Exploitation films

Succubus

Franco's arthouse credentials, such as they are. Fritz Lang liked it.

The Indian Scarf

Ten heirs in a Scottish castle, strangled one at a time. Kinski included.

99 Women

Franco doing the formula early, with Mercedes McCambridge as the warden.

Goliath and the Vampires

Maciste renamed again, fighting a shapeshifter. Cheerfully incoherent.

Kill, Baby... Kill!

A ghost child with a white ball. Fellini and Scorsese both stole from it.

The College Girl Murders

The point where the black-and-white krimi tips over into full-colour giallo delirium.

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock

Barbara Steele married to a necrophile surgeon, and Freda smuggling it past the 1962 censors on innuendo alone.

Castle of Blood

Barbara Steele in a haunted house on a bet. Better than it sounds.

Matango

Honda's mushroom-people film. Far bleaker than anything else Toho made.

Operation Kid Brother

They cast Sean Connery's actual brother. That is the entire idea.

Vixen!

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

Zatoichi: The Tale of Zatoichi

The blind masseur who is also the deadliest swordsman alive. The first of twenty-five-plus.

Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot!

Nothing to do with Django, and one of the strangest and cruelest westerns Italy ever shot.

OSS 117: Mission for a Killer

The eurospy archetype, from a French agent who beat James Bond into print by four years.

Sword of Doom

A swordsman with no morals and no motive cuts his way through the film. It stops rather than ends.

The One-Armed Swordsman

The film that made Shaw Brothers switch to male leads and stay there.

Blood Feast

The first gore film. Barely competent, historically unavoidable.

Branded to Kill

Got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu for making films nobody understood. Correct.

Planet of the Vampires

Bava builds an alien planet out of fog and two rocks, and Alien quietly borrowed the skeleton.

The Awful Dr. Orlof

Where the entire Franco machine started. Everything he made for forty years is in here somewhere.

The Big Gundown

Sollima's best. A manhunt that keeps turning into a political argument.

Tokyo Drifter

Suzuki given a budget cut and responding with pop-art abstraction.

Wild in the Streets

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

Danger: Diabolik

Bava doing pop art on pocket change. Genuinely one of the best-designed films ever.

Gamera, the Giant Monster

Daiei's cut-price answer to Godzilla. A flying turtle. Children loved it.

Hells Angels on Wheels

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

Samurai Rebellion

Kobayashi and Mifune against feudal authority again. It builds slowly and then it does not stop.

The Whip and the Body

Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.

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.

Psych-Out

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

The Devil Rides Out

Hammer's best occult film. Lee as the hero for once, and enjoying it.

The Mercenary

Corbucci's Zapata western. A Polish gun-for-hire, a peasant revolutionary, and Jack Palance in a frock.

Two Thousand Maniacs!

H.G. Lewis, a Southern town, and gore effects that predate everyone.

War of the Gargantuas

Two giant humanoid brothers, one good, one savage, tear up Japan. Weirdly beloved, and Brad Pitt's favourite.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

The film that invented the Amicus anthology, dealt out as tarot on a train.