them – immediately went out and made their own cloth-eared, non-linear ensemble gangster movie of questionable worth, stuffed with hoary old has-been actors and endless, desperate, directionless patter.  Upon its release, Pulp Fiction was so instantly influential that it unwittingly became the accessory to dozens of cinematic crimes. Suicide Kings, 2 Days in the Valley, The Big Hit, Palookaville, 8 Heads In ​a Duffel Bag, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead. All of them so busy breaking their backs to shoehorn in the right pop culture references that along the way they forgot to be interesting or even competent.  Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is perhaps the most egregious Pulp Fiction knock-off, because that somehow went on to be influential in its own right. To this day I still can’t switch on any VOD service without drowning in cack-handed British gangster films called things like Top Dog or St George’s Day. I blame Pulp Fiction for that. But then I blame Pulp Fiction for everything. I blame Pulp Fiction for Battlefield Earth. I blame it for Destiny Turns on the Radio. I blame it for A Serbian Film and the Fun Lovin’ Criminals. I’m pretty sure I even blame it for Shrek.  So the question is this: given all the horrors that it’s responsible for, would I go back in time and kill Pulp Fiction at birth?  It’s tricky. Stopping Pulp Fiction from being made would have saved me a lot of personal strife – especially all the strife I encountered studying film at university during its relative afterglow, where people would pad out their hokey three-minute plots with swath​s and swath​s of tedious babble about continental hamburgers and the imagined subtexts hidden within Ach​y Breaky Heart.  On the other hand, without a film like Pulp Fiction to shake things up, we might still be stuck in the early ​1990s, watching endless, ponderous John Grisham potboilers, soundtracked by bloated James Horner scores. As we speak, we might be bracing ourselves for the release of The Pelican Brief 4: Revenge of Justice Rosenberg. That isn’t a world I’d particularly like to live in.  And, as I’ve mentioned, I do actually quite like Pulp Fiction. I like its energy. I like how lightly it wears itself. I like most of its performances. Even when it misfires – when the dialogue becomes a little too smug, when its attitude to violence gets a little too throwaway – it’s still undeniably the product of a very singular mind. It’s a good film that I probably won’t ever watch again, because the thrills it summons have all been neutered by its guffy legacy.  There are many, many worse films than Pulp Fiction. But this series isn’t about the worst films. It’s about the decent films that can’t possibly live up to the hype ascribed to them. The films rendered numb by criticism and parody. The films you’re sick of before you’ve even watched them, because people have spent years quoting them to you at length. The films that have made you distrust guitars because every arsehole who owns one will invariably sit you down at some point and try to play Misirlou to you. Pulp Fiction is one of these films, and then some.
Parent to a legion of crap imitations – I blame it for Shrek – the hype over Tarantino’s film renders it almost meaningless. So, would I go back and strangle it at birth, asks Stuart Heritage