Exploitation films

Shoot First, Die Later

Di Leo's dirty-cop picture, and the rot goes all the way home.

Stone

Australia's outlaw-biker scripture. Mad Max drank from this tank.

Switchblade Sisters

Jack Hill doing Othello with teenage gangs. Much smarter than it needs to be.

The Big Doll House

Jack Hill and Pam Grier invent the modern formula in the Philippines.

The Chinese Boxer

Jimmy Wang Yu invents the empty-hand kung fu film. No swords.

The Fifth Cord

The best-looking giallo nobody names, shot by Storaro between two Bertoluccis.

The Ghost Galleon

The Blind Dead put to sea on a model boat in a visible fish tank. The runt of the four.

The Iron Rose

Rollin with the vampires stripped out, and his best film for it.

The Legend of Boggy Creek

The Arkansas Bigfoot docudrama that invented an entire regional-monster format on a hundred grand.

The Nude Vampire

A secret society, a Paris chateau, and dream logic all the way down.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black

Barely a murder mystery. A slow psychological collapse, and superb.

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.

Almost Human

Tomas Milian as a repellent psychopath. Deeply unpleasant, very good.

Blue Sunshine

A batch of ten-year-old LSD makes people go bald and homicidal. A great, paranoid premise.

Death Walks on High Heels

Ercoli's best. Structurally cleverer than most of the cycle.

Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion

Sold as a women-in-prison quickie. Shot like an art film. Meiko Kaji barely blinks.

Heroes of the East

Chinese kung fu versus Japanese martial arts, as a marriage. Lau Kar-leung's most good-natured film.

High Crime

Castellari's breakout in the genre, and Franco Nero furious for ninety minutes.

Hunchback of the Morgue

Naschy's grisliest, and the one where the rats were not an effect.

Images in a Convent

D'Amato's convent, where the theology is a coat-hook for the softcore.

Man from Deep River

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

Return of the Evil Dead

Blind Dead again, this time besieging a whole village. The best of the four.

Schoolgirl Report

West Germany's pseudo-documentary sex series. Thirteen entries, vast profits, zero shame.

Şeytan

The Exorcist, shot-for-shot, in Istanbul, with the same score. Astonishing nerve.

Street Law

Castellari's Death Wish. An ordinary engineer, brutalised and ignored, arms himself.

The Big Racket

Castellari's best. The car-rolling-down-the-hill shot is famous for a reason.

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

A widower lures redheads to his castle to get over his dead wife. Nonsense plot, glorious mood.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door

The most political film the blaxploitation boom made, pulled from cinemas and buried for thirty years.

The Street Fighter

Sonny Chiba tearing people apart. First film rated X in America for violence alone.

The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman

Naschy's Waldemar Daninsky at his most enjoyable.

Vampyres

Two women lure travellers to a country house and drain them. British, bloody, erotic.

A Virgin Among the Living Dead

Franco at his dreamiest. Distributors added zombies later without telling him.

Baron Blood

A resurrected torturer stalks his own castle. Bava on more commercial autopilot, still gorgeous.

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.