Exploitation films from the USA

Boardinghouse

The first shot-on-video horror feature, blown up to 35mm and just as ugly as that sounds.

Penitentiary

Prison-boxing blaxploitation that out-grossed every indie of its year and got forgotten anyway.

Petey Wheatstraw

Rudy Ray Moore makes a deal with the Devil to come back from the dead. Deranged and delightful.

She-Devils on Wheels

H.G. Lewis hands the gore to a real biker gang. The acting is a crime; the piano wire is the point.

TNT Jackson

Cirio Santiago's Manila blaxploitation at full tilt, remembered for one fight staged in the dark.

Werewolves on Wheels

Exactly what it says, at half the pace you want.

Bad Girls Go to Hell

The definitive Doris Wishman roughie: grimy, deranged, and edited by someone allergic to faces.

Macon County Line

One of the most profitable independents ever made. Nastier than its reputation.

Satan's Sadists

Al Adamson's grimiest, shot partly where the Manson family was living.

Willie Dynamite

A flamboyant pimp fights to stay on top as everything closes in. Sharper and sadder than most.

Detroit 9000

A biracial cop pairing hunts jewel thieves in Detroit. Tarantino re-released it for a reason.

Rituals

The Canadian Deliverance, and grimmer than the nickname promises.

Scum of the Earth

Herschell Gordon Lewis invents the roughie the same year he invents gore. Busy man.

Three the Hard Way

Brown, Williamson and Kelly against a plot to poison the water supply.

Maniac

Dwain Esper's roadshow lunacy. A man eats a cat's eye. Not the 1980 film.

Sugar Hill

Revenge via Haitian zombies. The best of the blaxploitation horror crossovers.

The Lickerish Quartet

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

The Mack

Half drama, half documentary of 1970s Oakland. The real players are in it.

The Violent Years

A girl gang robs, kidnaps and worse. Written by Ed Wood, which explains everything.

Women in Cages

Pam Grier as the sadist for once. Bleaker than its stablemates.

Angels Hard as They Come

Jonathan Demme's first script, produced by Corman. Rashomon on bikes.

Ganja & Hess

An art film that was sold as a vampire picture. Recut and buried for decades.

J.D.'s Revenge

A dead 1940s gangster possesses a mild law student. Blaxploitation crossed with the supernatural.

Love Camp 7

The film that invented nazisploitation six years before Ilsa made it a genre.

Messiah of Evil

Made by the couple who then wrote American Graffiti. A nightmare that never explains itself.

Spider Baby

Jack Hill's first, Lon Chaney Jr's last good role. Very odd and very fond.

The Big Bird Cage

Funnier and better than the first. Sid Haig is having an excellent time.

The Gore Gore Girls

Herschell Gordon Lewis signs off with a meat tenderiser and a gag about chocolate milk.

The Wizard of Gore

A stage magician whose tricks are real. Lewis's most interesting idea.

Abby

The blaxploitation Exorcist. A minister's wife is possessed by a sex demon. Warner Bros sued.

Chained Heat

Linda Blair goes to prison. A sleazy 80s update of the formula, with a corrupt warden and a hot tub.

Dolemite

Technically inept and completely irresistible. Boom mics in every other shot.

Reform School Girls

The women-in-prison film as its own punchline, fronted by the lead singer of the Plasmatics.

Scream Blacula Scream

The rare sequel that adds Pam Grier and a shred of dignity.

Switchblade Sisters

Jack Hill doing Othello with teenage gangs. Much smarter than it needs to be.

The Big Doll House

Jack Hill and Pam Grier invent the modern formula in the Philippines.

The Born Losers

The first Billy Jack film, and much nastier than the sequels.

The Legend of Boggy Creek

The Arkansas Bigfoot docudrama that invented an entire regional-monster format on a hundred grand.

Trouble Man

Cool to the point of refrigeration, scored by Marvin Gaye the one time he ever bothered.

Truck Turner

Isaac Hayes in front of the camera for once, and Nichelle Nichols swearing.

Barbarian Queen

Corman's Argentine Conan-with-women, honest bottom-shelf swords and loincloths.

Blue Sunshine

A batch of ten-year-old LSD makes people go bald and homicidal. A great, paranoid premise.

Brain Damage

A parasite gives a young man euphoric highs in exchange for feeding it brains. Addiction as horror.

Cannibal Apocalypse

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

Color Me Blood Red

Lewis finishing his gore trilogy. A painter, and his pigment source.

Marihuana

Esper again. One reefer leads directly to nude swimming and death.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door

The most political film the blaxploitation boom made, pulled from cinemas and buried for thirty years.

Black Belt Jones

Jim Kelly karate-chops the mob to save a Watts dojo. Blaxploitation meets kung fu, joyfully.

Black Mama White Mama

The Defiant Ones with Pam Grier, shot in the Philippines by a Filipino who actually knew the terrain.

Cotton Comes to Harlem

Two Harlem detectives chase a stolen fortune hidden in a bale of cotton. The one that opened the door.

God Told Me To

A detective investigates random killers who all say God ordered it. It goes somewhere insane.

Hell Up in Harlem

Larry Cohen's weekend sequel to Black Caesar, rougher and more berserk than the original.

High School Confidential

An undercover cop infiltrates a high school drug ring. Reefer, hot rods and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Race with the Devil

Satanists chase a Winnebago across Texas. Better than that sounds.

Shock Waves

Underwater Nazi zombies rise off a tropical island. Peter Cushing, John Carradine, and real dread.

The Immoral Mr. Teas

Historically pivotal, formally inert. Watch ten minutes and read about the rest.

The Toolbox Murders

A proto-slasher that front-loads its nastiness, then becomes a different and stranger film.

Tromeo and Juliet

Body piercings, a penis monster, and Lemmy on narration. Troma's actual masterpiece.

Vigilante

Lustig doing it straight. Robert Forster deserves better and knows it.

White Line Fever

Trucker versus the cartel. Earnest, blue-collar, better than expected.

Black Caesar

Larry Cohen shooting Harlem guerrilla-style. James Brown scores it.

Cleopatra Jones

Tamara Dobson, six feet two, government agent. Shelley Winters overacts gloriously.

Q: The Winged Serpent

Larry Cohen, a dragon over Manhattan, and a great Michael Moriarty.

Squirm

Electrified worms in Georgia. Rick Baker's early effects are the draw.

Across 110th Street

Grim, well acted, and the best film in the cycle by some distance.

Class of Nuke 'Em High

Troma's toxic high school, second only to Toxie. Exactly as stupid as you want it to be.

Grizzly

Jaws with a bear, pitched exactly that way, and it worked.

Mom and Dad

Kroger Babb toured it for twenty years with a fake nurse in the lobby.

Supervixens

Meyer's biggest hit of the decade, and his cartoon violence at its most cartoonish.

Tourist Trap

Mannequins that move, telekinesis, and a masked killer. Far stranger than a slasher should be.

Vixen!

The one that made the money and triggered the obscenity fight.

Daughters of Darkness

Delphine Seyrig as Bathory in an empty Ostend hotel. Genuinely elegant.

Deathstalker

Corman in Argentina. The genuine article, for better and worse.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry

Ninety minutes of driving and one of cinema's great abrupt endings.

Hell Night

Linda Blair, a frat hazing, an old dark house. Atmosphere over arterial spray, and better for it.

Street Trash

People melt in primary colours. Tasteless, inventive, weirdly beautiful.

Super Fly

Curtis Mayfield's score critiques the film it's in. Remarkable object.

Tales from the Crypt

The best Amicus omnibus, and Joan Collins versus a killer Santa two years before Black Christmas.

White Lightning

Burt Reynolds, moonshine, and the blueprint for a decade of Southern comedy.

Blood Feast

The first gore film. Barely competent, historically unavoidable.

Caged Heat

Jonathan Demme's debut, and it is visibly a Jonathan Demme film.

Frankenhooker

A man rebuilds his dead girlfriend from the parts of exploded sex workers. Exactly that stupid, and great.

Phase IV

Saul Bass's only feature. Ants, geometry, and an ending nobody saw for 40 years.

The Slumber Party Massacre

Written as satire, shot straight, and stranger than either choice on its own.

The Sword and the Sorcerer

A three-bladed sword that fires two of the blades. Sold on that alone.

Wild in the Streets

A rock star is elected president and puts everyone over 35 in LSD re-education camps.

Gone in 60 Seconds

93 cars destroyed for real. The director broke his own ankles. Worth it.

Hells Angels on Wheels

The biker cycle's Jack Nicholson entry, shot by Laszlo Kovacs and a cut above the AIP norm.

The Funhouse

Tobe Hooper does a carnival slasher. A deformed killer, a hall of mirrors, and real dread.

Dead & Buried

Stan Winston effects and a good twist. Underseen.

Female Trouble

Divine's crime spree as performance art. Waters at his most focused and vicious.

Martin

Romero's vampire film. A boy who needs blood, and no fangs, cape or certainty that he is one.

Psych-Out

A deaf runaway searches for her brother in Haight-Ashbury. Nicholson with a ponytail and a band.

Rolling Thunder

Paul Schrader script, and the last twenty minutes are perfect.

Society

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

The Driller Killer

Abel Ferrara's debut. More interesting as a document of downtown New York.