The films

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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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Frankenhooker

A man rebuilds his dead girlfriend from the parts of exploded sex workers. Exactly that stupid, and great.

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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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The Slumber Party Massacre

Written as satire, shot straight, and stranger than either choice on its own.

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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.

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Dead & Buried

Stan Winston effects and a good twist. Underseen.

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Eaten Alive!

Lenzi recycling other films' footage into a Jonestown story. Grim work.

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Gamera, the Giant Monster

Daiei's cut-price answer to Godzilla. A flying turtle. Children loved it.

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Gone in 60 Seconds

93 cars destroyed for real. The director broke his own ankles. Worth it.

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Hells Angels on Wheels

The biker cycle's Jack Nicholson entry, shot by Laszlo Kovacs and a cut above the AIP norm.

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I Vampiri

Freda walked off Italy's first sound horror; Bava finished it. The whole euro-gothic shelf starts here.

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Lady Snowblood

Where Kill Bill got most of its ideas, including the snow.

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Samurai Rebellion

Kobayashi and Mifune against feudal authority again. It builds slowly and then it does not stop.

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The Funhouse

Tobe Hooper does a carnival slasher. A deformed killer, a hall of mirrors, and real dread.

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The House That Dripped Blood

Four Robert Bloch stories, Cushing and Lee on hand, and barely a drop of the title's blood.

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The Whip and the Body

Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.

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Thriller: A Cruel Picture

The eyepatch Tarantino copied. Contains real hardcore inserts and a real animal death.

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To the Devil a Daughter

Hammer's last gasp. Christopher Lee said it finished the studio off.

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1990: The Bronx Warriors

Fred Williamson in a cape. Castellari doing Warriors on a Roman budget.

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Day of Anger

A gunfighter mentors a despised young man, then has to face what he created. Van Cleef at his best.