The films

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Road Games

Rear Window in a truck, with Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis.

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Street Trash

People melt in primary colours. Tasteless, inventive, weirdly beautiful.

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Super Fly

Curtis Mayfield's score critiques the film it's in. Remarkable object.

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Sword of Doom

A swordsman with no morals and no motive cuts his way through the film. It stops rather than ends.

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Tales from the Crypt

The best Amicus omnibus, and Joan Collins versus a killer Santa two years before Black Christmas.

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The Big Gundown

Sollima's best. A manhunt that keeps turning into a political argument.

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The Cars That Ate Paris

Peter Weir's debut. A town that farms car crashes. Very strange.

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The New Barbarians

Castellari's Mad Max, with perspex cars and George Eastman. Sold in the US as Warriors of the Wasteland.

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The One-Armed Swordsman

The film that made Shaw Brothers switch to male leads and stay there.

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The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

The Martino/Fenech formula, arriving fully formed. Cut and retitled Blade of the Ripper in the US.

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The Sword and the Sorcerer

A three-bladed sword that fires two of the blades. Sold on that alone.

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Tokyo Drifter

Suzuki given a budget cut and responding with pop-art abstraction.

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Tombs of the Blind Dead

Eyeless Templars on skeletal horses in slow motion. Best monster design of the 70s.

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White Lightning

Burt Reynolds, moonshine, and the blueprint for a decade of Southern comedy.

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Who Can Kill a Child?

Spanish, sun-bleached, upsetting. The opening newsreel is a hard sell.

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Yor, the Hunter from the Future

Starts as caveman fantasy, becomes science fiction with no warning.

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2019: After the Fall of New York

The last fertile woman on Earth, in a quarry outside Rome.

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All the Colors of the Dark

Satanic paranoia in Swinging London. Edwige Fenech is excellent.

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Blood Feast

The first gore film. Barely competent, historically unavoidable.

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Branded to Kill

Got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu for making films nobody understood. Correct.

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Caged Heat

Jonathan Demme's debut, and it is visibly a Jonathan Demme film.

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Cemetery Man

A cemetery caretaker shoots the returning dead and falls in love repeatedly. Beautiful and deranged.

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Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Spanish-Italian, shot in England, and much smarter than its stablemates.

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Phase IV

Saul Bass's only feature. Ants, geometry, and an ending nobody saw for 40 years.

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Planet of the Vampires

Bava builds an alien planet out of fog and two rocks, and Alien quietly borrowed the skeleton.

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StageFright

A killer in a giant owl mask, a locked theatre, and Soavi announcing himself.

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The Awful Dr. Orlof

Where the entire Franco machine started. Everything he made for forty years is in here somewhere.

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The Blood on Satan's Claw

A plough turns up a skull and a village falls apart. Coined the term.

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The Case of the Bloody Iris

The Fenech giallo distilled to its purest form: models, murders, and no reason to solve any of it.

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The House with Laughing Windows

A rural giallo with no gloss and a deep, patient dread. Often voted the best one going.

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The Psychic

Fulci does a clockwork giallo. A woman's vision of a murder turns out to be her own future.

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Who Saw Her Die?

A child is murdered in Venice. A grieving father hunts the killer through the fog.

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Wild in the Streets

A rock star is elected president and puts everyone over 35 in LSD re-education camps.

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Anthropophagus

Almost entirely people walking around an island. Then two minutes of infamy.

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Companeros

Zapata western with Franco Nero and a very good Morricone theme.

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Danger: Diabolik

Bava doing pop art on pocket change. Genuinely one of the best-designed films ever.