Exploitation films

Cotton Comes to Harlem

Two Harlem detectives chase a stolen fortune hidden in a bale of cotton. The one that opened the door.

Five Deadly Venoms

Chang Cheh's oddest. Five styles, five masks, one whodunit.

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.

Lisa and the Devil

Bava's most personal film, and his strangest. Telly Savalas as the devil, holding a lollipop.

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.

Successive Slidings of Pleasure

A nouveau-roman novelist makes a nunsploitation film and refuses to let it mean anything.

The Boss

Di Leo's most cynical crime film. A mob enforcer navigates a Mafia war where everyone is corrupt.

The Grand Duel

Lee Van Cleef, one three-way showdown, and the Bacalov theme you know from Kill Bill.

The Italian Connection

Mario Adorf on foot versus a car. Best chase in Italian cinema.

The Shiver of the Vampires

Rollin with a fuzz-guitar band and a vampire who lives in the clock. His most fun.

The Toolbox Murders

A proto-slasher that front-loads its nastiness, then becomes a different and stranger film.

White Line Fever

Trucker versus the cartel. Earnest, blue-collar, better than expected.

Alucarda

The most hysterical nunsploitation film ever made. A convent, two possessed girls, and constant screaming.

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.

Flavia the Heretic

Far angrier and more political than the packaging suggests.

Goodbye Uncle Tom

Jacopetti and Prosperi's slavery reconstruction, and the most indefensible thing the mondo pair ever shot.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance

A disgraced executioner and his toddler take the assassin's road. The pram has blades in it.

Revolver

Di Leo's saddest. Oliver Reed, and a Morricone theme that hurts.

Short Night of Glass Dolls

Narrated by a paralysed man presumed dead. Unusual and very good.

Squirm

Electrified worms in Georgia. Rick Baker's early effects are the draw.

The Blood Spattered Bride

Spanish Carmilla adaptation with an unusually pointed anger about marriage.

The Case of the Scorpion's Tail

Martino at his most efficient. Nobody wastes a frame.

The Gestapo's Last Orgy

The most extreme of the sadiconazista cycle, and the only one shaped like a love story.

The Grapes of Death

Rollin does an outbreak. A pesticide turns wine-country villagers into oozing killers.

3 Dev Adam

Captain America and a Mexican wrestler fight Spider-Man, who is a murderer. Unlicensed, obviously.

Across 110th Street

Grim, well acted, and the best film in the cycle by some distance.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity

Not pinky violence. Fukasaku's handheld yakuza epic, and a classic.

Five Fingers of Death

The one that broke kung fu in America, months before Bruce Lee did.

Flower and Snake

The film that made Nikkatsu's S&M line a going concern. Rope, and lots of it.

Four of the Apocalypse

Fulci does a bleak, hallucinatory western. Four outcasts cross a hostile frontier. Most do not make it.

Grizzly

Jaws with a bear, pitched exactly that way, and it worked.

Hatchet for the Honeymoon

A bridal-couture killer who narrates his own psychosis, and the best ghost gag Bava ever staged.

Killer Nun

Anita Ekberg, morphine, and a plot that gives up around the hour mark.