Prince Charles Cinema
7 Leicester Place Soho London WC2H 7BY
One of London’s few genuinely indie movie houses, the Prince Charles is Quentin Tarantino’s favourite UK cinema. After many years as a seedy Soho dive, showing porn and B-movies, then offering second-run movies for a pittance, it achieved mainstream success after spearheading the dress-up-and-show-off ‘singalongas’ of the early 2000s. The appeal of dressing as Nazis, nuns and brown paper parcels (all covered in string), in order to ‘singalonga’ The Sound of Music knows no limits, and now Singalonga Grease and Singalonga Rocky Horror have been added to the mix – along with ‘quotalonga’ cult classics like The Big Lebowski. They also put on a raft of creative programming that supplements the more interesting mainstream movies with B-movie schlock and grindhouse, world cinema, cult classics, underground and avant garde offerings – as well as silent movies with live music. Themed nights (including the ‘Good Bad Movie’ club), triple features and midnight shows all add to the cult kudos. Incidentally, all those Trigger Happy TV skits in which Dom Joly disturbs hapless audience members by bellowing into a giant mobile phone, blocking people’s view, dressing as a giant rabbit and spilling popcorn all over them – they were filmed here.
