Exploitation films

Hell of the Living Dead

Bruno Mattei rips off Dawn of the Dead with a Goblin score he also stole. Gloriously shameless.

Pieces

Spanish, incoherent, and gleefully stupid. 'Bastard! Bastard!'

Q: The Winged Serpent

Larry Cohen, a dragon over Manhattan, and a great Michael Moriarty.

The House on the Edge of the Park

Deodato points Last House at a dinner party. Grubby, mean, effective.

Class of Nuke 'Em High

Troma's toxic high school, second only to Toxie. Exactly as stupid as you want it to be.

Razorback

A giant pig film shot like a perfume ad. Somehow works.

Deathstalker

Corman in Argentina. The genuine article, for better and worse.

Escape from the Bronx

More of the same, with flamethrowers and property developers as villains.

Hell Night

Linda Blair, a frat hazing, an old dark house. Atmosphere over arterial spray, and better for it.

Road Games

Rear Window in a truck, with Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Street Trash

People melt in primary colours. Tasteless, inventive, weirdly beautiful.

The New Barbarians

Castellari's Mad Max, with perspex cars and George Eastman. Sold in the US as Warriors of the Wasteland.

Yor, the Hunter from the Future

Starts as caveman fantasy, becomes science fiction with no warning.

2019: After the Fall of New York

The last fertile woman on Earth, in a quarry outside Rome.

StageFright

A killer in a giant owl mask, a locked theatre, and Soavi announcing himself.

The Slumber Party Massacre

Written as satire, shot straight, and stranger than either choice on its own.

The Sword and the Sorcerer

A three-bladed sword that fires two of the blades. Sold on that alone.

Anthropophagus

Almost entirely people walking around an island. Then two minutes of infamy.

Eaten Alive!

Lenzi recycling other films' footage into a Jonestown story. Grim work.

The Funhouse

Tobe Hooper does a carnival slasher. A deformed killer, a hall of mirrors, and real dread.

1990: The Bronx Warriors

Fred Williamson in a cape. Castellari doing Warriors on a Roman budget.

Dead & Buried

Stan Winston effects and a good twist. Underseen.

Society

A teen suspects his rich family are not human. The finale proves it, wetly.

Ms. 45

Ferrara's best. Zoë Lund is extraordinary and the ending is a genuine image.

The New York Ripper

Genuinely nasty and hard to defend. The killer quacks. It doesn't help.

Maniac

Savini's effects, Spinell's performance, and a very bleak little film.

Santa Sangre

Jodorowsky's late masterpiece. A circus, a cult, an armless mother, and her son's hands.

Shogun Assassin

Two Lone Wolf and Cub films chopped into one English dub. A grindhouse legend regardless.

Terror Train

A costume party on a moving train, a killer swapping disguises, and Jamie Lee Curtis again.

The Exterminator

A flamethrower and a meat grinder. Death Wish with the restraint removed.

Basket Case

$35,000, shot on 42nd Street, and completely charming. The best kind of cheap.

Class of 1984

Death Wish enrols at high school and the faculty loses.

Nekromantik

German, banned widely, and much sadder than its reputation suggests.

Sleepaway Camp

Ninety minutes of nothing, then an ending nobody who has seen it forgets.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Sixty-seven minutes of industrial nightmare. Nothing else looks like it.

The Prowler

A killer in WWII combat gear stalks a graduation dance. Savini's best gore work.