Exploitation films

Death Race 2000

Corman satire with actual teeth. Stallone before anyone knew.

Drunken Master

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

Harakiri

A ronin asks to commit suicide in a lord's courtyard. What follows dismantles the whole code.

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.

The Wild One

Brando's motorcycle gang takes over a town. The film that invented teenage cool and terrified parents.

Videodrome

Long live the new flesh. Cronenberg's prophecy about media, the body, and a chest that opens.

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.

Django

A coffin, a machine gun, and mud everywhere. Banned in Britain until 1993.

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.

Freaks

Killed Browning's career, banned in Britain for thirty years. Still unclassifiable.

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.

Irreversible

Noe runs the night backwards so the horror lands before the love does, and half the cinema left before either.

The Warriors

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

Cannibal Holocaust

A serious film about media atrocity that committed real atrocity.

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.

Mad Max 2

The template the whole Italian post-nuke cycle copied for a decade.

The Big Boss

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

The Evil Dead II

Remake and sequel at once. Raimi discovers slapstick and never looks back.

The Omen

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

Battle Royale

A class of ninth-graders handed weapons and told to kill each other. Fukasaku at seventy, swinging hard.

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.

Enter the Dragon

Lee died six days before release. The mirror room still works.

Friday the 13th

Cynical, derivative, and it industrialised the whole form. Savini's finest hour.

Godzilla

Not a monster romp. A sober film about nuclear annihilation, made nine years after.

Dirty Harry

The vigilante with a badge. Pauline Kael called it fascist and was not wrong.