Exploitation films

Baron Blood

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

Black Belt Jones

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

Black Mama White Mama

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

Calvaire

Deliverance relocated to the Belgian mud, and just as unwilling to let anyone leave.

Cemetery Without Crosses

The French corner of the spaghetti cycle: gaunt, ritualistic, and dedicated to Leone.

Cotton Comes to Harlem

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

Five Deadly Venoms

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

God Told Me To

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

Goyokin

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

Hell Up in Harlem

Larry Cohen's weekend sequel to Black Caesar, rougher and more berserk than the original.

High School Confidential

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

Lisa and the Devil

Bava's most personal film, and his strangest. Telly Savalas as the devil, holding a lollipop.

Maciste in Hell

A muscleman drops into a full gothic hell. Peplum crossbred with a haunted-castle picture, and it looks it.

Race with the Devil

Satanists chase a Winnebago across Texas. Better than that sounds.

Shock Waves

Underwater Nazi zombies rise off a tropical island. Peter Cushing, John Carradine, and real dread.

Successive Slidings of Pleasure

A nouveau-roman novelist makes a nunsploitation film and refuses to let it mean anything.

Succubus

Franco's arthouse credentials, such as they are. Fritz Lang liked it.

The Boss

Di Leo's most cynical crime film. A mob enforcer navigates a Mafia war where everyone is corrupt.

The Grand Duel

Lee Van Cleef, one three-way showdown, and the Bacalov theme you know from Kill Bill.

The Immoral Mr. Teas

Historically pivotal, formally inert. Watch ten minutes and read about the rest.

The Indian Scarf

Ten heirs in a Scottish castle, strangled one at a time. Kinski included.

The Italian Connection

Mario Adorf on foot versus a car. Best chase in Italian cinema.

The Shiver of the Vampires

Rollin with a fuzz-guitar band and a vampire who lives in the clock. His most fun.

The Toolbox Murders

A proto-slasher that front-loads its nastiness, then becomes a different and stranger film.

Tromeo and Juliet

Body piercings, a penis monster, and Lemmy on narration. Troma's actual masterpiece.

Veerana

The Ramsay brothers' witch movie, with musical numbers between the murders.

Vigilante

Lustig doing it straight. Robert Forster deserves better and knows it.

White Line Fever

Trucker versus the cartel. Earnest, blue-collar, better than expected.

Women's Prison Massacre

Late Italian entry. Laura Gemser, and a body count instead of a plot.

99 Women

Franco doing the formula early, with Mercedes McCambridge as the warden.

Alucarda

The most hysterical nunsploitation film ever made. A convent, two possessed girls, and constant screaming.

Black Caesar

Larry Cohen shooting Harlem guerrilla-style. James Brown scores it.

Cleopatra Jones

Tamara Dobson, six feet two, government agent. Shelley Winters overacts gloriously.

Contamination

Alien via Rome, with exploding chests and a Goblin score doing heavy lifting.

Der Todesking

Buttgereit's bleakest: seven suicides, one rotting corpse holding it together.

Flavia the Heretic

Far angrier and more political than the packaging suggests.