Exploitation films from Italy

Free Hand for a Tough Cop

Tomas Milian debuts Er Monnezza, the filthiest man in Italian crime cinema, and steals his own movie.

The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist

Late-cycle Castellari. Everyone is exhausted and it shows productively.

The Lickerish Quartet

The most elegant film ever filed under sexploitation, and the reason Metzger belongs in the canon.

The Violent Professionals

Martino sends Luc Merenda undercover and off the leash. Prime cop-on-a-rampage stuff.

Violent Naples

Merli takes his no-mercy cop routine to Naples. Fast, brutal, and politically incoherent as ever.

Beyond the Door

The Italian Exorcist. Warner sued. It made money anyway.

Death Walks at Midnight

Ercoli's brighter, faster Death Walks. Nieves Navarro sees a murder and nobody buys it.

Exterminators of the Year 3000

The Italian Road Warrior with sand instead of the Bronx, muscle car included.

SS Experiment Camp

A DPP video nasty far better known for its poster than for anything in the film.

The Nun and the Devil

Convent politics played as Renaissance power-drama. More Borgia than bondage.

2020 Texas Gladiators

D'Amato and Eastman's Mad Max in a cowboy hat. Assembled entirely from better films.

Behind Convent Walls

Borowczyk brings his erotic art-house eye to the convent. Beautiful, explicit and barely plotted.

Conquest

Fulci does Conan through so much fog you can barely see the gore. Somehow that helps.

Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man

Two cops who are clearly the villains. Ruggero Deodato, before the jungle.

Rome Armed to the Teeth

Maurizio Merli punches Rome for 100 minutes. Politics: incoherent.

Shoot First, Die Later

Di Leo's dirty-cop picture, and the rot goes all the way home.

The Fifth Cord

The best-looking giallo nobody names, shot by Storaro between two Bertoluccis.

The Long Hair of Death

Margheriti and Barbara Steele do the burned-witch gothic, and the fog does half the acting.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black

Barely a murder mystery. A slow psychological collapse, and superb.

Almost Human

Tomas Milian as a repellent psychopath. Deeply unpleasant, very good.

Burial Ground

Incoherent even by the standards of the cycle. The Peter subplot is unforgivable.

Camille 2000

Dumas restaged in a mod furniture showroom. The best-looking softcore of its year by a mile.

Cannibal Apocalypse

Vietnam veterans as cannibals. Sillier and kinder than the jungle cycle.

Death Walks on High Heels

Ercoli's best. Structurally cleverer than most of the cycle.

High Crime

Castellari's breakout in the genre, and Franco Nero furious for ninety minutes.

If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

The gadget-gunslinger spaghetti west arrives fully dressed in black.

Images in a Convent

D'Amato's convent, where the theology is a coat-hook for the softcore.

Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die

Mid-tier Eurospy with an unusually good title and Mike Connors.

Man from Deep River

The one that started it, by remaking A Man Called Horse in Thailand.

Nightmare Castle

Barbara Steele twice over, one of them back from the grave, scored by a young Morricone.

Nightmare City

Zombies that run and use guns, decades early. Incompetent in enjoyable ways.

Street Law

Castellari's Death Wish. An ordinary engineer, brutalised and ignored, arms himself.

The Big Racket

Castellari's best. The car-rolling-down-the-hill shot is famous for a reason.

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

A widower lures redheads to his castle to get over his dead wife. Nonsense plot, glorious mood.

Zombie Holocaust

Cannibals and zombies at once, reusing the Zombi 2 sets and cast.

Ator the Fighting Eagle

Joe D'Amato's Conan, giant puppet spider and all. Miles O'Keeffe swings the sword.

Baron Blood

A resurrected torturer stalks his own castle. Bava on more commercial autopilot, still gorgeous.

Cemetery Without Crosses

The French corner of the spaghetti cycle: gaunt, ritualistic, and dedicated to Leone.

Lisa and the Devil

Bava's most personal film, and his strangest. Telly Savalas as the devil, holding a lollipop.

Maciste in Hell

A muscleman drops into a full gothic hell. Peplum crossbred with a haunted-castle picture, and it looks it.

The Boss

Di Leo's most cynical crime film. A mob enforcer navigates a Mafia war where everyone is corrupt.

The Grand Duel

Lee Van Cleef, one three-way showdown, and the Bacalov theme you know from Kill Bill.

The Italian Connection

Mario Adorf on foot versus a car. Best chase in Italian cinema.

Women's Prison Massacre

Late Italian entry. Laura Gemser, and a body count instead of a plot.

99 Women

Franco doing the formula early, with Mercedes McCambridge as the warden.

Contamination

Alien via Rome, with exploding chests and a Goblin score doing heavy lifting.

Flavia the Heretic

Far angrier and more political than the packaging suggests.

Goliath and the Vampires

Maciste renamed again, fighting a shapeshifter. Cheerfully incoherent.

Goodbye Uncle Tom

Jacopetti and Prosperi's slavery reconstruction, and the most indefensible thing the mondo pair ever shot.

Hell of the Living Dead

Bruno Mattei rips off Dawn of the Dead with a Goblin score he also stole. Gloriously shameless.

Kill, Baby... Kill!

A ghost child with a white ball. Fellini and Scorsese both stole from it.

Revolver

Di Leo's saddest. Oliver Reed, and a Morricone theme that hurts.

Short Night of Glass Dolls

Narrated by a paralysed man presumed dead. Unusual and very good.

The Case of the Scorpion's Tail

Martino at his most efficient. Nobody wastes a frame.

The Gestapo's Last Orgy

The most extreme of the sadiconazista cycle, and the only one shaped like a love story.

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock

Barbara Steele married to a necrophile surgeon, and Freda smuggling it past the 1962 censors on innuendo alone.

The House on the Edge of the Park

Deodato points Last House at a dinner party. Grubby, mean, effective.

Castle of Blood

Barbara Steele in a haunted house on a bet. Better than it sounds.

Four of the Apocalypse

Fulci does a bleak, hallucinatory western. Four outcasts cross a hostile frontier. Most do not make it.

Hatchet for the Honeymoon

A bridal-couture killer who narrates his own psychosis, and the best ghost gag Bava ever staged.

Killer Nun

Anita Ekberg, morphine, and a plot that gives up around the hour mark.

Operation Kid Brother

They cast Sean Connery's actual brother. That is the entire idea.

The Black Belly of the Tarantula

The killer paralyses you first so you feel it. A first-rank giallo nobody name-checks.

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times

A family curse, a killer in a red cloak, and a legend that kills every hundred years.

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

Best title in the genre. Poe adaptation with Edwige Fenech and a black cat.

Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot!

Nothing to do with Django, and one of the strangest and cruelest westerns Italy ever shot.

Escape from the Bronx

More of the same, with flamethrowers and property developers as villains.

Jungle Holocaust

Deodato's first pass. Slower, meaner, less interesting than what followed.

OSS 117: Mission for a Killer

The eurospy archetype, from a French agent who beat James Bond into print by four years.

The New Barbarians

Castellari's Mad Max, with perspex cars and George Eastman. Sold in the US as Warriors of the Wasteland.

The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

The Martino/Fenech formula, arriving fully formed. Cut and retitled Blade of the Ripper in the US.

Yor, the Hunter from the Future

Starts as caveman fantasy, becomes science fiction with no warning.

2019: After the Fall of New York

The last fertile woman on Earth, in a quarry outside Rome.

All the Colors of the Dark

Satanic paranoia in Swinging London. Edwige Fenech is excellent.

Cemetery Man

A cemetery caretaker shoots the returning dead and falls in love repeatedly. Beautiful and deranged.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Spanish-Italian, shot in England, and much smarter than its stablemates.

Planet of the Vampires

Bava builds an alien planet out of fog and two rocks, and Alien quietly borrowed the skeleton.

StageFright

A killer in a giant owl mask, a locked theatre, and Soavi announcing himself.

The Big Gundown

Sollima's best. A manhunt that keeps turning into a political argument.

The Case of the Bloody Iris

The Fenech giallo distilled to its purest form: models, murders, and no reason to solve any of it.

The House with Laughing Windows

A rural giallo with no gloss and a deep, patient dread. Often voted the best one going.

The Psychic

Fulci does a clockwork giallo. A woman's vision of a murder turns out to be her own future.

Who Saw Her Die?

A child is murdered in Venice. A grieving father hunts the killer through the fog.

Anthropophagus

Almost entirely people walking around an island. Then two minutes of infamy.

Danger: Diabolik

Bava doing pop art on pocket change. Genuinely one of the best-designed films ever.

Eaten Alive!

Lenzi recycling other films' footage into a Jonestown story. Grim work.

I Vampiri

Freda walked off Italy's first sound horror; Bava finished it. The whole euro-gothic shelf starts here.

The Whip and the Body

Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.

1990: The Bronx Warriors

Fred Williamson in a cape. Castellari doing Warriors on a Roman budget.

Companeros

Zapata western with Franco Nero and a very good Morricone theme.

Day of Anger

A gunfighter mentors a despised young man, then has to face what he created. Van Cleef at his best.

Face to Face

Sollima's smartest western: watch a decent man discover he likes it.

The Giant of Marathon

Reeves again, with underwater battle scenes Bava shot uncredited.

The Mercenary

Corbucci's Zapata western. A Polish gun-for-hire, a peasant revolutionary, and Jack Palance in a frock.

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

Fulci does psychedelia. The dog scene got him prosecuted.

Keoma

Late, strange, half-sung by a folk narrator. Castellari's best film.