Exploitation films from Japan

Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter

Meiko Kaji before Toei, leading a girl gang through Nikkatsu's coolest delinquent picture.

Assault! Jack the Ripper

A couple who find that killing is the only thing that works, followed all the way down.

Cops vs. Thugs

Fukasaku again, arguing the two categories in the title are the same.

Ecstasy of the Angels

Wakamatsu wires the pink film to a detonator and steps back.

Horrors of Malformed Men

Suppressed by Toei for decades. Butoh dancing, an island, and total delirium.

Street Mobster

Bunta Sugawara as pure appetite. The jitsuroku style arriving fully formed.

Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs

Toei's red-coated killer cop, and the blueprint for every lone avenging woman after her.

Blind Beast

Masumura, one set, three actors, and an ending that goes much further than expected.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41

Ito's second, and the most formally daring film in the whole category.

Girl Boss Guerilla

Norifumi Suzuki at full speed. Reiko Ike is the whole show.

Violated Angels

The Richard Speck murders restaged as avant-garde pink film. Wakamatsu's coldest hour.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable

Ito's last. Kaji drags a severed arm through Tokyo in the opening minutes.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

Bleeding skies, a forehead-splitting alien, and an ending with no comfort in it whatsoever.

School of the Holy Beast

The Japanese entry, and formally the most accomplished of them.

Sex & Fury

The naked snow swordfight. Everyone remembers it; the rest is decent Meiji melodrama.

Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom

The title is the pitch. Delivers on it with unusual formal care.

Graveyard of Honor

Fukasaku's nastiest. A gangster too unstable for organised crime.

Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood

The fake snuff film that got Charlie Sheen on the phone to the FBI.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx

The best of the series. A pram, a snowfield, and a small army that should have stayed home.

Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion

Sold as a women-in-prison quickie. Shot like an art film. Meiko Kaji barely blinks.

The Street Fighter

Sonny Chiba tearing people apart. First film rated X in America for violence alone.

Goyokin

A samurai returns to stop the massacre he could not prevent the first time. Shot in real snow.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance

A disgraced executioner and his toddler take the assassin's road. The pram has blades in it.

Tokyo Gore Police

The Japanese splatter movement at full arterial pressure, from the man who built it.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity

Not pinky violence. Fukasaku's handheld yakuza epic, and a classic.

Flower and Snake

The film that made Nikkatsu's S&M line a going concern. Rope, and lots of it.

Matango

Honda's mushroom-people film. Far bleaker than anything else Toho made.

Trouble Every Day

Cannibal desire filmed like an art installation, and it will not hurry for you.

Zatoichi: The Tale of Zatoichi

The blind masseur who is also the deadliest swordsman alive. The first of twenty-five-plus.

Sword of Doom

A swordsman with no morals and no motive cuts his way through the film. It stops rather than ends.

Branded to Kill

Got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu for making films nobody understood. Correct.

Tokyo Drifter

Suzuki given a budget cut and responding with pop-art abstraction.

Gamera, the Giant Monster

Daiei's cut-price answer to Godzilla. A flying turtle. Children loved it.

Lady Snowblood

Where Kill Bill got most of its ideas, including the snow.

Samurai Rebellion

Kobayashi and Mifune against feudal authority again. It builds slowly and then it does not stop.

Society

A teen suspects his rich family are not human. The finale proves it, wetly.

War of the Gargantuas

Two giant humanoid brothers, one good, one savage, tear up Japan. Weirdly beloved, and Brad Pitt's favourite.

Rodan

Toho's first colour kaiju. A supersonic pterosaur levels a city with its wingblasts.

Mothra

The most charming of Toho's roster, and openly anti-colonial about it.

Shogun Assassin

Two Lone Wolf and Cub films chopped into one English dub. A grindhouse legend regardless.

Suicide Club

Opens with fifty-four schoolgirls and an oncoming train. Then it gets stranger.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Sixty-seven minutes of industrial nightmare. Nothing else looks like it.

Destroy All Monsters

Eleven monsters, no restraint. Honda cashing every chip at once.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah

The psychedelic pollution one. Godzilla fights a smog monster, and the film goes completely strange.

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster

The film where Godzilla becomes a hero. Three of Toho's monsters team up against a golden space dragon.

Ichi the Killer

Miike hands out sick bags at the premiere and earns every one of them.

King Kong vs. Godzilla

The most-watched Godzilla film in Japan, and essentially an ad-industry farce with two giant monsters.

Audition

The slowest, sweetest bait-and-switch in horror. Miike lets you fall for her first.

Harakiri

A ronin asks to commit suicide in a lord's courtyard. What follows dismantles the whole code.

In the Realm of the Senses

The art film that shipped its own negatives abroad to beat Japan's censors. Unsimulated, and deadly serious about it.

Battle Royale

A class of ninth-graders handed weapons and told to kill each other. Fukasaku at seventy, swinging hard.

Godzilla

Not a monster romp. A sober film about nuclear annihilation, made nine years after.

Oldboy

The corridor fight alone would earn its place. The last twenty minutes are why nobody forgets it.