The films

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Camille 2000

Dumas restaged in a mod furniture showroom. The best-looking softcore of its year by a mile.

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Cannibal Apocalypse

Vietnam veterans as cannibals. Sillier and kinder than the jungle cycle.

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Color Me Blood Red

Lewis finishing his gore trilogy. A painter, and his pigment source.

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Death Walks on High Heels

Ercoli's best. Structurally cleverer than most of the cycle.

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Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion

Sold as a women-in-prison quickie. Shot like an art film. Meiko Kaji barely blinks.

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High Crime

Castellari's breakout in the genre, and Franco Nero furious for ninety minutes.

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Hunchback of the Morgue

Naschy's grisliest, and the one where the rats were not an effect.

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If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

The gadget-gunslinger spaghetti west arrives fully dressed in black.

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Images in a Convent

D'Amato's convent, where the theology is a coat-hook for the softcore.

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Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die

Mid-tier Eurospy with an unusually good title and Mike Connors.

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Man from Deep River

The one that started it, by remaking A Man Called Horse in Thailand.

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Marihuana

Esper again. One reefer leads directly to nude swimming and death.

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Nightmare Castle

Barbara Steele twice over, one of them back from the grave, scored by a young Morricone.

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Nightmare City

Zombies that run and use guns, decades early. Incompetent in enjoyable ways.

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Return of the Evil Dead

Blind Dead again, this time besieging a whole village. The best of the four.

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Schoolgirl Report

West Germany's pseudo-documentary sex series. Thirteen entries, vast profits, zero shame.

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Şeytan

The Exorcist, shot-for-shot, in Istanbul, with the same score. Astonishing nerve.

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Street Law

Castellari's Death Wish. An ordinary engineer, brutalised and ignored, arms himself.

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The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter

Lau Kar-leung's brutal last great Shaw film. A massacred family, and pole fighting as grief.

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The Big Racket

Castellari's best. The car-rolling-down-the-hill shot is famous for a reason.

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The Creature with the Blue Hand

Kinski playing both twins and a killer's claw that snaps shut like a bear trap. The krimi going out swinging.

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The Fellowship of the Frog

The first Rialto Wallace krimi, and the reason the other thirty exist.

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The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

A widower lures redheads to his castle to get over his dead wife. Nonsense plot, glorious mood.

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The Street Fighter

Sonny Chiba tearing people apart. First film rated X in America for violence alone.

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The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman

Naschy's Waldemar Daninsky at his most enjoyable.

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Vampyres

Two women lure travellers to a country house and drain them. British, bloody, erotic.

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Zombie Holocaust

Cannibals and zombies at once, reusing the Zombi 2 sets and cast.

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A Virgin Among the Living Dead

Franco at his dreamiest. Distributors added zombies later without telling him.

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Baron Blood

A resurrected torturer stalks his own castle. Bava on more commercial autopilot, still gorgeous.

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Black Belt Jones

Jim Kelly karate-chops the mob to save a Watts dojo. Blaxploitation meets kung fu, joyfully.

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Black Mama White Mama

The Defiant Ones with Pam Grier, shot in the Philippines by a Filipino who actually knew the terrain.

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Cotton Comes to Harlem

Two Harlem detectives chase a stolen fortune hidden in a bale of cotton. The one that opened the door.

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Five Deadly Venoms

Chang Cheh's oddest. Five styles, five masks, one whodunit.

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God Told Me To

A detective investigates random killers who all say God ordered it. It goes somewhere insane.

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Goyokin

A samurai returns to stop the massacre he could not prevent the first time. Shot in real snow.

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High School Confidential

An undercover cop infiltrates a high school drug ring. Reefer, hot rods and Jerry Lee Lewis.