Exploitation films

Almost Human

Tomas Milian as a repellent psychopath. Deeply unpleasant, very good.

Barbarian Queen

Corman's Argentine Conan-with-women, honest bottom-shelf swords and loincloths.

Blue Sunshine

A batch of ten-year-old LSD makes people go bald and homicidal. A great, paranoid premise.

Brain Damage

A parasite gives a young man euphoric highs in exchange for feeding it brains. Addiction as horror.

Burial Ground

Incoherent even by the standards of the cycle. The Peter subplot is unforgivable.

Camille 2000

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

Cannibal Apocalypse

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

Color Me Blood Red

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

Death Walks on High Heels

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

Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion

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

Heroes of the East

Chinese kung fu versus Japanese martial arts, as a marriage. Lau Kar-leung's most good-natured film.

High Crime

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

Hunchback of the Morgue

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

If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

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

Images in a Convent

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

Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die

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

Man from Deep River

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

Marihuana

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

Nightmare Castle

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

Nightmare City

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

Return of the Evil Dead

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

Schoolgirl Report

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

Şeytan

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

Street Law

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

The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter

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

The Big Racket

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

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.

The Fellowship of the Frog

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

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.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door

The most political film the blaxploitation boom made, pulled from cinemas and buried for thirty years.

The Street Fighter

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

The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman

Naschy's Waldemar Daninsky at his most enjoyable.

Vampyres

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

Zombie Holocaust

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

Ator the Fighting Eagle

Joe D'Amato's Conan, giant puppet spider and all. Miles O'Keeffe swings the sword.

A Virgin Among the Living Dead

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