Clerks simply shouldn’t work. A slacker comedy featuring sub-community theatre acting and filmed entirely in black and white, with an impossibly low budget and written and directed by someone with no feature experience.. that it ended up one of the funniest films of the 90s thanks to a sharp, inventive script is almost solely due to director/writer/actor Kevin Smith and his game cast of amateurs. A surprising (and, at the time, original) mixture of comedy and frank talk about sexuality influenced a whole generation of (generally lesser) comedies that focused more on talk than gags. It gets a bit bogged down in the final half hour, but it’s still hilarious and one of the largest low-budget accomplishments (along with El Mariachi) to come from the early 90s indie film scene.