The films

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Lorna

Meyer stops joking. The one where the sun goes behind a cloud.

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Milano calibro 9

Di Leo's masterpiece. Cold, fast, well written.

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Ms. 45

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

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Rodan

Toho's first colour kaiju. A supersonic pterosaur levels a city with its wingblasts.

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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Financed independently, structured like nothing else, and it changed the industry.

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The New York Ripper

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

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Torso

Sleazy for an hour, then a brilliant silent final act.

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Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals

Black Emanuelle wanders into a cannibal picture, and D'Amato lets both halves misbehave.

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Hercules in the Haunted World

Bava shoots Hades in gel colours. Looks like nothing else in the cycle.

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Maniac

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

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Mothra

The most charming of Toho's roster, and openly anti-colonial about it.

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Reefer Madness

A church-funded warning that became a comedy 40 years later.

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Santa Sangre

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

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Shogun Assassin

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

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Terror Train

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

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The Exterminator

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

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The Girl Who Knew Too Much

The one usually called the first giallo. Still half a krimi.

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The Wild Angels

Corman starts the cycle. Peter Fonda, real Hells Angels, and a funeral.

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Wake in Fright

A masterpiece and an ordeal. The kangaroo hunt is real footage and it is unbearable.

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Walking Tall

One sheriff, one hickory club, and the blueprint for every Southern vigilante picture after it.

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Basket Case

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

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Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Meyer and Roger Ebert, at a major studio, on drugs. Somehow released.

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Don't Torture a Duckling

Fulci's best film and his angriest. A giallo about mob justice in a village.

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Foxy Brown

Coffy again, louder and worse written. Grier is still magnetic.

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Mountain of the Cannibal God

The cannibal cycle in a dinner jacket, ex-Bond girl and real animal deaths included.

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Nekromantik

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

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Rabid

Cronenberg gives Marilyn Chambers a blood-feeding stinger. Montreal falls apart around her.

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Sleepaway Camp

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

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Tetsuo: The Iron Man

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

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The Crazies

A military bioweapon drives a town homicidally insane. Romero on institutional failure, again.

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The Great Silence

Corbucci in the snow. The ending would never have cleared an American studio.

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The Prowler

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

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What Have You Done to Solange?

Unusually sad for a giallo, and much better for it.

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A Bullet for the General

The most openly political of the Zapata cycle, and the sharpest.

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Black Sabbath

Three stories, one Karloff. The Wurdulak segment is the best thing Bava shot.

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Bride of Re-Animator

Herbert West builds a woman from parts. The sequel goes bigger, wetter and more demented.