The films

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Supervixens

Meyer's biggest hit of the decade, and his cartoon violence at its most cartoonish.

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The Black Belly of the Tarantula

The killer paralyses you first so you feel it. A first-rank giallo nobody name-checks.

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The Man from Hong Kong

Jimmy Wang Yu wrecks Sydney, with hang-gliding and a man actually on fire. Peak crossover.

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The Red Queen Kills Seven Times

A family curse, a killer in a red cloak, and a legend that kills every hundred years.

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The Untold Story

Anthony Wong won Best Actor for this. Then you find out what goes in the pork buns.

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Tourist Trap

Mannequins that move, telekinesis, and a masked killer. Far stranger than a slasher should be.

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Trouble Every Day

Cannibal desire filmed like an art installation, and it will not hurry for you.

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Vixen!

The one that made the money and triggered the obscenity fight.

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Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

Best title in the genre. Poe adaptation with Edwige Fenech and a black cat.

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Zatoichi: The Tale of Zatoichi

The blind masseur who is also the deadliest swordsman alive. The first of twenty-five-plus.

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Daughters of Darkness

Delphine Seyrig as Bathory in an empty Ostend hotel. Genuinely elegant.

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Deathstalker

Corman in Argentina. The genuine article, for better and worse.

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Dirty Mary Crazy Larry

Ninety minutes of driving and one of cinema's great abrupt endings.

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Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot!

Nothing to do with Django, and one of the strangest and cruelest westerns Italy ever shot.

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Escape from the Bronx

More of the same, with flamethrowers and property developers as villains.

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Hell Night

Linda Blair, a frat hazing, an old dark house. Atmosphere over arterial spray, and better for it.

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Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks

Same Ilsa, new empire. The harem keeps the whip, loses the swastika.

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Jungle Holocaust

Deodato's first pass. Slower, meaner, less interesting than what followed.

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OSS 117: Mission for a Killer

The eurospy archetype, from a French agent who beat James Bond into print by four years.

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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.