Exploitation films

The Twilight People

The cheapest Island of Doctor Moreau ever committed to film, and one of the most watchable.

The Boxer's Omen

The most deranged thing Shaw Brothers ever paid for, and it never slows down to explain itself.

Brain Damage

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

Tokyo Gore Police

The Japanese splatter movement at full arterial pressure, from the man who built it.

Cemetery Man

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

Frankenhooker

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

Society

A teen suspects his rich family are not human. The finale proves it, wetly.

Basket Case

$35,000, shot on 42nd Street, and completely charming. The best kind of cheap.

Rabid

Cronenberg gives Marilyn Chambers a blood-feeding stinger. Montreal falls apart around her.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Sixty-seven minutes of industrial nightmare. Nothing else looks like it.

From Beyond

Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs do Lovecraft again. A machine that lets you see what should stay unseen.

Shivers

Cronenberg's debut. A phallic parasite turns a luxury apartment tower into an orgy of the infected.

The Brood

Cronenberg turns a divorce into monsters. Rage made flesh, and it is about his own custody battle.

Scanners

The exploding head made Cronenberg bankable. The film around it is smarter than that scene.

Videodrome

Long live the new flesh. Cronenberg's prophecy about media, the body, and a chest that opens.