Exploitation films

Love Camp 7

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

SS Experiment Camp

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

Night of the Bloody Apes

Mexican horror at the gore end: a gorilla-heart transplant, real surgery footage, and a masked lady wrestler.

Cannibal Apocalypse

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

Man from Deep River

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

Nightmare City

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

Zombie Holocaust

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

Contamination

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

Hell of the Living Dead

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

The House on the Edge of the Park

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

Killer Nun

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

Blood Feast

The first gore film. Barely competent, historically unavoidable.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

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

Anthropophagus

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

Eaten Alive!

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

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.

Martin

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

The Driller Killer

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

Thriller: A Cruel Picture

The eyepatch Tarantino copied. Contains real hardcore inserts and a real animal death.

Faces of Death

Mostly fake, entirely cynical, and a rental-shop legend regardless.

The Beast

An acclaimed animator's fairytale about a noblewoman and a well-equipped forest beast, banned on sight.

The New York Ripper

Genuinely nasty and hard to defend. The killer quacks. It doesn't help.

Maniac

Savini's effects, Spinell's performance, and a very bleak little film.

Shogun Assassin

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

Foxy Brown

Coffy again, louder and worse written. Grier is still magnetic.

Mountain of the Cannibal God

The cannibal cycle in a dinner jacket, ex-Bond girl and real animal deaths included.

Nekromantik

German, banned widely, and much sadder than its reputation suggests.

Rabid

Cronenberg gives Marilyn Chambers a blood-feeding stinger. Montreal falls apart around her.

The Prowler

A killer in WWII combat gear stalks a graduation dance. Savini's best gore work.

The Burning

The raft scene is the best kill in any slasher. The rest is fine.

Cannibal Ferox

Lenzi chasing Deodato with none of the argument. Real animal deaths, no defence.

Prom Night

Jamie Lee Curtis, a masked killer, and a decade-old secret. Halloween cashes in, disco included.

Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS

Shot on the leftover Hogan's Heroes set. Nothing here is defensible; it's catalogued, not recommended.

Inferno

Argento's sequel to Suspiria. Even less plot, even more colour. A building that is alive.

A Bay of Blood

Bava invents the slasher a decade early. Friday the 13th copied two kills outright.