Exploitation films

Piranha

Sayles script, Dante direction, and jokes that land. The best Jaws rip.

Salon Kitty

Nazisploitation with a real budget and Tinto Brass's dirty fingerprints. Ilsa was the knock-off.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

The best training film ever made. Lau Kar-leung at the peak.

My Name Is Nobody

The spaghetti western attends its own funeral, cracking jokes. Fonda, Terence Hill, and Leone's fingerprints everywhere.

Phantasm

A flying silver sphere, a towering undertaker, and dream logic. Nobody has explained it since.

The Devils

A great film about power, finally restored after fifty-five years.

Zombi 2

A zombie fights a shark. Fulci's splinter shot is still the worst thing here.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

Argento's debut, and the film that made the giallo an export.

Deep Red

Argento's best. Goblin's score does half the work and knows it.

I Spit on Your Grave

The most argued-about film on this site. Read the glossary entry before deciding.

The Hills Have Eyes

Craven's meanest. The suburban family turn out to be the better killers.

Pink Flamingos

Divine competes to be the filthiest person alive. The most notorious act in film history closes it.

Assault on Precinct 13

Carpenter remaking Rio Bravo for $100,000. The ice cream scene is still shocking.

Black Christmas

Predates Halloween and is scarier. The phone calls still work.

Death Race 2000

Corman satire with actual teeth. Stallone before anyone knew.

Drunken Master

Jackie Chan finds the formula: comedy, pain, and visible competence.

The Holy Mountain

Jodorowsky's spiritual epic. Every frame is a blasphemous tableau, and it is dead serious.

The Night Porter

A serious, much-argued-about film that producers immediately misread as a template.

Shaft

Gordon Parks directs a solid detective film. Isaac Hayes does the rest.

Dawn of the Dead

A shopping mall, four survivors, and Savini's finest hour.

They Call Me Trinity

The comedy turn that ended the cycle by making it impossible to take seriously.

Death Wish

Bronson as a liberal architect who buys a gun. A phenomenon, and reactionary.

In the Realm of the Senses

The art film that shipped its own negatives abroad to beat Japan's censors. Unsimulated, and deadly serious about it.

Suspiria

Barely a giallo and barely a plot. Possibly the most beautiful horror film ever shot.

The Last House on the Left

Bergman's Virgin Spring, brutalised. Genuinely unpleasant and knows it. Tonally a mess.

Duck, You Sucker

Leone's revolution film. A Mexican bandit and an IRA dynamiter blow up the establishment together.

The Wicker Man

Not exploitation, filed here by shelf-adjacency. One of Britain's best films.

Game of Death

The film Bruce Lee left unfinished, completed with a double, a cardboard cut-out, and his real funeral.

The Warriors

Barely exploitation, entirely brilliant. A subway ride as Greek epic.

Deliverance

The respectable ancestor of the whole backwoods cycle, and still the best of it.

Emmanuelle

The film that made softcore respectable at the box office. Glossy, empty, and enormously profitable.

Fist of Fury

Bruce Lee kicks a 'No Dogs and Chinese' sign to splinters. The crowd never recovered.

The Big Boss

Lee's first lead, and the star arrives fully formed.

The Omen

Studio horror with a Goldsmith choir and four very memorable deaths.

Mad Max

Made for nothing on public roads. You can feel every dollar missing.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Almost bloodless, and still the most upsetting film here. The heat is the horror.