Exploitation films

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.

Bad Girls Go to Hell

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

Kilink Istanbul'da

The homegrown Yeşilçam pulp: a skeleton-suited supervillain lifted wholesale from Italian comics.

Satan's Sadists

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

Horrors of Malformed Men

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

Scum of the Earth

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

Blind Beast

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

Santo vs. the Martian Invasion

Martians in togas demand Earth's surrender. Santo declines.

The Brainiac

Not a Santo film. A forked-tongue demon eating brains with a spoon.

The Curious Dr. Humpp

Argentine, insane, and re-cut by its US distributor into something stranger.

The Curse of the Crying Woman

The Mexican gothic at its cobwebbed peak, Universal horror with the fog cranked up.

Violated Angels

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

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

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

Love Camp 7

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

Santo vs. the Vampire Women

The best-shot Santo film. He wrestles twice for no reason at all.

Spider Baby

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

The Black Abbot

The standard-issue Wallace krimi. Hood, abbey, inheritance, fog.

The Blood Beast Terror

Cushing called it the worst film he ever made. He was being generous.

The Sinister Monk

A whip-wielding monk killing heiresses. Closest the krimi got to giallo.

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul

The first Brazilian horror film, and the birth of Coffin Joe, a national icon with terrible fingernails.

Night of the Bloody Apes

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

The Born Losers

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

The Dead Eyes of London

Blind killers, insurance fraud, and the best fog in the series.

The Inn on the River

The Rialto Wallace machine at full tilt: fog, a harpoon and Klaus Kinski looking guilty.

The Long Hair of Death

Margheriti and Barbara Steele do the burned-witch gothic, and the fog does half the acting.

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse

Coffin Joe returns, still hunting the perfect woman, and the film turns Technicolor to show you Hell.

Zinda Laash

Pakistan's first horror film: Hammer's Dracula, plus musical numbers, minus permission.

Camille 2000

Dumas restaged in a mod furniture showroom. The best-looking softcore of its year by a mile.

Color Me Blood Red

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

If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

The gadget-gunslinger spaghetti west arrives fully dressed in black.

Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die

Mid-tier Eurospy with an unusually good title and Mike Connors.

Nightmare Castle

Barbara Steele twice over, one of them back from the grave, scored by a young Morricone.

The Creature with the Blue Hand

Kinski playing both twins and a killer's claw that snaps shut like a bear trap. The krimi going out swinging.

Cemetery Without Crosses

The French corner of the spaghetti cycle: gaunt, ritualistic, and dedicated to Leone.

Goyokin

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

Maciste in Hell

A muscleman drops into a full gothic hell. Peplum crossbred with a haunted-castle picture, and it looks it.