Exploitation films

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.