Exploitation films

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.

Milano calibro 9

Di Leo's masterpiece. Cold, fast, well written.

The New York Ripper

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

Torso

Sleazy for an hour, then a brilliant silent final act.

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals

Black Emanuelle wanders into a cannibal picture, and D'Amato lets both halves misbehave.

Hercules in the Haunted World

Bava shoots Hades in gel colours. Looks like nothing else in the cycle.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much

The one usually called the first giallo. Still half a krimi.

Don't Torture a Duckling

Fulci's best film and his angriest. A giallo about mob justice in a village.

Mountain of the Cannibal God

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

The Great Silence

Corbucci in the snow. The ending would never have cleared an American studio.

What Have You Done to Solange?

Unusually sad for a giallo, and much better for it.

A Bullet for the General

The most openly political of the Zapata cycle, and the sharpest.

Black Sabbath

Three stories, one Karloff. The Wurdulak segment is the best thing Bava shot.