Cool Gangsters and Snappy Dialogue: 20 Crime Movies That Tried To Be 'Pulp Fiction'

Younger readers will not remember this in this hellish dystopia in which kids do not watch Fight Club but instead get their brains rotten by the most fragile of conmen. But some of us are old and cranky, and so we remember when Pulp Fiction first appeared. It was a scrambled story with ’70s music, heroin overdoses, and dialogues about burgers — and it won the Palme d'Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. It was madness. And sure, film buffs knew that the previous movie by this Tarantino guy had taken a lot from many different sources, like Takeshi Kitano’s Violent Cop, and especially Ringo Lam’s City on Fire. But Pulp Fiction? This was a whole other thing – and the best proof is that we still have movies trying to replicate its specific formula up to this day.

Indeed, Pulp Fiction’s insane success had an immense effect on the rest of the indie movie industry, if not the industry in general. Think of any indie movie you love that came out after 1994 (particularly crime thrillers or black comedies), and it probably got greenlit thanks to Pulp Fiction, or it at least got a chance because Pulp Fiction had changed everything. Was indie cinema awesome before Tarantino’s movie? Of course. But when it came out, the floodgates were busted wide open. Now, we already discussed the topic of Pulp Fiction copycats a while ago, but in this Pictofact we thought we might zoom in. Dramatically, like in Kill Bill. The result is 20 movies that, for better or worse (mostly for worse), tried to emulate Pulp Fiction’s non-linear, pop culture-discussing, hyper-violent, meta and multi-narrative style.