The films

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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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Class of 1984

Death Wish enrols at high school and the faculty loses.

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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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Happy Birthday to Me

A prestige director slumming in the glut, and a poster more famous than the film.

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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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Suicide Club

Opens with fifty-four schoolgirls and an oncoming train. Then it gets stranger.

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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.

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Destroy All Monsters

Eleven monsters, no restraint. Honda cashing every chip at once.

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From Beyond

Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs do Lovecraft again. A machine that lets you see what should stay unseen.

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Godzilla vs. Hedorah

The psychedelic pollution one. Godzilla fights a smog monster, and the film goes completely strange.

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Inside

The French extremity wave stripped to one room, one night, and a pair of scissors.

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It's Alive

A mutant newborn kills the delivery room and goes on the run. Larry Cohen means the metaphor.

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My Bloody Valentine

Canadian, mine-set, unusually well shot. The censored cut ruined it for decades.

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Opera

Needles taped under the eyes so she cannot look away. Argento's last truly great film.

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The Burning

The raft scene is the best kill in any slasher. The rest is fine.

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The Trip

Corman stages an LSD experience with every optical trick he had. Written by Jack Nicholson.

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The Vampire Lovers

Hammer clocks that the censors have loosened and sends Ingrid Pitt to make the most of it.

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Vampyros Lesbos

Franco's most watchable. The soundtrack outlived the film by decades.