Author: Duane Bradley; Ian Watson
Date: 2014-05-13 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: exploitation; bmovies; cult films; grindhouse; sexploitation
Description: A collection of bizarre & erotic stories, including 'Semen Demon', 'Greg's Pecker Must Be Destroyed' and 'Sex, Booze & Power Tools.'
Publisher: Smashwords Edition

Watching Porn With Leatherface

By

Duane Bradley

Copyright 2018 Duane Bradley

Published At Smashwords

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License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this eBook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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By The Same Author

SCHLOCK TREATMENT

MIDNIGHT SPOOKSHOW

SCHLOCK THEATER

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Abby (1974)

If you’re going to rip off The Exorcist, this is the way you do it: by turning it into a Blaxploitation movie where the climactic exorcism takes place in a discotheque.

From the dialogue (“Whatever possessed you to do a thing like that?”), through the heroine’s hilariously unconvincing transformation into a potty-mouthed demon in pancake make-up, to a scene where she violently checks herself out of hospital (“I’m going home, bitch!”), there’s enough here to make you wonder if the filmmakers were sending themselves up.

Best of all is the sequence where the possessed Abby, who’s also a marriage guidance counsellor, informs a couple that their problems stem not from an inability to share their feelings but from their boring sex life. She tells the wife: “I’m gonna take your husband upstairs and fuck the shit out of him!”

Ab-Normal Beauty (2004)

You’ve probably never heard of this Hong Kong horror movie from Danny and Oxide Pang, which is too bad because this is a much creepier film than The Eye, the duo’s earlier effort.

Unlikely ever to be remade starring Jessica Alba, Ab-normal Beauty tells the story of Jiney (Race Wong), a death-obsessed photographer who photographs car crash victims. As a friend attempts to curtail her obsession, Jiney’s behaviour catches the attention of a disturbed admirer who sends her a videotape that shows a young woman being killed. Certain it’s a practical joke, Jiney investigates…. and to reveal any more would be unthinkable.

If you’re familiar with the Pangs at all, you probably know them for their English language misfires The Messengers (with Kristen Stewart) and Bangkok Dangerous (with Nicolas Cage). Ab-normal Beauty has more style and atmosphere than either, and will remain with you long after the end credits.

The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971)

If you had to explain to the uninitiated exactly what it is that makes Vincent Price such an icon, hopefully you’d direct them to his portrayal of Dr Anton Phibes, a demented Biblical scholar (and organist) who following injuries sustained during a car crash wears a rubber face mask and drinks through a hole in the side of his neck.

It’s unlikely that anyone other than Price could’ve pulled the character off – capable of speaking only through an electronic voice box he created, Phibes’s voice is seldom heard, meaning Price has to bring him to life via body language. In even his more sympathetic roles, the actor appears menacing, but here he really pulls out the stops to create a flamboyant supervillain.

He’s also conducting a vendetta against the surgeons that failed to save his wife Victoria (Caroline Munro) on the operating table. Not just any old vendetta, mind you – this one involves recreating the 10 plagues of Egypt from the Old Testament. So one character is attacked by rats, another is eaten by locusts and, representing a plague of hail, one surgeon encounters a machine that spews ice.

Absurd (1981)

Directed by the legendary Joe D’Amato, who’s better known for cheap sexploitation pictures like Erotic Nights Of The Living Dead, Absurd is an Italian imitation of John Carpenter’s Halloween and it’s one of D’Amato’s best films. From its prowling camera to its synth score, Absurd imitates Halloween at every turn, and ripping off a better filmmaker has inspired D’Amato to make a more entertaining film than usual, with snappier pacing and more energy.

George Eastman plays a mute, unstoppable killer who stalks babysitters and nurses, and the movie has a wonderfully hokey explanation for why you can’t kill the Bogeyman. A “biochemical experiment” (performed on a Greek island, no less) transformed Eastman into a superhuman killing machine whose body regenerates after being shot, stabbed, set on fire etc. The only way to stop him: destroy the “cerebral mass.”

Instead of repeating his usual trick of cramming all of the gore scenes into the last reel, D’Amato throws one in every ten minutes or so, with a nurse, an orderly and a motorcyclist (played by future director Michele Soavi) all being dispatched in the first act. He still cranks it up for the climax, delivering a shameless facsimile of Halloween II as Eastman, blinded by the heroine, hunts her by sound in a confined space.

Alien 2: On Earth (1980)

After releasing an unofficial sequel to Dawn Of The Dead (Zombi 2, aka Zombie Flesh Eaters), the Italians quickly ground out another “seemquel” that was filmed in Italy and the US, featured a B-movie cast and invoked the ire of the producers of the original film.

Due to budgetary restraints, the majority of Alien 2’s action is confined to a series of caves, where creatures brought to earth by a failed space mission attack a group of explorers. As was common among movies of this type, the film may be titled after a recent hit but it’s far from a scene for scene copy.

Imagine The Descent directed by a pseudonymous Italian, full of stock footage and rubbery effects, with idiot characters running around in the dark and you’ll have a fair idea of what the movie has in store. As cheap Italian rip-offs go, Alien 2 is considerably less entertaining than Contamination, though it does manage to throw in some gratuitous nudity once the characters get underground. Kudos.

A*P*E* (1976)

Released in Christmas of 1976, the Dino de Laurentiis-produced King Kong was a $24 million folly for which a forty foot high, six and a half ton monster robot was specially constructed, even though the filmmakers decided not to use it. In theatres within a week was Ape, a no-budget Korea-lensed 3D knock-off whose star appeared to be an extra in a monkey mask and wool sweater.

Leaving out the expedition to Skull Island, the dinosaurs, plus Kong’s introduction and subsequent capture, Ape begins three-quarters of the way through the traditional narrative with the hirsute antagonist wading ashore to stomp model buildings and throw around vehicles that look suspiciously like Tonka toys.

In a sequence strangely absent from its bigger-budgeted brethren, our antagonist, smitten by a hanglider, skips along merrily behind it, arms aloft, head moving from side to side. “Let’s see him dance for his organ grinder now,” growls an unimpressed General, before sending in some wire-supported helicopter gunships. He’s left open-mouthed, however (as is the audience), when Ape/ Kong swats them aside before giving him the finger.

Aquanoids (2003)

The best babes-versus-sea-monsters movie The Asylum never made, Aquanoids rips off everything from Jaws to Humanoids From The Deep, mounts it all on a budget of $1.98 and refuses to take itself seriously, ensuring a gloriously tacky time is had by all.

In amongst the gratuitous nudity, silly monsters and amateurish performances is the story of a big-breasted “environmentalist” who tries to convince the Mayor that the fish monsters that attacked the town 16 years ago have returned, which nobody wants to hear because it’s July 4th weekend. Mr Mayor is also planning a multi-million dollar shopping mall with some shady developers, so when chewed-up bodies wash ashore, he convinces the pathologist to write it up as a “boating accident.”

In a movie with no shortage of Jaws references, the best has to be the Quint-like monster hunter, who tells one Aquanoid, “I’m gonna mount you on the board, I’m gonna hang you in the living room and I’m gonna count every one of them 10, 000 bucks.” Then he puts his head in the water, and you can guess the rest.

The Asphyx (1972)

Robert Powell plays a Victorian scientist who becomes obsessed with The Asphyx, the “spirit of the dead” described in Greek mythology. Together with his boss, played by Robert ‘father of Toby’ Stephens, he attempts to imprison an Asphyx of his own, which will allow him to achieve immortality.

Thoroughly original, atmospheric and well-constructed (if a little slow at times), The Asphyx is a movie from a different era – it’s not jumbled and jump cut, the actors aren’t too contemporary to be believable in their roles and the practical effects are genuinely eerie. Needless to say, there are no current plans for a reboot.

Playing at times like a straight-faced version of William Castle’s The Tingler (minus the ‘Percepto’ gimmick), the film died on its original release but later found its audience on TV and home video. Viewers who can take a genteel Victorian ghost story laced with steampunk should watch it immediately.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)

Played by writer/director Jose Mojica Marins, Coffin Joe is Brazil’s first horror icon. A bearded, black-garbed gravedigger who wears a top hat and cape, Joe has one wish: to maintain the “continuity of the blood.” Because his wife cannot bear him a child, he kills her and sets about finding a suitable woman to grant him an heir, leaving the usual trail of corpses in his wake.

For an early 60s effort shot in monochrome, Midnight is surprisingly explicit: a card player has a finger severed by a broken bottle, a man is whipped during a bar brawl and the local doctor has his eyes gouged out before Joe pours acid over him. Marins makes underground pictures on threadbare budgets – part exploitation, part art-house – but the violence in his films is more shocking than anything that played American Drive-ins around the same time.

A direct sequel, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, followed in 1967, but despite appearances in The Strange World Of Coffin Joe (1968), The Awakening Of The Beast (1969) and Hallucinations Of A Deranged Mind (1978), the final part of the “Coffin Joe Trilogy” didn’t appear until 2008. Embodiment Of Evil ups the violence and nudity, perhaps attempting to hide the fact that although Marins was still attempting to find the perfect woman, he was 72 at the time of filming.

Attack Of The 50ft Woman (1958)

When a “strange glowing object” appears and a giant papier-mache hand pops out, heiress Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes), screams and runs back home to her husband. This turns out to be a bad idea, because two-timing Harry (William Hudson) has been planning to have her committed and steal her fortune, and all this talk about giant papier-mache hands does is put a gleam in his eye.

Nancy’s situation becomes even more dire when radiation from the object causes “Astonishing growth”, so Hayes soon smashes through the roof and rampages across town, laying waste to a number of miniatures while shouting, “Harry! I want my husband Harry!” Transparent in long shots, solid in close-ups and a giant rubber hand at all other times, this scantily clad she-hulk outwits the comic relief deputy (“A thirty foot giant? Oh no!”), locates Harry and squashes him and his mistress to a pulp.

So dismayed was director Nathan Juran (Twenty Million Miles To Earth) by the special effects that he took the billing “Nathan Hertz”, but while they may lack conviction, the central performances, especially the normally underused Hayes in her signature role, do not. Seek it out and enjoy it for what it is, and you’ll have a great time.

Attack Girls Swim Team Vs The Undead (2007)

All a movie with that title asks is that you get on its wavelength, enjoy it for what it is and admire the cast in their swimsuits. Director Koji Kowano knows this, so his camera lingers on every curve, erect nipple and pert behind as his actors swim, sunbathe, shower and fight off a zombie horde.

At an all-girl school in Japan, a virus turns students and teachers into flesh-eating monsters with an unnatural fear of chlorinated water, meaning that only the swim team is unaffected. Fortunately, two swimsuit-clad lesbians are around to save the day, and when they’re not battling chainsaw-wielding zombies, they’re exploring each other in the shower.

With its porno production values, cheap effects and emphasis on female nudity, Attack Girls has even less ambition than Zombie Strippers, but it’s better-paced and, in true Japanese style, so disarmingly gonzo it’s difficult not to be entertained.

Audition (1999)

When a lonely widower attempts to begin dating, he uses a filmmaker friend to “audition” prospective girlfriends and eventually settles for Asami (Eihi Shiina), unaware she has a past that’s best described as “complicated.” If you think this is going to be a psychodrama of the Fatal Attraction variety, however, guess again – Glenn Close never put needles in Michael Douglas’s eyes or displayed a penchant for amputation.

It’s a simple story, but in the hands of director Takashi Miike (Ichi The Killer) the material becomes more than just another psychodrama, full of stark images, unexpected surprises and incredibly dark story turns. This is not a movie that Hollywood that will be remaking with Reese Witherspoon in the lead.

When first shown in Japan, Audition caused walkouts, with one outraged female viewer telling the director – to his face – that he was a very sick person. Don’t be fooled by the deliberate pacing because this is a picture that, like all the best horror movies, creeps up on you. If you only watch one of Miike 90+ films, make it this one.

The Babysitter (1969)

One of those rare pictures that delivers more than the trailer promises, The Babysitter is a blast of vintage sleaze whose attempts to shock and exploit take precedence over logic and motivation, resulting in an abundance of unbelievable caricatures behaving in dumb (and uproarious) ways.

Our heroine is Candy (nudge), one of those free-thinking young women who just wants to smoke pot, dance naked and tell some groovy guy, “Man, I dig you, you turn me on.” She’s also cranking the handle of an aging prosecutor who’s seeking refuge from the pent-up, Bridge-playing sobersides that blames him for everything wrong with their marriage.

What Candy doesn’t realize is that her squeeze already has a grown daughter, who some thugs are threatening to out as a lesbian (this is 1969, you see). You know you’re watching a classy movie when the filmmakers take a “show, don’t tell” approach to the girl’s sexuality, lingering on the poolside smooching and ear-nibbling before the actresses hit the sauna for some serious ‘method acting.’

Bad Biology (2008)

Born with 7 clitorises, Jennifer (Charlee Danielson) needs orgasms the way a junkie needs a fix, and after each one night stand she gives birth to “an unfinished mutant baby” that ends up in a dumpster. She meets her match in Batz (Anthony Sneed), who began injecting steroids into his heart’s delight as a teenager and now has an XXL member that can tap out Morse code when it needs feeding.

After witnessing a hooker experience an “everlasting orgasm” courtesy of Batz’s gift, Jennifer decides she’s found Mr Right and tries to become his latest conquest, which is when his pride and joy detaches from his body and slithers away in pursuit of underwear models.

Financed and co-written by underground rapper R.A. “The Rugged Man” Thorburn and directed by the legendary Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker), Bad Biology was shot at the tail end of Dubya’s presidency, and its remit appears to have been to offend as many Republicans as possible. A film where showering starlets are attacked by a penis monster, Bad Biology is the kind of movie that the characters from Basket Case would’ve paid to see.

Bad Milo (2013)

When office worker Duncan (Ken Marino) develops stomach pains, he doesn’t expect them to be caused by a demon living in his intestines, who periodically absconds to murder those causing Duncan stress at work. The only person who can help is Highsmith (Peter Stormare), a loony New Age therapist whose solution to every problem seems to lie in shouting and destroying furniture.

Lying somewhere between the films of Frank Henenlotter and Adam Green, Bad Milo isn’t exactly done in the best possible taste, but the film eschews cheap jokes and non-stop flatulence gags in order to tell a credible story – well, as credible as a movie about a butt demon named Milo can get, anyway.

There’s blood, pathos and never a dull moment as Duncan comes to realize that Milo is still connected to him – whatever anyone does to Milo, Duncan also feels. As you can imagine, this makes curtailing the little critter’s rampages a tad difficult.

Battle Beyond The Stars (1980)

Released shortly after The Empire Strikes Back, Battle Beyond The Stars is a Roger Corman knock-off that also takes inspiration from Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai as well as its Americanized remake, The Magnificent Seven.

Once again, a poor farmer assembles a group of mercenaries to defend his people (known as the Akira, obviously) from aggressors, this time a tyrant named Sador (John Saxon).

The cast is interesting: Robert Vaughn reprises his lost-his-nerve gunslinger from TM7, George Peppard (who was in Damnation Alley, 20th Century Fox’s ‘other’ sci-fi film from 1977) plays a character named Cowboy and Earl Boen (Dr Silverman in The Terminator) is one of the aliens. Among the crew are James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd and James Horner, who later worked on Aliens.

A Bay Of Blood (1971)

Also known as Bloodbath, Carnage and, confusingly, Last House On The Left II, Mario Bava’s classic was reviled on its release, with even Christopher Lee voicing his concern at the picture’s content. Under its American title, Twitch Of The Death Nerve, the film found its audience in Drive-ins and grindhouses, where it played for years.

It’s the archetypal slasher film where people are stalked and murdered in a remote mansion by a barely-seen killer, but later films such as Friday The 13th would do away with Bava’s convoluted plot and instead concentrate on the grisly murders, which Bay Of Blood has in abundance.

In all, 13 characters meet their end in the film, making it Bava’s most violent picture. Of particular interest to fans of Friday The 13th Part II will be the machete to the face and the young lovers who are impaled mid-coitus, both of which it reuses.

The Beast In Heat (1977)

Intended strictly as a cash-in on Ilsa: She Wolf Of The S.S., The Beast In Heat amounts to forty minutes of softcore sex scenes padded out with footage from director Luigi Batzella’s earlier When The Bell Tolls (1970).

The stock footage adds everything you’d expect from a WWII movie, including battle scenes, air raids and that guaranteed crowd pleaser, Nazi soldiers shooting old ladies. However, the new scenes add a subplot about a sexy Nazi villainess who rewards her latest “experiment” (a sex-crazed mutant she keeps in a cage) with naked virgins. Not sure about the scientific value, but it certainly makes for interesting viewing.

This Fraulein also conducts human experiments, though these seem to consist of attaching electrodes to the genitals of naked females while the watching guards lick their lips. Too over the top to be shocking, the violence has an unintended comic effect when a woman having her fingernails torn out says, “You’re hurting me!”

The Beast Must Die (1974)

It’s a spin on 10 Little Indians that Agatha Christie never thought of – 5 suspects, one of which is a werewolf, are lured to an eccentric millionaire’s electronically bugged estate so that the culprit can be apprehended. “After all the clues have been shown,” announces the film’s narrator, “the viewer gets a chance to name the villain during the ‘werewolf break’.”

Combining elements of horror, whodunit and Blaxploitation, The Beast Must Die is loads of gimmicky fun, the kind of camp oddity that could only have been made during the 1970s. It’s so fast-paced and endearing, in fact, that most viewers will be willing to forget the fact that that the ‘werewolves’ are actually German shepherds.

No matter how bizarre the movie becomes – how many films give the audience 60 seconds to guess the werewolf’s identity? – the cast (which includes Peter Cushing, Charles Gray and Anton Diffring) maintain a straight face throughout, which Cushing a standout as a mannered German doctor. Anyone who doubts the movie’s entertainment value is invited to watch the Kevin Williamson-scripted Cursed instead.

Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon (2006)

Behind The Mask is the movie that Scream 4 should have been: a hip, smart deconstruction of slasher movie conventions that never becomes twee or repetitive.

It’s a simple premise, and a damn cute one: psycho Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel) invites a documentary crew to follow him around as he chooses, stalks and kills his prey in the town of Glen Echo. Being little more than a killer shark, he of course has a “Captain Ahab”, in this case an embittered shrink named Doc Halloran (Robert Englund), whose resemblance to Donald Pleasence’s character in Halloween is purely intentional.

There are bigger-budgeted (and therefore “better”) slasher movies out there, but they don’t have an ounce of Behind The Masks’ wit and invention. Not only was the film released with zero fanfare, but it was quickly buried beneath the remakes of Halloween, Prom Night, April Fools’ Day, Friday The 13th and My Bloody Valentine. Now there’s irony for you.

The Belko Experiment (2017)

Anyone who accuses James Gunn of having “sold out” by hopping on the superhero bandwagon will have their faith restored by The Belko Experiment. Even though Gunn brought in Greg McLean to direct his script, he produced the movie and it’s got his fingerprints all over it, from the tongue-in-cheek soundtrack to the casting of his regulars (Michael Rooker, Greg Henry etc).

This is A Good Thing because even though Gunn didn’t direct, it’s easily in the same league Slither and Super. The plot involves 80 employees being locked in their corporate office building and urged to kill their colleagues by a voice on the company’s intercom, but you can put the likes of Saw 3D and 31 from your mind. The Belko Experiment is less grim and more energetic, and all of the humour is intentional.

Unlike, say, Frank Darabont’s The Mist, this is less a thoughtful study of hysteria and more of a good old-fashioned bloody romp, with exploding heads and faces being bashed in every few moments once it gets rolling. The finale isn’t all that surprising, but the build-up to it makes The Belko Experiment worthwhile.

The Beyond (1981)

After a lengthy career directing comedies, westerns and thrillers in Italy, Lucio Fulci had his biggest commercial success with Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), which typed him as a horror director and led to City Of The Living Dead (1980), House By The Cemetery (1981) and New York Ripper (1982). The British censors weren’t remotely ambivalent about these films: they hated them.

Banned as a Video Nasty in November 1983, The Beyond was available in an edited version from April 1985 and released uncut in 2002, with 1 min 26 sec of chain whippings, eye gougings and spurting blood reinserted. The film finally gained some respect, but Fulci wasn’t around to enjoy it – he died on March 13 1996, following a series of health problems.

Unusually for a cheap exploitation movie, The Beyond’s poster features several images taken straight from the movie. And what images: there’s Sarah Keller’s blind girl, the zombie attack on Catriona MacColl, and David Warbeck blasting part of a zombie girl’s face away. If that doesn’t whet your appetite for gory mayhem, then the trailer promises flesh-ripping spiders, a face dissolved by acid and a man being nailed to a wall – all set to Fabio Frizzi’s memorable score.

Fulci was at the top of his game here, and for a movie shot quickly and cheaply, The Beyond looks like a million bucks. It failed to impress Roger Ebert, who in a half-star review adopted the condescending tone that critics reserve for horror films. He has great fun mocking the dialogue and pointing out that a hospital sign reads “Do Not Entry”, but at no point does he mention Sergio Salvati’s incredible photography or Frizzi’s score, both of which are so important to the film’s success.

Then again, what did you expect from the screenwriter of Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens?

Big Meat Eater (1982)

Canadian science-fiction is a narrow genre at best, but even harder to find are those films featuring music numbers, cannibalism, toy robot aliens, a zombie mayor and a hero that owns a butcher’s shop.

Spoofing everything from Plan 9 From Outer Space to more earnest Canadian productions, Chris Windsor’s sole directorial effort not only pre-dates Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste but makes you wish he could’ve gone on to a similar career.

The “plot” involves a group of wind-up toy aliens who reanimate the dead so that they can steal Balonium, the revolutionary fuel source that has inexplicably formed in a local butcher’s septic tank. The mayhem and weirdness doesn’t end there, however: Windsor also throws in a dance number (“Baghdad Boogie”) set in a boiler room, a Michael Caine-ish geek who’s building a spaceship in his bedroom, and an immigrant family whose daughter keeps getting attacked by monsters.

Inception, this is not.

Big Tits Zombie (2010)

From the director of the immortal classics Killer Pussy and Sumo Vixens comes Big Tits Zombie, but don’t go expecting a stupid one-note travesty along the lines of Strippers Vs Zombies. In Japan, they know how to do this sort of thing with wit and invention.

You’ve got to love a 3D zombie movie that opens with real-life porn star Sola Aoi playing a chainsaw-wielding stripper fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle against the undead, but the best is yet to come. Flashbacks reveal that a fellow stripper found a copy The Book Of The Dead, and you know what that means.

One of the side effects of being transformed into a walking ghoul in this film is being able to spider walk with flames shooting out of your nether regions, something not even Peter Jackson dared put on film in Braindead. There’s also a zombie with a detachable head, a female sumo contest and all the samurai dismemberment you’d expect in a film like this, so what are you waiting for?

Black Christmas (1974)

Inspired by a series of murders in Quebec, Black Christmas mostly takes place in a sorority house where a barely glimpsed killer is polishing off the girls one by one, their sudden absence explained by the end-of-term setting. Made four years before Halloween, Bob Clark’s movie does for the festive season what John Carpenter did for October 31st and imbues an otherwise innocuous season with an air of menace.

In Clark’s movie, crystal ornaments become lethal weapons and even carol singers (whose sudden appearance is intercut with one murder) seem sinister. You’ve never seen a lonelier, more desolate neighbourhood than this street, and the one warm and inviting place – the sorority house itself – is the last place you’d want to spend your Christmas vacation.

All the genre hallmarks are here: there’s the lurking POV camera, the ineffectual cop, the final girl and red herrings galore, plus Clark throws in a surprise final twist. According to Jason Zinoman, Clark was at one point considering a sequel where the film’s killer, now incarcerated in an asylum, escapes on Halloween night and returns to the town to wreak havoc.

Sounds like an interesting premise for a movie….

Black Samurai (1977)

Jim Kelly plays a secret agent sent to rescue an ambassador’s daughter kidnapped by The Warlock, one of those super villains who bring to mind Kelly’s retort from Enter The Dragon: “Man, you come right out of a comic book.”

A voodoo practitioner whose ceremonies involve hookers smearing themselves in blood in front of dancers wearing masks leftover from a Pink Floyd music video, The Warlock favours black capes, camp henchmen and mariachi bands, plus he has his own attack vulture, who’ll gouge out the eyes of anyone that messes with him.

Fortunately, Kelly has a wire-supported jet pack, so he’s able to gain access to the villain’s hideaway, then he goes one on one with cackling dwarf assassins and the usual bare-chested henchmen, during which the soundtrack goes out of synch several times.

Blood Diner (1987)

Years after their Uncle Anwar died in a police shooting when he was revealed to be The Happy Times All-Girl Glee Club Massacre Killer, two brothers resurrect him as a talking brain in a jar. He then tells them to resurrect the Lumerian goddess Sheetar by calling her forth at a “Blood Buffet” where her spirit must be summoned into a body stitched together from the cadavers of murder victims.

A film that delights in its puerility, revels in its cartoonish outrageousness and never goes over the top when it can ascend into the stratosphere, Blood Diner is a pseudo-sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963). According to the Godfather of Gore himself, he was due to helm a straight sequel (which he did years later) but Jackie Kong, the picture’s director, had other plans.

A volatile director, dubbed “Queen Kong” by cast and crew, she often pulled colleagues aside for a “Kongfrontation” (a word seen on a billboard in one sequence), which perhaps explains the level of frantic energy that permeates the film. Blood Diner might be clumsy, mean-spirited and offensive, but you have to admit: it’s never boring.

Blood Feast (1963)

We get a taste of what’s in store in Blood Feast’s trailer, which opens with actor William Kerwin announcing that the following picture “Contains scenes which under no circumstances should be viewed by anyone with a heart condition or anyone who is easily upset.” Thus intrigued, we’re shown a succession of ‘highlights’, including bashed-in heads, ripped-out hearts and torn-off limbs. To make sure we fully understand, an onscreen caption reads: “Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror!”

Viewed today, of course, the picture looks as cheap and sloppy as Plan 9 From Outer Space. ‘Actors’ attempt to express shock by raising their hands to their faces, show their consternation by crossing their arms and try to look pensive by touching their chin. The lead detective, though a “keen student” of Egyptian folklore, can’t connect the wave of mutilation murders and the weird local caterer (who dyes his hair and eyebrows the same ash grey) who’s planning an “Egyptian feast.” And then there’s Connie Mason.

Performing her part as though she were reading the script aloud into the mirror, the Playmate is a fascinatingly vacuous lead, the perfect choice for a film that’s laughably amateurish in every respect. Blood Feast, as director Herschell Gordon Lewis claimed, is like a Walt Whitman poem – it’s no good, but it’s the first of its type.

Blood Freak (1972)

Leave it to Brad Grintner, the director that set Veronica Lake against Adolf Hitler in Flesh Feast (1970), to come up with this Z-grade oddity, surely the greatest film where a stoner turns into a turkey and rampages through a town cutting off limbs with a circular saw.

You see, Herschell (Steve Hawkes) needs cash for his habit, so he agrees to take part in trials at his local turkey ranch, where the animals have been fed an experimental growth hormone. Faster than you can say Thanksgiving, Herschell grows a hilarious papier mache turkey head and develops a close attachment to his power tools.

In the best scene, he attempts to reconcile with his girlfriend. “Gosh, you sure are ugly,” she tells him. “If we got married, what kind of life would we have? What would our children look like?”

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)

Herb Evers, who later became Jason Evers and refused to discuss this film up until his death in 2005, is Dr Bill Cortner, a surgeon so gifted he literally brings a patient back from the dead in the opening scene. He’s also a little loose in his shoes and steals body parts from the operating theatre for the ‘research’ he and his deformed assistant have been conducting at their rural retreat.

We learn the nature of that work when his fiancée Jan (Virginia Leith) is decapitated in an auto wreck and Evers, always the devoted suitor, keeps the head alive (and talking) until it can be grafted onto a new body.

Think about that. If you woke up as a disembodied head, and instead of ending your misery your other half went to a titty bar to find a replacement body, wouldn’t that add some grit to your relationship? So Jan starts to go, you know, a bit daffy. A little, yes, funny in the head. And she starts plotting revenge, but what’s she gonna do? Nag him to death?

Fortunately, one of the doc’s failed experiments is locked up in the closet, so when Evers returns home with a ‘figure model’ on his arm, the creature breaks loose and begins throttling him while Jan shrieks maniacally in her pan.

Bulletproof (1988)

You know the writers of The Simpsons have seen Bulletproof because both feature blond, barrel-chested cops named McBain who disrespect authority and whose exploits cause an inordinate amount of collateral damage. But whereas the animated figure voiced by Harry Shearer loves awful puns, Gary Busey’s character has a single catchphrase: he calls his nemeses “Butthorn”.

This term is first employed in the opening scenes, when Danny Trejo’s gangsters, interrupted during a deal, wonder what that noise coming from the rafters could be. “Your worst nightmare, Butthorn!” Busey says, leaping into action and despatching them one by one. This is an important scene in terms of character because it reveals the origin of Frank ‘ Bulletproof’ McBain’s soubriquet.

Shot by one of Trejo’s goons, Busey pulls out the slug himself and places it in a mason jar with the other 38 bullets his body has taken before returning home to find a woman in his bathtub who tells him: “You might be bulletproof, but you’re not love proof.”

Serpico, this ain’t.

Burial Ground (1980)

Leave to Andrea Bianchi, the director of the Italian classics Exciting Love Girls and Strip Nude For Your Killer, to crank out one of the sleazier imitations of George Romero’s zombie films.

Confining his protagonists, who look 20 years too old to be acting like horny teenagers, to a scenic Italian mansion, Bianchi has one character model lingerie for her man, who tells her: “You look just like a little whore – I like that!” As another couple argue about cash, the boyfriend says: “I’ll give you a rise, but it has nothing to do with money.” You get the idea.

Creepiest of all is young Michael who, in between fighting zombies, decides to declare his “true feelings” for his mother by unbuttoning her blouse. Thankfully, he dies horribly in the next scene, but when he returns from the grave, it’s not to eat his mother’s brains.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

What Mario Bava’s A Bay Of Blood is to the slasher film, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust is to the Found Footage movie. In fact, a good tagline for the movie might’ve been: “In February 1980, four young filmmakers disappeared in the Amazon jungle while shooting a documentary. Two months later, their footage was found.”

So authentic was Ruggero Deodato’s movie that after the Italian premiere, he was arrested and charged with obscenity, a charge he evaded only when he produced his actors in court to prove he hadn’t made a snuff movie. What he couldn’t dispute was that all the violence against animals in the movie was real.

Pigs, racoons, turtles, monkeys and snakes were slaughtered by Ruggero and his crew, which helped Holocaust acquire its reputation as “The most controversial movie ever made”, although being banned in a rumoured 50 countries (including Italy and Norway) probably didn’t hurt either.

In the UK, the film bypassed cinemas and appeared on video in February 1982, sporting outrageous cover art that showed a native eating intestines. This promptly brought the film to the attention of the authorities and in July 1983 it was withdrawn from distribution and prosecuted for obscenity. The picture wasn’t available again until 2001, when it was released in a heavily edited version that excised several scenes of sexual violence and animal killings.

Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1974)

Late-period Hammer movies come in for criticism, what with all those silly and repetitive monster films, but in amongst them were some entertaining movies that deserve to be better known.

Written and directed by Brian Clemens, Captain Kronos is as quirky and eccentric as Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde, Clemens’ previous script for Hammer. It’s a new spin on an old idea, with Kronos chasing vampires across Europe, armed not with stakes but his trusty sword (and accompanied by his hunchbacked manservant, no less).

A swashbuckling vampire movie, you say? Yes, because Clemens has turned his back his back on Hammer’s creaky franchise monsters in favour of a more unconventional approach, as you’d expect from a former scriptwriter for the TV series The Avengers.

Also around, and debuting as a leading lady, is Caroline Munro as a wayward gypsy girl, but don’t go thinking that this is another period piece with beasts, blood and boobs – the movie’s sophisticated enough to eschew those trappings.

The Centerfold Girls (1975)

The first portmanteau softcore slasher movie, The Centerfold Girls exists because of a questionnaire sent to Drive-in operators that enquired about their willingness to show a picture with nudity and horror. “They responded enthusiastically,” says director John Peyser. “So we made the picture.”

Comprising of three segments linked only by a killer (Andrew Prine) who stalks the eponymous starlets, The Centerfold Girls kicks off with Prine’s pursuit of nurse Jackie (Jaime Lynn Bauer), whose home is invaded by a sinister hippy and her druggy friends. Jackie escapes and seeks help at a nearby hotel, but not only is the owner a scumbag (he’s played by Aldo Ray, after all), Prine just happens to be his latest guest, showing up when all seems safe.

Peyser whisks us to a deserted island for the second section, where a trio of models, a male actor, a female agent and (of course) a sleazy photographer gather for a shoot. This results in the movie’s highest body count when black-garbed Prine appears, razor in hand, to spoil their good time. Whether making unwanted advances or spiking a girl’s drink, the menfolk don’t come off too well here, so come the third story it’s time for Prine to come unstuck courtesy of real-life Playmate Tiffany Bolling.

The Champions Of Justice (1970)

Second only to El Santo in terms of popularity, Mexican wrestler Blue Demon takes centre stage in The Champions Of Justice, a movie that compensates for its ultra-low budget by including lots of scenes where masked wrestlers kick the crap out of dwarves.

You see, there’s a mad scientist who wants to destroy Blue Demon as well as his colleagues Mil Mascaras and The Killer Doctor, and he’s hit upon the perfect method – a machine that transforms ordinary midgets into super-strong assassins. So every five minutes there’s a scene where a dwarf is being brutalized by a luchador, but don’t worry – the dwarves turn into stuffed dummies before they fly into exploding lab equipment.

If you’ve ever wanted to see midgets fight wrestlers in mid-air or terrorize beauty pageant contestants, say hello to your new favourite movie.

The Child (1977)

A $30,000 home movie where much of the amateur cast’s thesping is variable at best, The Child still manages to create some atmosphere with its prowling camera, ominous soundtrack and hyperactive smoke machine, while bizarre sequences such as the heroine dancing with a scarecrow lend the picture a dream-like quality that would do Jean Rollin proud.

When governess Alicianne (Laurel Barnett) meets Rosalie Norton (Rosalie Cole), she comes to realize that the child not only has psychic powers but is also capable of resurrecting her “friends” from the nearby cemetery. This leads to the film’s trump card, a final reel homage to Night Of The Living Dead that comes within shouting distance of George Romero’s movie.

Director Robert Voskanian’s preference for misty outdoor settings, close-ups accompanied by an ominous tinkling piano and quick cuts to barely-seen predators are, depending on your point of view, either wonderfully atmospheric or amusingly corny, and even if The Child isn’t exactly a long-lost classic, it’s still a movie worth catching. Even Rob Zombie’s a fan – he sampled the dialogue on his Hellbilly Deluxe II album.

City Of The Living Dead (1980)

After opening with a scream, City Of The Living Dead’s titles begin accompanied by Fabio Frizzi’s memorable score before cutting to a fog-shrouded cemetery where a priest is preparing to commit suicide. It’s one hell of an atmospheric opening, and about as subtle as Lucio Fulci’s movie gets.

To the delight of gorehounds, the priest’s suicide opens the gates of hell and allows the dead to walk the earth, so over the following 90 minutes characters bleed from their eyes, brains are torn out and a drill pierces a man’s skull. Plague Of The Zombies, this is not.

Special mention must be made of the scene where a girl (Daniela Doria, who dies violently in 3 other Fulci movies) vomits up her own intestines while the zombie priest watches. If the effects look a little too authentic, that’s because the effects team were using the entrails of a sheep that had just had its throat cut. “After 10 minutes the entrails start to dry out and can’t be used,” Fulci explained helpfully.

Cockneys Vs Zombies (2012)

If Shaun Of The Dead was a quaint British film that just happened to feature walking cadavers, Cockneys Vs Zombies is its East End cousin, the ruder, cruder and decidedly lewder relative that’s more interested in exploding heads than romantic sub-plots.

When the dead start to rise, Andy (Harry Treadaway) and Terry (Rasmus Hardiker) immediately fear for the safety of Ray (Alan Ford), the grandfather that raised them after their hippie parents unwisely took on police marksmen with assault rifles (long story). They decide to set off on a rescue mission, little realizing that Ray’s safely ensconced inside a retirement home with Richard Briers, Honor Blackman and a cache of assault rifles.

This is The Walking Dead scripted by Ricky Gervais, and your enjoyment will depend upon watching British TV veterans portraying octogenarian zombie killers (with walking frames and AK-47s). Gone are Shaun Of The Dead’s cricket bats and polite humour, and in come decapitations, raucous jokes, plus one-time Bionic Woman Michelle Ryan as a leather-clad, samurai sword-wielding locksmith (why not?). It’s not gentle or genteel, but it is loads of fun.

Cold Prey (2006)

Norway’s answer to the 80s slasher movies, Cold Prey follows five snowboarders who take refuge in an abandoned hotel when one of them (Rolf Kristian Larsen – a dead ringer for Shaggy from Scooby Doo) breaks his ankle on the slopes. What they don’t know (but quickly realize) is that the place closed in 1975 when the owner’s son disappeared, and faster than you can say “Mrs Voorhees’ boy”, they’re being chased through the snow by a pickaxe-wielding psycho.

So far so traditional, but what separates the movie from the pack is….okay, it doesn’t offer anything new but director Roar Uthaug strings the he’s-right-behind-you suspense scenes together better than his 80s counterparts, it’s slickly shot and there’s an in-joke for fans of The Shining.

Audiences responded favourably, so two years later, Final Girl Jannicke (Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Chernobyl Diaries) returned in Cold Prey: Resurrection, which in the tradition of Halloween II (1981) offers more of the same, only set in a hospital.

Contamination (1981)

It was a running joke among Italian exploitation filmmakers that if you wanted to know what your next movie was going to be, you only had to look at Hollywood’s box office.

Having previously helmed Star Wars knock-off Starcrash, the finest space opera ever to feature a light saber-wielding David Hasselhoff and a robot with a Southern drawl, Luigi Cozzi pitched a story that brought Alien to Earth and months later found himself calling the shots on this agreeably silly cheapie.

When a freighter arrives in New York with its crew dead, police find a number of pulsating eggs (actually painted balloons) which spray them with a substance that inexplicably causes their bodies to explode. Are these the same eggs seen on an expedition to Mars led by Commander Hubbard (Zombie Holocaust’s Ian McCulloch)?

Also borrowing from Them!, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and the James Bond films, Contamination is an entertaining schlockfest that allows nothing – including the awkward dialogue and illogical plotting – to stand in its way. Stay tuned and you’ll see one of the great B-movie monsters, a rubbery cyclopean squid that hypnotizes its victims. Enjoy!

Cutting Class (1989)

Made at the tail end of the 80s slasher craze, Cutting Class captures the tone of the later Friday The 13th movies – it’s slightly spoofy, a bit camp and not meant to be taken seriously. This is a good thing because the sight of Brad Pitt as a vacuous, floppy-haired jock would’ve caused any serious intentions to vanish.

Brad plays Dwight Ingalls, a high school student who suspects that a recent string of homicides might’ve been committed by Brian (Donovan Leitch), a former friend who’s just been released from the loony bin. You get a taste of how silly and unsubtle the movie is going to be when this important piece of information is conveyed by a close up of a newspaper headline that reads “Boy Who Killed Father Released From Mental Asylum.”

Loaded with big hair and questionable fashion choices, Cutting Class is both a document of an era and an inadvertent but pitch perfect parody of it. From the fake looking gore to the cheerleader who “forgot” to wear panties to the big game, the film ticks all the boxes of an 80s trash classic, but what separates it from the pack is Pitt, whose character claims that while he lacks social stature he’s “bigger where it counts.”

Didn’t see that in Seven Years In Tibet, did you?

Deadheads (2011)

Brett & Drew Pierce’s debut feature contains all the slapstick, entrails and gross-out gags you’d expect from the sons of Bart Pierce, who handled special effects photography on The Evil Dead (which is seen playing at a Drive-in). A festival favourite, Deadheads picked up numerous awards on the circuit, including Best Comedy in Toronto, deservedly so as it’s funnier than most studio pictures.

Having been dead for three years, Brent (Ross Kidder) realizes he’s missed the Transformers movies, which is all that worries him about returning from the grave. But his buddy Mike (Michael McKiddy) has just found the wedding ring he was going to put on his girlfriend’s finger, which sets him wondering what his old flame might be doing now and what she might see in him now he resembles Bub’s bespectacled bro.

So begins a road trip in search of this lost love, during which our heroes are joined by Cheese, a non-speaking zombie of the traditional variety, as well as a Nam veteran who carries the ashes of his prostitute wife. If you’re tired of The Walking Dead, you need to watch this movie.

The Deadly Spawn (1983)

The Deadly Spawn opens with a meteorite depositing an extra-terrestrial antagonist in Hicksville, but rather than a benevolent being in a rubber costume, these aliens are oversized pink worms with multiple rows of teeth.

Fortunately, there’s a young sci-fi fan on hand that knows aliens and electricity don’t mix well and sets about baiting a trap before the creatures can slime his collection of vintage movie posters. Yes, it’s a movie made by monster fans for monster fans, but while the filmmakers had an Ed Wood budget, they didn’t make an Ed Wood movie.

Not only are the performances and music are decent, but there are some cool effects including the standout final shot where what looks like a hill turns out to be the biggest, hungriest creature of them all. If movies are cheaper and easier to make these days, why is nobody making anything as much fun as this?

Death Race 2000 (1976)

It’s the near future, and the United Provinces of America is “the greatest power in the known universe”, a feat made possible by Mr President, who addresses his supporters as “my children” and reminds them of his affection with posters that announce, “Mr P Loves You!”

His greatest achievement is the Death Race - a coast-to-coast race where drivers score points by running over pedestrians. “We love it violent, violent, violent,” gushes one commentator. “That’s the American way!”

Not everyone shares the sentiment: when a group of rebels (led by a white haired grandmother named Thomasina Paine) disrupt the race and start killing the drivers, the deaths are at first explained away as accidents but when more corpses turn up, the President makes a personal appearance to deliver the “truth”. It’s the fault of the French, he says, the very same people who wrecked the economy and destroyed the country you love.

Demonwarp (1988)

When a group of teenagers arrive at their cabin to find the front door missing, furniture overturned and Oscar winner George Kennedy ranting about the “Thing” that carried off his little girl, they naturally flee in terror. Nah, just kidding. Because they’re in a horror movie, they hang around so they can make out and get high, which backfires when Bigfoot shows up to tear down walls, snap necks and steal their toaster.

Filmed in barely two weeks for the price of a Cadillac, with a supporting cast that includes X-rated starlet Michelle Bauer and Playmate Pamela Gilbert (gee, do you think they’ll get naked?), Demonwarp isn’t just your average Z-grade monster movie. For one thing, how often do you see an Oscar winner attempt to trap the monster by calling him a “woolly bastard”?

But the film’s strongest moment is its climactic revelation – Bigfoot turns out to be just one of several werewolf-zombie hybrids living in a space ship operated by a cackling priest and his master, a claw-handed archangel that eats the hearts of naked starlets. Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

The Descent (2005)

The Descent has a shot at being the best British horror film since 28 Days Later, with which it bears comparison – it’s a grim, unrelenting survivalist drama, very different from director Neil Marshall’s earlier Dog Soldiers (2002).

Released in the UK shortly before The Cave, The Descent tells a very similar story about trapped explorers, but does so with more verve and conviction. Here, the characters don’t have “cannon fodder” written all over them, and since we care about whether or not they live, Marshall’s able to ratchet up the tension to almost unbearable levels.

In the US theatrical cut, the film ended abruptly and bizarrely, with Shauna Macdonald escaping the cavern and returning to her car, only to run into one of her supposedly dead friends. The original British ending, where Macdonald’s escape was revealed to have been a dream, makes more sense, even if it borrows heavily from Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge.

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

Toho’s twentieth monster movie (their ninth to feature Godzilla), Destroy All Monsters is, by some distance, the liveliest and most outrageous of Toho’s early films.

Set in an apparently alternate 1999, where rocket ships leave for the moon on an hourly basis, all of Toho’s creatures have been confined to a sanctuary called Monster Island. Naturally, they escape and start doing their thing, with Godzilla attacking NYC, Rodan trashing Moscow, Mothra invading Beijing etc., but the monsters aren’t acting of their own free will.

Turns out they’re being controlled by the Kilaaks, an “alien race” whose members just happen to resemble beautiful women in tight outfits. Thankfully, a group of astronauts are able to return control of the creatures to Earth, setting up one of the all-time-great monster movie showdowns as Godzilla, Mothra, Gorosaurus, Rodan, Baragon, Varan, Anguirus, Kumonga, Manda and Minira (Godzilla’s son) face off against King Ghidorah and the Fire Dragon, a flaming kestrel that turns out to be a Kilaak flying saucer.

Incredibly, a critic for Cinefantastique, who you’d think would enjoy this sort of thing, called the picture “too thin in its characterizations” (!?), but those of us that watch movies for fun know better. Destroy All Monsters is utterly ridiculous and loads of fun – don’t even mention the dubbing.

Doctor Of Doom (1963)

Assisted by Gomar, a bulletproof ape with a human brain, a mad doctor kidnaps young women for his brain transplant experiments, unwisely choosing the sister of Gloria Venus (Lorena Velazquez), Mexico’s most famous wrestler, who teams up with her colleague Golden Rubi (Elizabeth Campbell) to take revenge.

Words alone cannot express how much dumb, delirious fun this movie is to watch: as well as the expected bad dubbing and obvious stunt doubles, there’s some hilariously awful makeup and a hammy villain whose motivation appears to have been to give Vincent Price’s Dr Goldfoot a run for his money. The acting, writing and direction are all on the level of (yet weirdly predate) Adam West-era Batman, with a monster that’s supposed to be “half man half beast” but looks more like a strongman with fur glued to his chest and arms. If it’s camp entertainment you’re looking for, put this movie at the top of your watch list.

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Don’t Look Now opens with the most terrifying thing imaginable – the death of a child, which establishes the film’s grim, downbeat tone. It’s also the plot device that causes Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland to uproot and leave for gloomy-looking Venice where, for a variety of reasons, the tragedy continues to haunt their new life.

To reveal more would be unthinkable, because this is a movie that audiences have to experience for themselves, armed with as little knowledge as possible, which is equally unthinkable in the age of Rotten Tomatoes. The less you know, the more enjoyable the journey, and the more satisfying the ending (unless you’ve already read Daphne Du Maurier’s short story).

Sure, you can dismiss Nic Roeg’s direction as arty and pretentious if you wish, but doesn’t his handling of the material add to the overall dreamlike quality of the narrative? You decide.

Dracula The Dirty Old Man (1969)

Had history played out differently, Dracula The Dirty Old Man would’ve been just another forgettable no-budget monster nudie flick. To the gratitude of bad movie fans, however, the director lost the soundtrack in post-production and decided to redub it as a comedy, turning a threadbare sex farce into a movie that must be seen to be believed.

For budgetary reasons, Count Dracula lives in one of California’s Bronson Caves and, after transforming a nosy journalist into a lycanthrope named Irving Jackalman, instructs him to procure young virgins. When the starlets are delivered to his cave, the Count ties them up, starts fondling them and….that’s when the movie goes mad.

Dubbed with the voice of a bad Bela Lugosi impersonator, the Count points out technical goofs and jokes about how cheap the movie looks. In between denuding starlets, he’ll look around his cave and say, “I’ve got to get a new interior decorator.” At one point, he says, “I am Count Dracula. Which is Alucard backwards. So you can call me Ali.”

El Vampiro Y El Sexo (1969)

El Vampiro Y El Sexo pits Mexican wrestler El Santo against none other than Count Dracula, and in trying to move with the times the filmmakers throw in blood and nudity, making the picture more explicit than your average luchador film.

This is the movie where we learn that El Santo isn’t just Mexico’s most famous wrestler – he’s also a top scientist who’s just built a time machine, and in order to study the effects of time travel (or something) he sends a colleague’s daughter back through time, little realizing she’ll end up being menaced by Dracula and his topless vampire babes.

For most of the first half, this feels like two films spliced together as the period footage barely connects with the modern scenes, but when El Santo and his colleagues come to the girl’s aid the movie shifts into high gear and turns into a camp delight.

Of particular note is Santo’s comic relief sidekick, who wears thick-rimmed glasses, a dollar sign around his neck and speaks in a high-pitched whine in between performing pratfalls. Then there’s Mexican Dracula himself, portrayed by a bad actor in a bad makeup job, who wants to stop Santo from stealing his treasure and donating it to the poor.

Elves (1989)

The best Elves and Nazis movie ever shot in Colorado (in 1989, anyway), Elves stars Grizzly Adams himself, Dan Haggerty, as a homeless ex-cop who realizes that elves are in fact Nazi genetic experiments whose leader will mate with a virgin on Christmas Eve to produce the leader of the Fourth Reich. As is explained in The Book of Revelation.

What he doesn’t know is that the virgin in question is kindly waitress Kirsten, who when she’s not drawing naked chicks with “Art deco boobs” or having her ablutions interrupted by her potty-mouthed brother, is being knocked around by her Nazi grandpa, who is also her father. Gramps, you see, impregnated his own daughter to sire Kirsten, whose destiny is to produce a master race of Nazi Elves.

There’s ideas and (intentionally?) funny dialogue to spare in this overlooked treat, whose labyrinthine (some might say tasteless) plot is credited to three writers. Never mind Poltergeist and Fantastic Four, this is the movie we want to see being remade.

Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals (1977)

You could put pretty much any film starring Laura Gemser, whose films include Sexy Nights Of The Living Dead (1980) and Violence In A Woman’s Prison (1983), on this list, but Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals is interesting for the way it attempts to combine the softcore and cannibal genres.

The plot of a New York journalist travelling to a remote island would later be recycled in Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) and Zombie Holocaust (1981), while the film’s horror elements predate the likes of Cannibal Ferox (1981) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980) by several years. That’s likely more by accident than design because the director is Joe D’Amato, the Italian schlockmeister who also gave us House Of Anal Perversions (1997) and Cop Sucker II (1997).

For the first half, the “plot” involves Gemser getting naked every 10 minutes, including a bizarre sequence where a chimp smokes a cigarette while watching her bathe. Then the cannibals show up and abduct our heroine, who promptly escapes and….that’s it. The End.

Story isn’t the film’s strongest suit, but Gemser’s fans never seemed to mind.

Event Horizon (1997)

If there’s one British filmmaker who doesn’t get enough credit, it’s Paul WS Anderson (not the Magnolia guy), who for nearly a quarter of a century has been steadily pumping out a succession of large-scale genre films that are never less than entertaining.

Pitched as “The Shining in space”, Event Horizon is one of his best films, and it’s a cut above the similarly-themed films likes of Supernova and Sphere. Taking its visual cues from the first two Alien movies (Aliens is one of Anderson’s favourite films), Event Horizon is the story of an exploration vessel that reappears as mysteriously as it vanished seven years earlier.

What the investigating crew (which includes Lawrence Fishburne, Sam Neill and Sean Pertwee) quickly realize is that there’s a strange presence on board, perhaps brought in when the ship’s gravity drive opened a gateway into an unknown dimension. If you just thought, “I bet that results in the crew going crazy and turning on each other” give yourself a cigar.

The Evil Dead (1982)

Described as “the ultimate experience in gruelling terror”, The Evil Dead lives up to its billing and then some. You will not find a better synopsis than the one written by Joe Bob Briggs: “Five teenagers become spam-in-a-cabin when they head for the woods and start turning into flesh-eating zombies. Asks a lot of moral questions like: ‘If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what do you do? Carve her into itty-bitty pieces or look the other way?’

To the gratitude of aficionados everywhere, Bruce Campbell realizes the only way to kill zombies is through the act of bodily dismemberment, so the rest of the movie is the story of a man, an axe and his zombified friends. Having gotten their education at the Drive-in, where Campbell and Sam Raimi watched horror movies to see what went over best with audiences, the duo’s motto became “the gore the merrier.”

You can see it at work in the attack sequences, where limbs are lopped off and blood spurts in every direction, but that’s nothing compared to the finale, where the zombies disintegrate in the most disgusting way possible.

Evil Dead Trap (1988)

There are no zombies in Evil Dead Trap but there’s gore, sadism and monsters aplenty, all served up with a lack of restraint that makes Dario Argento look like Frank Capra.

When what purports to be a snuff film arrives on the desk of a ratings-hungry TV presenter, she and her crew journey out to the deserted army base shown on the tape, unaware that it’s home to a sicko with a penchant for torture porn. When these idiots decide to split up and wander off alone down dark corridors, that’s when the movie shifts into high gear.

This is basically the Japanese version of an 80s slasher, but even though it follows that template for a while, it departs from the formula and follows its own path, ending up with one of the craziest resolutions you’ve ever seen. Imagine the best of Mario Bava, David Cronenberg and Frank Henenlotter blended together in one movie and you’ll have an idea of what’s in store.

Evils Of The Night (1985)

Leave it to Mardi Rustam, producer of the American classics Psychic Killer (1975), Please Don’t Eat The Babies (1983) and Lash Of Lust (1972), to make his directing debut with a jiggle-fest that makes his earlier pictures look like The Sound Of Music. Never one to disappoint, Rustam fills out the supporting cast with all the porn queens he can find and has them engage in enough softcore shenanigans to satisfy anyone who watches Skinamax at 2 am.

Picking up where his idol, Al Adamson, left off, Rustam hires some cheap, washed-up actors, a few faded TV starlets and, of course, John Carradine, whose spaceship/revolving light-rack lands near where some promiscuous potheads have gone skinny-dipping.

Mars needs women (and men), preferably idiots in a state of undress, so Carradine and his groovy space stewardesses (including Julie Newmar and Tina Louise) turn the area into Camp Blood Bank and literally suck the life out of its inhabitants. Somehow able to take over a local hospital, they enlist grease monkeys Aldo Ray and Neville Brand to supply them with 16-24 year olds (“no younger”) for their ‘experiments’, which seem to revolve around the movement of breasts beneath tight, clingy t-shirts.

If you’ve ever wanted to see Newmar and Louise as aliens in low-cut dresses, help yourself.

Faster Pussycat Kill Kill (1965)

Faster Pussycat begins the way most movies do, with a narrator warning us about the “rapacious new breed” of dangerously evil females that hunts alone and in packs, operating at any level, anytime, anywhere and with anybody.

After killing a drag-racing stranger, a psychotic go-go dancer leads her two equally deranged girlfriends to the desert ranch of an old cripple and his retarded son. Alerted to the old man’s hidden fortune, the girls scheme, seduce and double-cross their way to the loot in ways that suggest there won’t be anybody left standing when the credits roll.

If you didn’t know that Russ Meyer was a former glamour photographer, you’d be able to guess from Pussycat’s portrayal of women. Dressed in tight trousers or short shorts, with their ample bosoms practically spilling out of their low-cut blouses, Meyer’s femme fatales tower over the men and seem to enjoy berating and beating them up more than they do seducing them. They also get all the best lines. “I’m of legal age for whiskey, voting and loving,” says Billie (Lori Williams). “Now the next election is two years away, and my love live ain’t getting much better, so how about some of that one hundred percent?”

Feast (2006)

If a film about a group of strangers, trapped in an isolated tavern, fighting for their lives against a tribe of flesh-eating creatures makes Feast sound like drab Netflix filler, think again: the writers are Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, who also scripted four Saw sequels, so there’s enough bloody mayhem for several movies.

The same creative ensemble later made Piranha 3DD, and the results are similarly anarchic, with bodies being shredded every few moments while blood sprays everywhere. The cast’s good, too: how often do you see Jason Mewes, Henry Rollins and one-time Emmanuelle Krista Allen in the same movie?

Let no one accuse the writers of leaving a stone unturned in their quest to wring as many gross out gags as possible from the material, and it’s refreshing to watch a movie where nobody is safe, least of all the characters billed as “hero” and “heroine.” Anyone looking for dead baby gags, however, will have to wait for the sequel.

Fido (2006)

Billy Connolly and Carrie-Anne Moss star in this horror comedy that gives the boy-and-his-dog formula an amusing twist. Instead of an animal, a lonely young boy befriends a domesticated zombie.

You see, the Zombie Wars have been and gone and the remaining living dead have been pacified with “containment collars” that curtail their hunger and allow them to be used for menial tasks. Depending on your needs, they can mow lawns, deliver milk or, if they’re young and fresh enough, be used as concubines.

Set in a Norman Rockwell America, and best described as Leave It To Beaver meets Shaun Of The Dead, Fido is the zombie comedy to end all zombie comedies. Mixed in with the laughs and the expected blood and guts is a satire of 50s attitudes, and don’t miss Tim Blake Nelson’s performance as the creepy neighbour who keeps a zombie for a girlfriend.

Flesh For Frankenstein (1973)

In his second prosecuted film, Udo Kier plays the sleaziest, most demented Baron Frankenstein yet to reach the screen. He also delivers a line that would make Peter Cushing blush: “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life….in the gall bladder!”

In a laboratory dungeon filled with body parts, electrical equipment and a naked female corpse he mounts when the fancy takes him, the Baron tries to create a super race but reckons without the attentions of local peasant Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro), who realizes that Frankenstein murdered his best friend and is using the body in his experiments. Eschewing villagers with flaming torches and police inspectors with wooden limbs, the film instead throws in several gore sequences, most notably a scene where a character is decapitated with garden shears and his body continues to stagger around with blood pumping from the neck.

This was too strong for British tastes and the film played theatrically with eight minutes of cuts, most of which were reinserted for home video. Banned in March 1984 and successfully prosecuted, the movie wasn’t available in its uncut form until 2006.

Foxy Brown (1974)

Far from being a “cult” star (whatever that means), Pam Grier was at one point one of the most bankable female stars in Hollywood, just behind Barbara Streisand and Liza Minnelli. Unlike those performers, she rose to prominence not in comedies and musicals but in a series of “chicks in chains” movies (Women In Cages, The Big Doll House etc) before appearing in her 2 most iconic pictures, Coffy and Foxy Brown.

Endorsed by Quentin Tarantino, who borrowed the protagonist’s surname for Grier’s character in Jackie Brown (1997), Foxy Brown tells the story of a young woman who seeks revenge against the (white) gangsters that killed her boyfriend. It’s the kind of action film you don’t see anymore: a movie loaded with attitude, full of indignation at an African American’s lot, with a gun-wielding heroine who (according to the tagline) will put you on ice if you don’t treat her nice.

Brimming with observations about the lack of opportunities available to minorities in 70s America and crammed with hip dialogue (“That’s my sister, baby, and she’s a whole lot of woman!”), Foxy Brown stands up well enough to make you reflect on contemporary action roles for women. Neither Grier nor the movie really has a modern equivalent, and the world’s a poorer place for it.

Frailty (2002)

The late great Bill Paxton made his directing debut with Frailty, which simply put is one of the finest Southern Gothics you’ve never seen.

It’s a twisted story that could’ve come from the pen of Joe R Lansdale: when Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) walks into an FBI office one evening, he tells the agent in charge a story about how his old man (played in flashbacks by Paxton) raised him and his brother to be “demon slayers”, avenging angels who target and murder wrongdoers. Is this a figment of his imagination, or is Fenton telling the truth?

Ignored on its initial release, Frailty came along at the wrong time. The slasher boom had just limped to an end with Scream 3 and Valentine, and the trend for Japanese horror was about to kick in (The Ring was released 6 months later). Frailty stands up better than any of those efforts, and there’s a twist you won’t see coming.

Frankenhooker (1990)

Desperate to finance a picture to shoot alongside Basket Case 2, Frank Henenlotter improvised Frankenhooker’s plot in a pitch meeting, riffing on The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1963) and bringing it into the 90s with the protagonist now an employee of New Jersey Electric who loses his beloved to a souped-up, out-of-control lawnmower.

Thank goodness Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is “Sort of a surgeon in his spare time” because he can stash his fiancee’s severed head in his lab and read it poetry in between attempting to procure a new body. This he does by window-shopping Times Square’s working girls, searching for the one he can make a new woman out of, which allows Henenlotter to depict New York’s scuzzier elements in much the same way as he did in Basket Case (1982).

Lighter in tone and more cartoonish than Henenlotter’s Brain Damage, Frankenhooker stood out on release by virtue of not being a slasher sequel, but the blending of horror, comedy and gross-out setpieces works better here than in Basket Case 2 and besides, how can you hate a film with the tagline, “A terrifying tale of sluts and bolts!”

Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster (1965)

A Lily Munster-ish Martian princess and her bald, pointy-eared servant are seeking to repopulate their dying world, so they do what any Bad Movie Villain would – they kidnap bikinied ‘specimens’ from the beaches of San Juan and lock less-than-willing abductees up in a cage with a bad actor in a gorilla suit.

Meanwhile, our would-be Frankenstein, in this case a NASA scientist played by James Karen, has created a cyborg (named Colonel Saunders) and shot him into space only to see his rocket destroyed by the Martians, who think it’s an enemy missile. Surviving the stock-footage explosion with only third-degree burns, the Colonel malfunctions and goes on a lusty rampage, pursued (on scooter) by Dr Karen.

Sure, it’s cheap, silly and loaded with enough stock-footage to make Ed Wood proud, but the campy feel must’ve been intentional because producer Alan V Iselin’s resume also includes The Horror Of Party Beach. Here, the beach antics have been toned down, the number of pop songs reduced and there’s more going on whenever the antagonists are off-screen.

Friday The 13th Part II (1981)

The first Friday The 13th was a blah Halloween knock off directed by a porn grad, but this sequel is the archetypal 80s slasher movie, full of idiot victims (love that skinny dipping blonde) who die in unpleasant ways courtesy of a machete-wielding villain who won’t stay dead.

It’s basically an Americanization of Mario Bava’s A Bay Of Blood, and even recreates two murders from that film (the machete to the face and the spearing of the two lovers). On its American rerelease, Bava’s film was marketed as an unofficial sequel to The Last House On The Left, which is ironic: Steve Miner, who called the shots on Friday The 13th parts 2 and 3, was a production assistant on Last House.

Unlike several of the later sequels, Part II is a bona fide exploitation movie that serves up all the blood, shocks and gratuitous nudity a crowd could want. Several sympathetic characters bite the dust in horrific ways, and it’s a very nasty movie indeed that reserves one of the most unpleasant (and admittedly spectacular) deaths for the sole handicapped character. It’s not a movie long on PC or feminism, but it is loads of down and dirty fun.

Frightmare (1974)

Very different from the quaint and cosy horrors being produced by Hammer at the time, Pete Walker’s films are all about “making mischief”, the kind that involves gratuitous nudity, cynical digs at the establishment and Sheila Keith, his perennial supporting actress, wielding a power drill.

A fine introduction to Planet Walker, Frightmare is the story of Edmund (Rupert Yates), who must cover up for his wife Dorothy (Keith) when she’s released from an asylum and immediately reverts to her old ways by killing strangers to satisfy her hunger for human flesh. You know how it is in Surrey.

One of the few British horrors that set out to match the nastiness of the low-budget American films of the period, Frightmare has an ace up its sleeve in the form of Keith, a sweet old lady who kills her victims with pokers, pitchforks and the aforementioned drill. The latter image was used for the film’s poster, along with the tagline, “Dare you see the film that shocked the critics?”

From Beyond The Grave (1974)

According to Hollywood, anthology films never work and fail commercially, so it fell to Amicus to make the pictures that came to define the genre (Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors, Torture Garden, The House That Dripped Blood etc.), the most fun of which is From Beyond The Grave.

Clever, atmospheric and (at times) very funny, the film comprises four stories (based on the work of R Chetwynd-Hayes) linked by Peter Cushing’s antique shop, Temptations Ltd, which has “lots of bargains. All tastes catered to – and a big novelty surprise comes with every purchase.”

The guest stars include David Warner (who purchases a haunted mirror), Donald Pleasance (who shows a child “an act of kindness” by murdering his parents) and Ian Ogilvy (who installs a door that opens on another that opens on another dimension). Special mention, however, must be made of Margaret Leighton as Madame Orloff, a flaky clairvoyant who specializes in exorcising elementals.

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

You’d expect a vampire movie written by Quentin Tarantino, directed by Robert Rodriguez and starring (among others) Harvey Keitel and George Clooney to be seven shades of awesome, and From Dusk Till Dawn doesn’t disappoint. You’d also expect a collaboration from the big guns behind Grindhouse to be bloody as hell, and it’s that too.

What’s the worst that can happen inside a bar called The Titty Twister where the barman is Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin stands outside shouting, “Come on in, pussy lovers! If we don’t got it, you don’t want it”? Well, you could encounter Satanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek), the exotic dancer whose name comes from a 1975 Mexican horror film. Over a century old, she’s the Twister’s Queen Vampire, and judging from her youthful appearance, she must’ve opened a lot of necks and bathed in a lot of blood.

As the bar’s main attraction, it’s her job to keep the guests entertained while her colleagues lock the doors, which she does by performing a seductive dance. But be warned: resist her charms, and she will transform into a beast and sink her fangs into your neck.

From Hell It Came (1957)

A picture guaranteed to bring out the worst puns imaginable (“His bark’s worse than his bite”, “what a sap”, “surely knot” etc.), From Hell It Came convincingly depicts the “old legend” of Tabanga, the tree monster who, as any anthropologist will tell you “walked to avenge its wrongs.”

On a “savage island” in the South Seas populated by white English-speaking extras, a Prince named Kimo is sentenced to death by ceremonial dagger for supposedly murdering a chief, but every b-movie fan knows that when a wrongly-convicted man swears vengeance on his persecutors before being buried in a hollow tree trunk, it’s only a matter of time before he returns as another actor in a silly costume.

And what a costume it is. Unlikely to scare anyone except the film’s financial backers, who likely imagined the shirts disappearing off their backs, Tabanga was designed by an uncredited Paul Blaisdell which isn’t too hard to guess as the ambulatory antagonist possesses the same fluid grace as his finest creation, the conical cucumber creature from Roger Corman’s It Conquered The World.

Frontiers (2007)

Making his feature debut, Xavier Gens (Hitman) takes no prisoners and delivers one of the best meat movies never to feature Leatherface, throwing in everything from cannibalistic neo-Nazis to mutant children. Heads explode, bodies are ripped apart by a circular saw and heads are bashed in, but what makes Gens’ movie stand out from the pack is the setting.

It’s the not-too-distant future, where the extreme right wing is vying for control (“We’re where America was 10 years ago,” says one character, “we’ve got our George Bush now”), leading to riots that leave the cities ablaze. Taking advantage of the chaos, a group of Muslim Arab youths attempt a robbery that goes wrong and leaves them running for their lives, but they can find no refuge even in the middle of nowhere.

Seeking shelter at an isolated hostel, the gang encounters a group of fascists who refer to them as “half breeds” and set about dispatching them in the grisliest ways possible, even cutting one member’s Achilles tendons before locking him in a shed with pigs. The subtext is as loud as a jukebox: if politicians freely preach hatred and violence, what are the consequences?

Fugitive Girls (1974)

The penultimate collaboration between Ed Wood (Plan 9 From Outer Space) and Bulgarian porn auteur Steve Apostolof, Fugitive Girls is a synthesis of Ed’s The Violent Years and Roger Corman’s Swamp Women souped-up with heavy doses of T&A for the Drive-in crowd.

Arrested for a crime she didn’t commit, Dee (Margie Lanier) becomes a favourite of bulldyke Kat (Tallie Cochrane), who of course is planning to escape with three other women-in-prison movie caricatures. There’s an embezzler, a jive talkin’ black mama, a white trash racist and never a dull moment as they abscond in search of stolen loot.

Like Violent Years’ juvies, these femme fatales beat up bikers, engage in catfights and rape any man they come across, and Apostolof leaves nothing to the imagination, particularly in a scene where they fall foul of predatory hippies who force them to strip before the girls turn the tables and run. Then they start disrobing again because their clothes are lice-ridden etc etc.

Full Contact (1992)

Full Contact is another of Hong Kong director Ringo Lam’s gangster movies with Chow Yun Fat, but unlike their previous collaborations City On Fire and Prison On Fire, it’s loaded with gun battles and never takes itself too seriously.

Chow plays a thief who launches a bloody vendetta against his colleagues following a double cross, which is all the plot that’s needed to set in motion a succession of over-the-top-and-through-the-woods action sequence scenes. In one berserk sequence, Lam’s camera tracks the bullets during a shootout, flying across the room and shattering plate glass windows.

Particularly memorable is Simon Yam as the film’s flamboyant villain, who wears pink shirts (with ruffles), tells Chow he has a sexy telephone voice yet has no problem shooting people in the face. When he tells our hero that he’d like nothing more than for them to die in each other’s arms, Chow shoots him and says, “Go masturbate in hell!”

The Galaxy Invader (1985)

Even a low-budget sci-fi epic needs stars and good make-up to succeed, so when you’re shooting a picture in your backyard with your half-brother in the floppy creature suit, the odds are stacked against you before you burn a foot of film. For all its home movie production values, amateurish performances and third-hand ideas, though, this time capsule of vintage pleasure is mounted with such genuine, straight-faced sincerity that it’s worth its weight in goofy charm.

This was Don Dohler’s fourth such opus, and as in all the others there’s an ET loose in suburban Baltimore, only this time it’s a benevolent creature and the rednecks are the bad guys. He immediately regrets choosing Hicksville as a vacation spot when he meets the soft-bellied locals who, fortified by Dutch courage, establish First Contact through Messrs Smith & Wesson.

Dollar signs flash in their eyes when they come into possession of the glowing ball strapped around the being’s waist, prompting the rounding-up of a drunken posse for a hunt-and-capture mission, much to the dismay of anthropologist Richard Dyszel (aka horror host Count Gore De Vol), who argues that it’s an important scientific find. So they shoot him. Then they take off after the creature anyway and get picked off one by one etc etc etc.

Godzilla Vs Megalon (1973)

Joe R Lansdale says there isn’t a comedy as good as an old Godzilla movie and the funniest has to be Godzilla Vs Megalon, whose low budget and utterly bonkers plot ensures a good time will be had by all.

Upset by mankind’s nuclear testing, an underwater civilization known as Seatopia unleashes Megalon (a kung fu fighting giant beetle) to destroy all humans but they’ve reckoned without Godzilla, who in this instalment is joined by Jet Jaguar, the oddest movie robot of all time. Painted bright red and yellow, with a pointy-shaped head, Jet Jaguar doesn’t appear to be of much use until he transforms himself into a giant to stomp his attackers.

Godzilla Vs Megalon might short on jaw-dropping spectacle, but there’s fun to be had as guys in rubber monster suits clobber each other on cardboard sets during the extended climax. So convinced were the filmmakers that Jet Jaguar would become an icon that they immortalized him in the film’s closing song (“Godzilla and Jet Jaguar, punch punch punch, let’s do our best”).

Though he never appeared in another film, the character became a fixture of the Godzilla video games.

Grizzly II: The Concert (1983)

All concert and no grizzly, this belated sequel to William Girdler’s 1976 killer bear opus was still shooting when financial squabbles caused the Hungarian government to shut the production down, leaving the unfinished picture in limbo until a leaked workprint appeared online in 2007.

Wish we could say this is The Greatest Movie You Never Saw, but Grizzly II is to Girdler what Jaws II was to Spielberg, only much, much less. It does however feature Oscar winner Louise Fletcher as a park superintendent who wants that evening’s Nazareth concert to go ahead despite the mauling of fellow Oscar winner George Clooney, who made the mistake of wandering past a sign reading CLOSED BECAUSE OF BEAR DANGER with pals Charlie Sheen and Laura Dern.

Then there’s John Rhys Davies in the Robert Shaw role as a “French-Indian” bear-trapper who claims that in order to catch a grizzly you have to act like a grizzly, think like a grizzly, smell with his nose and wander through the woods in daylight while the rest of the movie is taking place after dark. Throw in Charles Cyphers (Halloween) as another grizzled grizzly hunter, Deborah Raffin (Death Wish 3) as head of “Bear Management” and Deborah Foreman (April Fool’s Day) as lead Teen In Peril and you have a ‘movie’ that’s irresistible to fans of watching famous faces demean themselves for a paycheck.

The Happiness Of The Katakuris (2001)

You can always count on Takashi Miike to break with convention but even by the standards of the director of Audition and Ichi The Killer, The Happiness Of The Katakuris reaches a whole new level of weird.

Part black comedy, part cheesy drama, part horror movie and part musical, the plot involves a family who open up an inn on a former garbage dump in the shadow of Mount Fuji. When their first guest, a TV personality, commits suicide during the night, they decide to bury the body and cover up the death, knowing the bad publicity will spell the end of their business.

When each subsequent guest also expires on the premises – by accident, murder or suicide – they also end up being buried nearby….but not before the family breaks into song. Could all this be leading towards a big song along with dancing zombies? It just might.

The Happiness Of The Katakuris is the movie that proved to Y2K filmmakers that it was okay to be weird and experimental proved you didn’t take yourself too seriously. Lloyd Kaufman credits it with inspiring Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead, but more on that later.

Hard Boiled (1992)

In this era of digital trickery, where characters routinely defy the laws of gravity, it’s easy to overlook the films where not only were the bone smashing stunts performed for real, they were done in one take.

Hard Boiled isn’t the best of John Woo’s Hong Kong films (The Killer takes that accolade), but as an example of his mastery of balletic bloodshed, it’s hard to beat. There are no white doves, but otherwise Woo’s visual trademarks are present and correct: characters fly through the air, one-eyed henchmen emerge from clouds of smoke in slow motion and everyone discharges 2 guns simultaneously.

There’s no real plot, just a succession of action sequences as cop Tequila (Chow Yun Fat) hunts down a gang of smugglers, little realizing that one of them is an undercover cop. This leads to umpteen Mexican standoffs, scores of gun battles and an outrageous finale set in a hospital where – get this – the bad guy keeps his cache of smuggled weapons.

The Haunted World Of El Superbeasto (2009)

Loathed by people who’ve never seen it, The Haunted World Of El Superbeasto is Rob Zombie at his most deranged, a 77 minute animated feature about a washed-up luchador whose encounters with monsters, Nazis and a horny robot are set to a soundtrack to die for.

Roping in several actors from his previous movies (Ken Foree, Dee Wallace, Danny Trejo etc), Zombie sets the action in a cartoon world called Monsterland, where the marriage of Dr Satan (Paul Giamatti) to trash-mouthed stripper Velvet Von Black (Rosario Dawson) will allow him to take over the world….somehow. The only people who can stop him are wrestler turned exploitation filmmaker El Superbeasto (Tom Papa), his secret agent sister Susi-X (Sheri Moon Zombie) and her sidekick Murray The Robot (Brian Posehn).

This is the kind of movie where a one-eyed heroine (carrying Hitler’s disembodied head in a jar – don’t ask) in a figure-hugging jumpsuit says, “Hey man, what’s a girl gotta do to get a theme song around here?” and is immediately serenaded by a song that includes the lyrics “Watching you grow from a little child/ To the girl with the ass that drives them wild.” Andrew Lloyd Webber this is not, but if you’re if the mood for something outrageous, it’s just the ticket.

Hellraiser (1987)

In the mid-80s, almost a decade after Hammer’s demise, British horror consisted mainly of would-be spoofs (Bloodbath At The House Of Death) and unwise attempts to compete with American exploitation fare (Don’t Open Til Christmas). At least, it did until Clive Barker came along.

After writing the scripts for Underworld (1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986), Barker stepped behind the camera for Hellraiser, which offered an Old Dark House gothic nobody had seen before, full of twisted sexuality and grisly violence. The film’s antagonists, the Cenobites, looked like demons in fetish gear, and as they pursued a skinless creature that had escaped their clutches, it was clear that British horror had entered a new era.

Their leader, originally named Priest and called Lead Cenobite in the script, became such an iconic figure that he returned in 7 sequels, making actor Doug Bradley the first new British horror star since the heyday of Hammer.

Horror Of The Blood Monsters (1970)

Thanks to the effects of “Chromatic Radiation”, an epidemic of Vampirism has broken out on Earth, resulting in starlets being attacked in dark alleys by extras wearing plastic fangs. In an effort to save humanity, John Carradine and crew venture into space with a TV, some deck chairs and a reel-to-reel tape recorder fitted into their wire-supported model spacecraft, which inexplicably transforms into the vessel from The Wizard of Mars (1965) when in orbit.

Landing on a planet “Identical to Earth” (and Vasquez Rocks Natural Park), they encounter lobster-men, sabre-toothed vampires, a flying bat demon and “Spectrum X”, the gimmick used to tint the black and white stock-footage red, yellow, blue and green.

You see, director Al Adamson took Tagani (1965), a B&W Filipino movie, shot some new scenes, jumbled it all together and released it to theatres as a “new” film, a trick he pulled again years later when he released the film to TV as Vampire Men Of The Lost Planet.

Hospital Massacre (1982)

Nineteen years after a psychopath impaled her brother on a hat stand as punishment for tearing up his Valentine card, Susan (former Playboy cover girl Barbi Benton) arrives at the hospital to pick up test results, little realizing that the psycho is back and has changed her medical records.

This somehow leads to Susan being detained by the medical staff and subjected to the kind of sleazy assessments Playmates usually receive in horror pictures, but not only does Barbi prove a great screamer, she can take a nude prostrate exam with the best of them.

About halfway through the film, Susan’s boyfriend Jack, who’s been waiting in the car the whole time, finally comes to the rescue and….loses his head to the psycho’s bone saw. Said noggin is then delivered to Susan in a bow-tied box, but when she summons help it’s been replaced by a cake, leading the too-dumb-to-be-believable nurses to restrain her etc. Then they wander off alone for an appointment with the psycho’s saw etc etc.

Best described as “uncomplicated”, Hospital Massacre seems to be winking at the audience on occasion, but it’s hard to tell. Certain scenes, such as when the ‘blood’ dripping on Susan’s shoes is revealed to be ketchup from a creepy patient’s hamburger, verge on parody, but with performances so unrestrained and a narrative so bizarre, it’s difficult to judge whether or not the filmmakers were trying to be funny.

Hostel Part II (2007)

Everybody seems to hate Eli Roth and Hostel II is just an all-girl facsimile of Hostel I but he’s genuinely trying to make a modern day exploitation movie here, even throwing in cameos from Edwige Fenech (All The Colors Of The Dark) and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust), who gets one of the film’s best scenes as “The Italian Cannibal.”

Judged from that perspective, Hostel II works better than Rob Zombie’s Halloween reboot (released the same year), with a real 70s feel to the unrestrained narrative. It’s also nastier and bloodier, most explicitly in a sequence where a naked woman is hung upside down while another woman cuts her and bathes in her blood.

Throw in a decapitation, genital mutilation and a character being ripped apart by dogs and you’ve got a good old Drive-in movie that was made for multiplexes. If Roth added scratches and a few fake trailers, he could’ve given audiences a cult movie instead of a gratuitous sequel.

House Of The Devil (2009)

Burned by his experience on Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, director Ti West threw caution to the wind and set out to make a low budget, slowly-paced movie with a retro look, and to hell with what anyone else thought.

His singlemindedness paid off because House Of The Devil is one of his best films, a return to the days when horror movies were about anticipation rather than instant gratification. Shot on 16mm, and set in 1983, the movie manages to do something new with that hoariest of horror clichés, the terrified babysitter, but to reveal any more of the plot would be unthinkable.

This is the kind of film that separates the adolescent boys from the men - viewers that aren’t willing to go along with the deliberate pacing should really stick to movies about sparkly vampires.

The House On The Edge Of The Park (1980)

The House On The Edge Of The Park isn’t your average home invasion movie – it’s far more explicit than that. Loaded with all the sleaze, graphic violence and senselessness found only in 42nd Street’s finest trash, this Italian Last House On The Left wannabe (from the director of Cannibal Holocaust, no less) was never going to escape unscathed in the UK.

After being denied a theatrical certificate, Ruggero Deodato’s movie appeared on video in October 1982 and was subsequently pulled from shelves in July 1983 ahead of a successful prosecution for obscenity. When finally re-released in 2002, the movie was shortened by nearly twelve minutes, with most of the violence wreaked by David Hess (who essentially reprises his character from Last House) hitting the cutting room floor.

In 2006, the movie was screened uncut at Aberystwyth University as part of the BBFC’s research into responses to sexual violence in films. After prompting both walkouts and laughter, the movie was re-released in with only 42 seconds of cuts.

Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf (1985)

The ten thousandth birthday of werewolf leader Stirba (Sybil Danning) is approaching, which will cause all other werewolves to reveal themselves unless Christopher Lee, Reb Brown and Annie McEnroe venture to Transylvania to destroy her. So far, so camp, but then the narrative flies off into the stratosphere.

Danning’s presence usually signifies a fairly high jiggle quotient, though here she’s required not just to disrobe but to break out in fur for a lycanthropic ménage a trois that must rank as one of the least erotic, most unintentionally (?) funny nude scenes ever filmed. When she’s not flanked by naked, cooing werewolves, the Playmate wears shades and a leather catsuit, shoots laser beams from her fingertips and causes noses to bleed and eyeballs to rupture with a mystical chant. She can also transform gargoyles into rubbery predators that suck their victim’s intestines out through their mouths, which is all her castle seems to have in the way of security since the ‘guards’ are more likely to be found indulging their orgiastic proclivities.

She even keeps McEnroe’s imperilled heroine, clad in rags and slathered in fake blood, chained up in an unlocked and unguarded cellar so that when our heroes arrive they can walk straight in. Armed with nothing less than the Holy Grail, Lee’s final confrontation with Stirba proves something of a letdown as, having expended her arsenal of colour-swirls, all it takes to defeat the werewolf queen is a single thrust of a titanium blade.

The Human Centipede (2007)

You can say this for Tom Six: he’ll never be mistaken for Walt Disney. A filmmaker with the appeal of an early 70s John Waters, Six spins an outrageous story with sledgehammer subtlety but tells it with such conviction that you don’t want to look away. His masterpiece thus far is The Human Centipede (First Sequence), a movie that goes out of its way to shock and disturb.

The Film tells the story of Dr Heiter (Dieter Laser), a gifted surgeon whose specialty is separating conjoined twins, but since his retirement, he’s concentrated mainly on his favourite hobby: joining creatures together. In order to give himself a “pet”, he kidnaps three tourists and connects them mouth to anus so that they share a single digestive system.

The pet must then be housebroken, so Heiter teaches the trio to move as one in his garden, beating them when they fail or when their cries keep him awake at night. Because you’re not required to show modesty around pets, he even disrobes in front of them before taking a swim in his birthday suit.

Humanoids From The Deep (1980)

It’s the Carter era, so pessimism is understandably rife, especially in the Californian fishing village of Noyo, where livelihoods are threatened by dwindling fish stocks. As is standard procedure, the local salmon cannery hires a marine biologist to treat the fish with an experimental growth hormone that has the unfortunate side effect of producing monsters that wade ashore with the unspeakable on their minds.

Which, if you think about it, was bound to happen. When you genetically engineer salmon to grow faster and develop larger brains, naturally they’re going to turn into a bunch of guys in rubber costumes who’ll invade your town, kill your dogs and mate with your daughter so she can give birth to something with gills in the final scene.

Produced by Roger Corman, Humanoids is way trashier than anything you’ve ever watched on the SyFy Channel. It’s the quintessential sleazefest, never missing an opportunity to have its female characters model swimwear, go skinny-dipping or be carried off screaming by rape-minded rubber monsters, but if you think there’s little more to the proceedings than tit shots, you’re sadly mistaken. There’s bloodletting also.

I Drink Your Blood (1970)

Clearly gunning for Night Of The Living Dead’s closed-in, apocalyptic feel (the protagonists even head into the cellar during the climax) and playing off the then-recent Charles Manson slayings, I Drink Your Blood isn’t always on the money but still delivers a rousing sleazefest with the colour photography and brisk pacing that George Romero’s movie lacked. Critically, though, Romero had better actors, a killer pay-off and, in particular, a more credible set up.

When a local girl is assaulted, blame falls on a group of hippies who call themselves the “sons and daughters of Satan.” After deciding to take the law into his own hands, an old man is doped with “that stuff they call LSD”, beaten and thrown out, which only angers his grandson. Taking blood from a rabid dog’s corpse, the young fella sneaks into the local bakery, injects some fresh-baked pastries and hawks them to the family members, who immediately tool up with knives and axes for a foaming-at-the-mouth rampage.

Among the manifestations of rabies are, of course, the sudden and uncontrollable urge to hack up strangers with an electric carving knife, as well as a pathological fear of water, leading to some amusing scenes of the infected being repelled simply by being splashed. “Do you realize what you’ve done?” asks one horrified character. “Yes,” the grandson replies, “but I hope you won’t tell grandpa.”

Ilsa: She Wolf Of The S.S. (1975)

The least shocking thing about this much-analysed film is that its lead actress, Dyanne Thorne, later became an ordained minister and co-founded the International Science of Mind Prayer Circle in Las Vegas.

As the eponymous Nazi villainess, however, she conducts experiments on her female prisoners, the kind that involve phallic implements and no clothes. She also sleeps with the men (castrating anyone who disappoints her), but eventually she meets a prisoner who can withhold his orgasm and….well, enough already.

Needless to say, the combination of Nazi imagery, torture sequences and softcore porn made the film a target for censors, and the film was banned in Australia and Norway. The latter claimed that since they’d been invaded by Nazis only three decades earlier, they’d already suffered enough.

Inferno (1980)

The first indication that Inferno would be problematic came when Dario Argento screened the movie for the President of Twentieth Century Fox, who told him the picture was “too strong” for American tastes and sent it straight to video. The film played theatrically in the UK, but a movie from the director of the successfully prosecuted Tenebrae was never going to escape unscathed and the film was added to the banned list in August 1984.

There are some grisly moments as Leigh McCloskey’s hero searches for his sister in New York but nothing that compares to the highlights of Tenebrae or Suspiria, and the film’s presence on the DPP list seems more like guilt by association than anything else. Inferno escaped prosecution, however, and was available in a cut version in 1987 before being released in its entirety in 2010.

Infestation (2009)

You’ve probably never heard of this giant bug movie, and thanks to The Asylum et al, you’re probably sick of creature features, but Infestation has several things going for it, including better than average monsters.

A combination of practical and digital effects, these suckers can take over a city in a heartbeat, cocooning the inhabitants and storing them for food. Led by Cooper (Christopher Marquette), a slacker in the Chuck mould, a handful of survivors arm themselves and attempt to destroy the bugs’ nest.

A movie that never takes itself too seriously, Infestation asks such important questions as, “Can you use a Taser against a giant bug?” (Yes, but the bugs tend to explode). Packing more fun into its 92 minutes then you’ve seen in a dozen Syfy films, Infestation is one big bug movie you need to check out.

Inside (2007)

Leave it to the French, the only filmmakers more twisted than the Japanese, to come up with this messed-up home invasion story, which on the surface doesn’t seem so big a deal. With its minimal cast and locations, Inside doesn’t promise to stretch the boundaries of horror overmuch, but just wait.

It’s Christmas Eve and Sarah (Alysson Paradis) is preparing to give birth to her first child when she’s imprisoned in her home by a mysterious woman who kills anyone that attempts to help her. This stranger turns out to be the midwife from hell, determined to deliver the child, steal it and raise it as her own.

Though it came out in the middle of the so-called “torture porn” wave, Inside doesn’t really belong in a box with Saw, Hostel, Captivity et al, and clearly wasn’t made for an audience of teenage boys. Turning their back on the lowest common denominator, directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury instead amp up the claustrophobia. Their forthcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel must really be something.

Invasion Of The Bee Girls (1973)

When several top-level scientists die from “sexual exhaustion”, a government agent investigates and uncovers the truth: the perpetrators are a group of beautiful women who just happen to be human/insect hybrids. Stuck in their reproductive cycle, the hybrids continue mating until their partner expires.

The scientists’ widows are then abducted and transformed into Bee Girls by being stripped naked, smothered in beeswax and left in a transformation chamber, from which they emerge wearing black contact lenses. Most of the female supporting players are strippers, Playmates and porn queens (including Colleen Brennan and Rene Bond), so you can probably imagine how the rest of the movie plays out.

You wouldn’t know it from the nudity-heavy trailer, but the script is by Nicholas Meyer (The Seven Per Cent Solution, Star Trek II), who isn’t considered a grindhouse aficionado. Tellingly, there’s a credit for a “Script Consultant” (“Rewrite Man”), so whenever characters discuss psychosomatic death, it’s Meyer, and whenever a breast pops out….you get the idea.

Island Of Death (1975)

Mindful of the profits being made by cheap exploitation films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), first time director Nico Mastorakis set out to make the most shocking film imaginable (and in the process turn a tidy profit). After completing a script in one week, he took a crew out to the Greek island of Mykonos and filmed a bizarre tale of a duo on a killing spree.

The first hint that Celia (Jane Ryall) and her brother Christopher (Robert Behling) might not playing with a full deck comes when they enjoy a moment of passion inside a phone booth – during a call to their mother, no less. Claiming to be doing the Lord’s work, they proceed to rid the island of its homosexuals, hippies and nymphomaniacs, dispatching each victim in a brutal and gory fashion.

For reasons known only to the filmmakers, Christopher also enjoys a moment of passion with a goat, after which he slays the animal and returns to his holy quest. This scene comes out of leftfield, lasts a few moments, and then is never referred to ever again, making you question its importance to the narrative.

In the UK, the theatrical print was shorn of eight minutes, and when the film appeared on video in November 1982, it wasn’t long before moral watchdogs called for it to be banned and prosecuted. The film eventually reappeared in its uncut form in 2010.

I Spit On Your Grave (1978)

As Day Of The Woman, Meir Zarchi’s movie did little business until it was acquired by The Jerry Gross Organization, who changed the title and gave the picture a memorable (if inaccurate) tag line: “This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned four men beyond recognition….but no jury in America would ever convict her! I Spit On Your Grave….an act of revenge!”

If you need convincing of the film’s power, consider its censorship history in the UK. When it was formally submitted to the censor in 2001(after the uncertified video release was banned and prosecuted in the early 80s), the BBFC cited Article 10 of the European Convention of Rights (which “guarantees freedom of expression but does allow restrictions to be placed on such freedoms”) as justification for chopping seven minutes from the film, excising the sequence where Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) is raped over a rock.

In 2010, the censors concluded that these cuts were “excessive” and re-released the film with 2 min 54 sec trimmed, reinstating any material “that emphasized the horrors of sexual violence.” In the same year, the remake passed with only 43 seconds trimmed, proving that they really don’t make them like they used to.

Jack Brooks Monster Slayer (2007)

Topping the list of monster movies that ought to be better known is this low-budget Canadian effort that features Robert Englund as a Professor who transforms into a creature after being possessed by an ancient evil.

Fortunately, one of his students is Jack Brooks (Trevor Matthews), an erstwhile plumber who has been in Anger Management since a one-eyed beast murdered his family years earlier. When Englund starts eating his own pupils, Jack’s just the right person to swing into action and save the day.

Eccentric, inventive and very funny, Jon Knautz’s film feels like a set-up for a franchise (Jack doesn’t become the Monster Slayer until the third act), and it’s too bad that those films never materialized because the movie provides a more solid foundation for a series than either Insidious or Paranormal Activity. There’s imagination at work here, and at no point does anyone watch a video of a door opening by itself.

Jack Frost (1997)

Not to be confused with the 1998 Michael Keaton movie of the same name, Jack Frost tells the story of a serial killer who, thanks to the kind of plot contrivances found only in horror movies, transforms into a killer snowman and takes revenge on the Sheriff who caught him.

The filmmakers were clearly under no impression that they were making a modern version of It’s A Wonderful Life, hence the scene where American Pie’s Shannon Elizabeth (in her acting debut) strips to the tune of 12 Days Of Christmas. She then has an encounter with the snowman, and without giving too much away, here’s a hint: Mr Frost certainly finds a novel use for his carrot.

Aside from that, it’s a perfectly humdrum and forgettable outing notable mainly for its director: Michael Cooney later wrote the very different Identity (2003) and is also an accomplished playwright.

John Dies At The End (2012)

When David Wong (Chase Williamson) sits down to talk to reporter Arnie (Paul Giamatti), he spins a whacked-out tale about body-snatching beings from other dimensions, a talking dog, phone calls from the future and a celebrity psychic who can destroy a creature made from cuts of meat by shouting at it.

Wong and his friend John Cheese (Rob Mayes) are no strangers to such phenomena, having acquired a reputation as paranormal investigators, but when John dies mysteriously and starts communicating with his friend from the afterlife, he leads David to a drug known as Soy Sauce that imbues the user with incredible powers, including an ability to transcend reality as we know it. To reveal more would be unthinkable (and bloody difficult), though there’s also a battle with a vast artificial intelligence in an alternate timeline. Obviously.

If you think that fractured synopsis makes the movie sound like a head-spinner….well, you’re right. This is as close to an actual trip as any filmmaker has yet committed to celluloid, and once it gets going, the constant flow of mind-bending invention never falters, never feels forced, phony or pretentious. If the South Park team ever remake David Lynch’s Lost Highway, it’ll look something like this.

Junk (2000)

Reservoir Dogs meets Re-Animator in this outrageous (and outrageously bloody) heist/zombie film, surely the most fun you’ll ever have reading subtitles.

The gory mayhem kicks off when a group of jewel thieves rendezvous with their colleagues at what they think is an abandoned army base. It isn’t – it’s home to a mad doctor’s experiments with DNX, a drug that reanimates the dead. As the gangsters start falling victim to zombies the doctor leads an attack on the base, little realizing that the zombie horde is being commanded by his late fiancée, the initial recipient of DNX.

To give you some idea of what’s in store, the Japanese pressbook promised “Torn up flesh, gouged entrails and splashing blood,” giving a fair idea of director Atsushi Moroga’s intent. Like Robert Rodriguez, he can stage a gun battle and loves comic book violence, but his make-up effects are on a par with Zombie Creeping Flesh and the ‘acting’ of the English-speaking players, whose scenes appear to have been tacked-on to expand the running time, are mostly good for laughs. If you can put that aside, then Junk is everything a zombies versus gangsters movie ought to be – loads of fun.

Jurassic City (2015)

In amongst all the usual rip-offs, knock-offs and jerk-offs that greeted the release of Jurassic World was a movie that, despite its obvious lack of budget, just wanted to give the audience a good time. Owing more to John Carpenter than Steven Spielberg, Jurassic City is basically Assault On Precinct 13 with sexy sorority girls, sinister scientists and rampaging raptors.

You see, there’s a bunch of hotties who find themselves behind bars just as a consignment of dinosaurs is rerouted to the jail (don’t ask), and faster than you can say “unbelievable plot contrivance”, the girls end up being pursued through the corridors by flesh-eating dinos. So if you like chicks with guns and don’t mind SyFy Channel-level effects, you need to own this movie.

What seals the deal is the cast, which includes Ray Wise (Twin Peaks), Kevin Gage (Heat) and Vernon Wells (Mad Max 2), though female leads Dana Melanie and Kayla Carlyle also do well with otherwise thankless roles. The movie ends on a cliffhanger, so hopefully director Sean Cain is planning on bringing the survivors back when the Jurassic World sequel comes out.

King Kong Lives (1986)

A decade after Dino de Laurentiis blew $24m on an intentionally camp (but mostly stupid) King Kong remake, a sequel that played it straight arrived in theaters– and immediately became a camp classic.

Being asked to believe that Kong survived his climactic tumble is one thing; being told that Dr Linda Hamilton has been looking after him in Atlanta ever since is more likely to raise a smirk. However, by the time Lance Kerwin’s explorer chances across a double-D female Kong in Borneo while Hamilton carries out a heart transplant on The King using oversized instruments and a crane, you may well be helpless with laughter.

Movie scientists are of course idiots so the doc keeps our hirsute hero chained up in a hangar patrolled by a single guard, who proclaims, “the other monkey’s gone apeshit” as Kong gets a whiff of the female’s scent and decides to break free. Somehow able to grab her and elope without being followed or spotted, he takes his new bride to “Honeymoon Ridge” so he can make goo-goo eyes at her, snuggle up and show her why they call him The King. Funny by itself, this scene works even better when you realize it’s two men inside the monkey suits.

King Kong Vs Godzilla (1962)

The US version of Toho’s third Godzilla movie has some serious flaws: the original score has been eliminated and some dreadful new scenes featuring American actors (including a sequence where a “noted scientist” explains that Kong has a brain the size of a pea) have been added.

It’s worth it, though, if only to see Godzilla (in his first colour film) emerge from a glacier and stomp ashore to smash model buildings and melt toy tanks with his radioactive breath. Meanwhile, two explorers discover King Kong on an island where Japanese actors in black body paint play the “natives”, and the insanity spirals from there.

Following an innocuous first encounter (which sees Kong walk away scratching his head, no match for Godzilla’s death ray), the pair’s climactic fight is all punches, headbutts and flying kicks, setting the standard for Toho’s future monster team-ups. It’s spectacular stuff, so let’s hope the 2020 remake does the pair justice.

Lady Terminator (1989)

This is your typical Indonesian Terminator rip-off – the villain is the South Sea Queen of Asian folklore, whose sexual partners lose their pride and joy to the eel between her legs. When one Gentleman caller removes the eel, the Queen vows to avenge the “insult” by returning to claim the man’s ancestors.

A century later, the Queen possesses a bikini-clad ‘anthropologist’, causing her to act and dress like an Austrian bodybuilder. So far out so good, but then it really kicks into gear as director H Tjut Djalil rips scenes straight from James Cameron’s movie, including a shoot-out at a Tech Noir-ish bar and a sequence where our injured antagonist makes a pit stop to address her wounds.

The running gun battles are probably the least interesting part of a movie with this much blood, nudity, stupidity, bad hair and laughable dialogue, the kind of experience that words alone could not do justice to. Sure, it’s a knock-off, but it’s the brashest, craziest, most unapologetically outrageous knock-off you’re likely to see, whose sheer chutzpah makes it a much better bet than Terminator Genisys.

The Last House On The Left (1972)

If ever an exploitation movie had greater intent than to appeal to the lowest common denominator, it’s Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left. Directed by a Professor of Humanities, and inspired by Ingmar Berman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), the film seems more interested in contrasting the lifestyles of the central characters than in exploiting the violence that brings them together.

In 1974, the first of many battles with the BBFC began when examiner Stephen Murphy rejected the film for theatrical release. He wrote: “We can find no redeeming merit in script, in acting, in character development or in direction which would lead us to feel that this muddly [sic] film is worth salvaging….Maybe we are wrong. But if we are to go into this area of sexual violence, it will have to be for a film in which we detect greater merit than this.”

A decade later, the situation escalated when police seized uncertified VHS copies of the film, which was subsequently banned and successfully prosecuted for obscenity. After years of disputes and appeals, the movie finally became legally available to watch (with cuts) in 2002, but it remained unavailable in its uncut form until 2008. By an extraordinary coincidence, a bigger-budgeted remake hit cinemas exactly one year later. It was passed uncut.

The Legend Of Hell House (1973)

The Legend Of Hell House boasts a fine script (by Richard Matheson, based on his novel), good direction by John Hough (Twins Of Evil) and a cast that includes Roddy McDowall, Pamela Franklin, Clive Revill and Gayle Hunnicutt.

It’s a spin on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House, with a team of paranormal researchers sent to “the Mount Everest of haunted houses” to collect evidence of life after death. Once inside, the crockery starts to rattle, furniture moves by itself and there’s a black cat that leaps out at nicely-timed intervals. Also, the movie employs a number of plot devices not normally seen in PG-rated fare.

Overcome with “autoerotic phenomena”, the lead investigator’s otherwise dull wife attempts to seduce McDowall while, later on, Franklin has an erotic encounter of her own with a spirit – a scene that was later spoofed, none too well, in Scary Movie 2.

Little Shop Of Horrors (1986)

Legendary as “The Film Shot In Two Days”, you wouldn’t expect Roger Corman’s The Little Shop Of Horrors (1960) to inspire an off-off-Broadway musical but that’s exactly what happened in 1982 when Alan Menken and Howard Ashman took it to the stage.

Directed by Frank Oz, this film version boasts incredible creature design (by Lyle Conway) and pitch-perfect casting with Rick Moranis just right as the florist’s assistant (and full-time loser) whose “unusual” new plant needs blood to survive. He’s matched by Ellen Greene (reprising her stage role) as his would-be girlfriend, while the excellent supporting cast includes Bill Murray, John Candy and Christopher Guest. Steve Martin, as the dentist, should’ve gotten his own movie.

In this version, the plant (“Audrey II”) speaks with the voice of Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops, and in one of the standout scenes, Audrey II performs “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space”, which became the first song containing profanity to receive an Oscar nomination (it lost out to Top Gun – boo!).

“You can keep The Thing, keep the It, keep the creature, they don’t mean sh*t!” Audrey II sings. They really don’t remake them like they used to, do they?

Lone Wolf & Cub 2: Baby Cart At The River Styx (1972)

When we first met Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama) in Sword Of Vengeance, he was shown passionlessly carrying out his duties as the official Shogunate Executioner before being forced into exile by a shadowy clan that murdered his wife. This sequel picks up shortly after those events, with Itto surviving on the road in rural Japan, offering his services as an assassin for 500 pieces of gold.

Hired by a group of villagers to murder the Gods Of Death, 3 brothers whose costumes will look familiar to anyone who’s seen Big Trouble In Little China, Itto must also contend with a group of female ninjas sent to finish him once and for all. Can one man, who wheels his young son in the eponymous baby cart, defeat an army and track down The Gods Of Death?

Of course he can, and over the course of 81 minutes there’ll be several amazing fight sequences (who would’ve thought you could attack someone with a radish?) backed by crisp photography and incredible period detail. Forget Hollywood’s samurai films – this is the real deal.

The Machine Girl (2008)

A revenge movie with a difference, The Machine Girl is an impassioned plea for restraint that argues violence never solves anything and that diplomacy will always save the day.

Nah, just kidding – it’s a movie about a shining innocent who avenges her brother’s murder by killing those responsible, but when she has her arm cut off as punishment she she seeks medical advice from her local mechanic (wouldn’t you?), who stitches up the wound with a needle and thread.

Given a replacement limb in the form of a custom-made machine gun that can blast flesh from bone and blow gaping holes in its targets, this “machine girl” so terrifies the Yakuza that they hire a group of samurai warriors in bulletproof football helmets and shoulder pads.

Indefensible, senseless and as subtle as a chainsaw, Machine Girl exists for no reason other than to see how much gratuitous bloodshed it can squeeze into its running time. There’s really no reason not to like it.

Madmen Of Mandoras (1963)

On the fictitious Caribbean island of Mandoras, a “leading scientist” is being held captive by Nazis interested in his antidote for G-gas, a lethal nerve agent they intend to release across the globe. This diabolical masterplan could only have been thought up by the still-living head of Adolf Hitler, which resides in a bulletproof jar and occasionally transforms into an unconvincing prop.

Unavailable for years, Madmen Of Mandoras was sold to television in 1968 as They Saved Hitler’s Brain (still bearing a 1963 copyright) and expanded to a Network TV-friendly 91 minutes with the inclusion of snooze-inducing new footage. Clumsily integrated into the narrative, the new scenes bring the movie to a grinding halt and serve only to jumble up the storyline.

In its original version, however, it’s a silly-but-fun B-grade thriller that doesn’t deserve the critical enmity it has inspired over the years. Judge for yourself.

Maniac (1980)

Directed by the auteur behind the skin flicks Hot Honey and The Violation Of Claudia (and funded in part by the profits from those films), Maniac is a time-capsule that captures New York at its worst. This is not the gleaming city seen in the 2012 remake but a cesspool full of XXX movie houses, adult bookstores and other business run by people who work without a tie.

It’s the perfect setting for a grim, grimy movie about an overweight Vietnam veteran (played with bug-eyed abandon by Joe Spinell) who places the scalps of his female victims on his assembly on mannequins. After clothing a mannequin, he carries it over to his bed and starts talking to it, pretending it’s his dead mother.

Full of explicit mutilations (including an infamous exploding head), Maniac’s claim to fame is Tom Savini’s expert gore effects, most of which were cut from the UK home video release. The multi-region Blu-ray is uncut, so you can finally experience the movie the way its makers intended.

The Man Who Saved The World aka Turkish Star Wars (1982)

You’ve never seen a knock off that’s as jaw-on-the-floor strange as The Man Who Saved The World, which rips off footage from George Lucas’ film, steals John Williams theme from Raiders Of The Lost Ark and throws in ninja battles for good measure.

There’s no point attempting to summarize the plot (particularly as some prints aren’t subtitled), but suffice it to say, if you’ve ever wondered what the Turkish equivalent of Ed Wood might assemble if given free rein to cobble together his own space opera, here’s your new favourite film.

In amongst all the stock footage are zombies, wizards and skeletons on horseback, though special mention must be made of the film’s villain, who wears shoulder pads and spiked headgear. Unlike Darth Vader, though, he’s defeated way too easily – all the hero has to do is karate chop him in half.

Martyrs (2008)

Whatever your opinion of Pascal Laugier’s film, the first 20 minutes certainly grab your attention. When a seemingly innocent family (including their children) are murdered in cold blood, the killer calls a friend and explains that they were the people who kidnapped and tortured her 15 years earlier.

The less you know about what happens next the better because this is a movie you have to experience for yourself, preferably with a breathless, visibly shaken crowd. You can say that it blows its credibility early on, relies too heavily on repetitive scenes of torture and that the final explanation for the crimes is senseless, but it never shies away from its exploration of the depths of human depravity, and therein lies its power.

If it copped out with a “safe” ending, Martyrs would be easy to dismiss (and send up – check out the remake), but it has a single-minded desire to “go there”, and whether or not you want to follow, or think the journey was worth taking, you have to admire its resolve.

Massacre In Dinosaur Valley (1985)

Directed by the auteur behind Women In Fury, Undergraduate Girls and the disarmingly titled A Policewoman On The Porno Squad, Massacre In Dinosaur Valley is loaded with gratuitous nudity, cheesy laughs, gratuitous nudity, fake gore and did we mention gratuitous nudity?

It’s your typical story of an Indiana Jones-ish adventurer and two lingerie models who, following a plane crash, are set upon by a succession of leering voyeurs. First, and most bizarre, are the tribesmen who force the girls into their birthday suits so they can dance for a claw-handed deity who emerges from a cloud of smoke.

Escaping with suspicious ease, they next encounter a perverted slave owner. While he attends to his illegal mining operation, the girls are “entertained” by his lesbian henchwoman, who whisks them off for a first date they’ll never forget.

The film also lends itself to a drinking game: take a drink every time the director comes up with another way of denuding his cast.

Masters Of The Universe (1987)

No movie that stars Courtney Cox, Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella and Billy Barty can be ignored, but it’s only the absence of Lou Ferrigno that suggests we’re watching anything more than an Italian knock-off. Unable to mount a large-scale picture that remained close to the cartoon series, Cannon Films choose to set the majority of the action in present day California - not a bad idea considering how cheap and cheerful Castle Greyskull looks.

Unfortunately, watching the shirtless, barely coherent Lundgren stumble around a contemporary setting has an unintentional comic effect. Seeing him enter a music store in pursuit of a “Cosmic Key” with which Skeletor plans to rule the universe is one thing, but by the time He-Man starts driving around in a pink car, your jaw will be on the floor.

Masters might be short on spectacle, but like the spaghetti imitations it often resembles, it’s never boring and kind of endearing in its own goofy way. Lundgren, then white-hot after Rocky IV, was never going to challenge Arnie or Sly in the personality stakes, but his blandness is compensated for by Langella, who’s a better villain than the movie deserves. Throw in some scenes of He-Man ‘flying’ that look suspiciously like the actor being towed, add some cornball dialogue and you have yourself a riotously silly way of wasting ninety minutes.

Someday, all toy commercials will be this much fun.

Meatball Machine (2005)

If you’re looking for an over the top splatter movie where alien parasites engage each other in combat, look no further. It’s not known where these creatures come from, but they have only one purpose and it’s not to improve life on Earth.

Upon their arrival, the aliens take over human bodies and transform them into Necroborgs, biomechanical weapons intent on tearing their opponent apart. Think Mighty Morphin Power Rangers by way of Tetsuo, with a healthy dose of Blood Feast, and you’re on the right track.

Meatball Machine was the breakout movie for special effects creator Yoshihiro Nishimura, who later directed the equally berserk Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl. For splatter fans, his movies are a real find: every one features mutants, dismemberment performed with power tools and spurting blood that hits the lens. The uninitiated should check out Mutant Girl Squad (2010) and Dead Sushi (2012).

Microwave Massacre (1983)

When a construction worker acquires a taste for female flesh after killing and eating his wife, he tells his psychiatrist, “I can’t make love to a woman unless I eat her.” Misunderstanding his patient, the psychiatrist advises him to stick to his current path, assuring him that chicks LOVE that sort of thing.

So begins Microwave Massacre, a comedy whose ‘hero’ says things like “I’m so hungry, I could eat a whore!” and throws dinner parties where he serves “Peking chick.” Eventually, his friends also develop a taste for cooked flesh, so it’s not long before he’s taking an axe to strippers and call girls he slow cooks to perfection in his microwave.

There are movies that present cannibalism as a shocking, taboo-breaking subject, movies that consider it fair game for gallows humour and then there’s Microwave Massacre, where naked starlets are smeared in grease and sliced in half. It’s not clever, not subtle and you certainly wouldn’t call it well-made, but there are enough echoes of Blood Feast and A Bucket Of Blood to make it worth a look.

The Mist (2007)

After directing the King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (and receiving three Oscar nominations in the process), Frank Darabont again turned to his favourite author for inspiration and made one of the best horror movies of the 2000s.

One thing you notice about The Mist now is how many of the film’s actors – Melissa McBride, Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn, Sam Witwer, Juan Gabriel Pareja and Tiffany Morgan – later appeared in The Walking Dead, but this is a much darker vision of humanity than appears on AMC. The real horror in this film isn’t the monster lurking in the mist but the reactions of the people trapped inside a grocery store, whose behaviour becomes increasingly erratic as the world falls apart.

Like King’s novella, it’s essentially a 50s monster movie given a modern spin, but Darabont gives the material a more downbeat feel and adds what turns out to be one of the movie’s most memorable scenes – a grim ending that’s very different from the source material. The perfect post-9/11 monster movie, The Mist brings on the apocalypse not by imitating George Romero’s vision but by throwing regular people (flawlessly played by a terrific cast) into an irregular situation and watching them react.

Monster Dog (1984)

Alice Cooper is no stranger to horror, but his first leading role is strictly for aficionados of strange cinema.

Directed by the incomparable Claudio Fragasso (Troll 2), Monster Dog delivers everything you’d expect from an Italian cheapie – bad acting, terrible dubbing and a nonsense plot. Cleverly cast against type as a rock star, Cooper returns to his hometown after a twenty-year hiatus, his arrival coinciding with a spate of grisly homicides.

This is too close to home for Coop, whose father was stricken with “a heart disease that transforms the patient into some kind of madman, a beast that goes howling at the moon” and went on his own rampage twenty years earlier. A torch-bearing mob eventually curtailed his lunar activities but, naturally enough, their ancestors don’t believe in coincidences and arrive at the singer’s house with their guns drawn, so picture their surprise when the real monster turns up to pick them off one by one.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)

You played the game, heard the soundtrack and read the novelization with your finger following the words and your lips moving, so you probably know that this sequel to the 1995 videogame adaptation is aiming slightly lower than, say, Battleship Potemkin.

Should you require a loud, brainless movie to go with your Saturday night takeaway, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation has enough cheesy effects, cheesy acting and cheesy fight scenes for 2 movies. Christopher Lambert doesn’t return (never a good sign) so taking his place is James Remar, who dons a grey wig, strokes his chin and delivers stoic platitudes, unintentionally setting up one of the movie’s biggest laughs.

Sacrificing his immortality in order to live as a human (only to regain it before the end credits), Remar undergoes a bewildering transformation from a white-robed sage into a kung-fu warrior with a buzzcut. Imagine Gandalf transforming into Gary Daniels and….on second thoughts, don’t bother.

Mother Of Tears (2007)

Described by the New York Times as “silly, awkward, vulgar, outlandish, hysterical, inventive, revolting, flamboyant, titillating, ridiculous, mischeivous uproarious, cheap, priceless, tasteless and sublime” Mother Of Tears is the concluding chapter in Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers Trilogy” and, disappointingly for fans, it doesn’t measure up to Suspiria (1977) or Inferno (1980).

On the plus side, however, there’s plenty of unintentional humour. Argento’s budget is so low that he has to stage Armageddon as cheaply as possible, resulting in a montage of women baring themselves in public while men take clubs to parked cars. Moreover, if the sudden appearance of gangs of loud and obnoxious young girls signifies the end of the world, we really are in trouble.

It’s all something to do with Mater Lacrimarum, the Mother of Tears herself, who revels in chaos and human despair and wants to usher in the second era of witches, the Bush-Cheney years having been a bust. Hazily defined at best, she turns out to be a beautiful naked witch in hastily-applied mascara that can only be defeated by burning the single stitch of clothing she appears to own, thus causing an earthquake. Obviously.

The Mummies Of Guanajuato (1972)

When a mummy murders a midget tour guide, Mexican wrestlers Blue Demon and Mil Mascaros investigate and discover that the mummy is a former wrestler seeking vengeance on their colleague El Santo. You see, a hundred years ago, Santo’s great-grandaddy beat this fella in the ring, and it stuck in his craw a little bit, so he had himself mummified and vowed to return from the grave to avenge himself on the luchador’s ancestor, who he somehow knew would also be a luchador.

For all the talk about El Santo, though, he’s barely in this one, and mostly sits the movie out until the final reel, when he appears out of nowhere and vanquishes the mummy menace in a few minutes. Until then, several bizarre musical numbers pad out the running time.

The Mummies of Guanajuato may have three of lucha libre’s biggest stars, but it doesn’t really offer three times the excitement, so if you can’t take troubadour bands, be prepared to fast forward.

Murphy’s Law (1986)

If you’re only familiar with Charles Bronson through his films with Michael Winner, you might find it hard to believe that he was also in The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen, among others. He’s a long way from his glory days in Murphy’s Law, but it’s still the pick of his 80s films.

Framed for the murder of his ex-wife, Chuck hightails it to a rustic cabin, where his ex-partner takes him in, gives him a weapon and says “take care, old friend.” So we know the guy’s as good as dead. Sure enough, when Chuck leaves to confront whoever set him up, along comes psychotic Carrie Snodgress who’s waging a vendetta against the men that put her away, including the partner, who she wastes on the spot.

All the expected clichés and caricatures are present and correct in this Cannon classic, but best of all are the eye-talian mobsters that Chuck tangles with. When one of them informs him of Murphy’s Law (“anything that can go wrong may result in a nosy cop taking a swim”), Bronson says: “The only law I know is Jack Murphy’s law. It’s very simple. Don’t fuck with Jack Murphy.”

My Little Eye (2002)

Before “reality TV” became a big fat cliché that was overused in a string of worthless films (see: The Task, One Missed Call etc), director Marc Evans proved you could still use the medium to explore the dark side of fame.

It’s a simple set-up: 5 young people, lured by a million dollar prize, agree to participate in a show being streamed live on the internet. If anyone leaves, everyone forfeits the cash. But what they don’t know is that one of them is a killer, and the show is a real-time snuff movie.

Unfortunately for Evans, his movie was released around the same time as a more high profile take on the same material. In Halloween: Resurrection, there’s another group participating in a reality TV show, only this time it’s coming from inside the Myers house on Halloween, and despite the house being rigged with cameras, Michael Myers appears to carve up the cast with his usual aplomb. It’s a laughable time-waster, very different from Evans’ smart, tightly controlled movie, so you know which to check out this Halloween.

Nailbiter (2012)

Sensibly eschewing the found footage, torture porn and generic teen slasher subgenres, Nailbiter gives us a cautionary tale that proves the wisdom of avoiding road trips during tornado season. Forced off the road by a tornado, a family takes refuge in the cellar of a seemingly abandoned house, and that’s where the true horror begins.

Unlike several other recent horror pictures, Nailbiter just wants to get on with the business of storytelling, and director Stephen Rea delivers a lean, entertaining effort that, while not dazzlingly original, still avoids the ‘been there, done that’ feel of most fare.

At no point does any character stop to namecheck George Romero, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven etc, nor does anyone experience a ‘Nilbog moment’ and proclaim the blindingly obvious. When finally revealed, the monster does resemble a rubbery Orc in a few shots and the ‘storm’ is clearly being generated by a rain machine, but that’s all.

The Nanny (1965)

One of Hammer’s most unsung films, The Nanny features a terrifying performance from Bette Davis, who plays a governess that murders her charges. Her latest ward is Joey, an emotionally disturbed 10-year-old who’s just returned from a children’s home, where he was remanded after drowning his sister.

Imagine Joey’s surprise when he returns home to his father (James Villiers, perennially cast as the snooty aristocrat) and mother (Wendy Craig, who’s best remembered for her comedy roles) to find creepy Davis willing to dote on him. Needless to say, he rebels, little realizing that Davis is not someone to trifle with. We don’t want to give too much away, so let’s just say that her preferred method of punishment is a short, sharp shock – involving water.

Davis, with a British accent, is so restrained as to make you forget about her other forays into horror, which usually saw her trying to outdo her co-stars. She was reportedly “difficult” on the set of The Nanny, but with a performance this good, why complain?

New York Ripper (1982)

The New York Ripper isn’t Lucio Fulci’s best film, but it’s certainly his most notorious – not only was the picture banned in the UK, the print was escorted out of the country by Her Majesty’s Constabulary.

Set in a grimy, run-down, pre-Giuliani New York, where every other person appears to be some kind of predator, NYR wallows in its own sleaze. There’s a mad killer (who speaks with Donald Duck’s voice) on the loose, but don’t expect any of Fulci’s usual cinematic flourishes as he’s far too interested in portraying the human condition at its lowest.

Mixed in with the prostitutes and live sex shows are some truly unpleasant sequences, such as when the killer ties up a young woman and tortures her with a razor blade, eventually slicing into her eyeball. Critics that accused the director of misogynistic excess may have a point.

A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

By 1984, the slasher genre seemed played out until Wes Craven added a supernatural element and introduced Freddy Krueger, a horror villain just begging to given his own franchise. Not only did his name bring to mind Krug from The Last House On The Left, but Craven would throw in more of the is-it-a-dream-or-isn’t-it sequences he’d first used in that movie.

Freddy is perhaps the best known horror movie villain of the 1980s, so famous that he appeared in music videos and on lunchboxes, and seemed to be on the cover of Fangoria every other month whether he had a movie out or not. In his debut, though, he isn’t much of a punster and remains mostly in the shadows, stalking a bunch of teenagers (including Johnny Depp) in their dreams before slashing them to ribbons.

For a movie from the MTV-obsessed, short attention span 80s, the level of invention shown here is remarkable, and the movie boosted the careers of Craven and Robert Englund, the latter of whom became a sort-of modern day Boris Karloff. It’s too bad that New Line Cinema rushed the sequels, cranking one out nearly every year until 1990, by which time the genre had once again run its course.

Night Of The Bloody Apes (1969)

Six years after Doctor Of Doom, director Rene Cardona remade the film (in colour) as Night Of The Bloody Apes, but even though the plot excises Gloria Venus and Golden Rubi, it starts with a bit of girl on girl wrestling. Our heroine here is Lucy Osorio (Norma Lazareno), who wears a bright red devil costume, (complete with horns), though her impact on the narrative is reduced to a few wrestling scenes and a bit where she answers the telephone in the nude. Her boyfriend is Lieutenant Arturo Martinez, and because it’s a small world he’s played by Armando Silvestre who was also a cop in Doctor Of Doom.

Martinez is investigating Dr Krallman, one of those B-movie scientists who thinks the only way to cure his son’s leukaemia is to steal a gorilla from the local zoo and transplant its heart into the boy’s body, which turns out to be a really bad idea. Transforming into a broader actor in a bad makeup job, the boy wanders across Mexico ogling showering senoritas and tearing apart anyone who gets in his way.

Extra gore and nudity were added to this dubbed version, including actual surgical footage that was “shocking” enough to land the movie on the Video Nasties list in the UK, where it was withdrawn and successfully prosecuted for obscenity. Don’t believe it: this is a cheesy good time, a mad melee of awkward dubbing, technical goofs and laughable dialogue.

Night Of The Demon (1980)

Night Of The Demon is your typical low-aiming exploitation movie, loaded with sleaze, fake gore and bad acting. The plot involves a dim-witted academic who leads some students into swamp country to look for Bigfoot – with hilarious consequences.

Looking like Lou Ferrigno covered in yak hair, this movie’s Bigfoot is one stealthy beast, capable of sneaking up on an unsuspecting lumberjack and divesting him of his axe before splitting his cranium in two. Clearly circus trained, he’s also able to make two knife-wielding girl scouts stab each other repeatedly while banging their heads together.

He is the romantic sort, though, which the students realize when a local girl describes her midnight encounter with our horny beast that lead to the birth of Bigfoot Jnr. This sets up a present-day reunion of sorts when junior knocks down the door and begins dismissing the class one by one, ripping out intestines, burning faces, tearing out throats and impaling bodies on pitchforks – while nobody attempts to escape.

Night Of The Hunted (1980)

French filmmaker Jean Rollin makes “lyrical” erotic thrillers, which is another way of saying his films are bizarre, slowly paced and beautiful to look at but otherwise empty. On the plus side, his female cast members get naked an awful lot.

Night Of The Hunted is one of his more surreal films, where a woman wakes up in a mysterious clinic whose patients all seem to be suffering from amnesia. In the hands of a Hollywood director, this would lead to a mind bending thriller full of chases and plot twists, but when Rollin’s cast is made up of hardcore performers, you know he has something different in mind.

There are multiple softcore sex scenes, a hint of lesbianism and some heavy doses of violence (a woman plunges a pair of scissors into her eyes), but then Rollin has to ruin it all with the explanation for why everyone’s mind is deteriorating – an environmental accident is slowly transforming them into zombies. Obviously. No other explanation is possible.

9 Deaths Of The Ninja (1985)

With its pre-credits action sequence, ‘epic’ theme song and flamboyant villains with silly names, as well as an appearance by Octopussy’s Vijay Amritraj, 9 Deaths thinks it’s a shoestring Bond movie, an ambition that’s derailed by saucer-eyed overacting, a supporting turn from Brent Huff (remember him in The Perils Of Gwendoline? Didn’t think so) and way too many unintentional laughs.

The problem with Moore-era Bonds was they often flirted with camp, what with all those comic strip villains and starlets named Chew Mee, but at least Roger’s smirk let you know the filmmakers were in on the joke. Here it’s hard to tell. There’s dwarf henchmen, naked female assassins, a villain that can catch a bullet, plus characters named Honey Hump and Madame Woo Pee, but it’s too earnest for it to be intentional.

Then there’s Blackie Dammett as Alby The Cruel, a wheelchair-bound Nazi in the Dr Strangelove mould, who when he can’t light his cigarette spits it out and shoots at it. You know Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis has watched this scene, if only to check out his dad’s acting.

Operation 67 (1967)

At the height of the Bond craze in the late 60s, Santo took a sabbatical from fighting monsters in order to track down terrorists planning to cause economic chaos. Swapping his trademark silver cape for a suit, he sets off on a globetrotting secret mission that involves lots of car chases and women in bikinis.

When a Spectre-like organization begins printing counterfeit money, Santo sets off in hot pursuit, but whether he’s relaxing on a beach, sitting in a nightclub or driving a car with built-in flamethrowers, he still wears his mask. Which begs the question: if he lost to an opponent, would they make him remove the mask before killing him?

Not that there’s any chance of Santo being defeated, mind you – like Bond, he’s an unstoppable force, capable of shooting down helicopters and forcing vehicles off the road with his own gadget-laden automobile. If you only see one Bond knock-off this year, make it this one.

Orgy Of The Dead (1965)

Ed Wood’s first collaboration with Bulgarian skinflick auteur “A.C. Stephen” (aka Steve Apostolof), Orgy Of The Dead began life as an 18-page script called Nudie Ghoulies to which Ed added The Mummy and The Wolf Man while Criswell, encoring from Plan 9 From Outer Space, was brought in as “Emperor of the Dead.” Once again, this incomparable MC introduces the proceedings as only he can, reading his demented dialogue (“It will please me very much to see the Slave Girl with her tortures”) from cue cards Ed was holding beneath the camera.

When the Emperor kidnaps an aspiring writer and his girlfriend, he forces them to watch ten striptease acts performed by such starlets as “Gold Girl” (who dances covered in gold paint), “Cat Girl” (who wears a crotchless catsuit) and “Slave Girl” (who dances naked with her hands bound).

Speaking of starlets, special mention must be made of Pat Barringer, whose dual role as the heroine and as Gold Girl allows her to give two amusingly bad performances. “Poor Pat Barringer,” muses John Andrews, who played The Wolf Man. “She thought she was going to be a big star. And she couldn’t even scream and make it convincing. She couldn’t do shit. And those tits are plastic, by the way.”

Outpost (2008)

In war-torn Eastern Europe, a group of mercenaries arrive at an underground bunker filled with dead bodies. Realizing they’re in an abandoned Nazi outpost with an armed enemy outside, the team dig in and prepare to fight but what they don’t realize is that the shady contractor who hired them is there to locate a particular piece of equipment – a machine that creates monsters.

Atmospheric, well cast and shot with a desaturated that adds to the mood, Outpost is one of the best British horror films of the 2000s. Steve Barker’s crisp direction keeps everything moving along at a fair clip and the script eschews absurdity by never mining the material for camp humour. Plus, how often do you get to see Ray Stevenson (Thor, Punisher: War Zone) and Richard Brake (31) killing Nazi zombies?

Outpost’s success meant that a sequel, the surprisingly entertaining Black Sun (also directed by Barker), emerged in 2012, but it’s a brave viewer who sticks around for the straight-to-DVD Outpost III: Rise Of The Spetsnaz.

Parasite (1982)

Demi Moore gets her first lead role in this low-budget Alien rip-off, but the real stars of the show are the eponymous creatures, which get loose and start chomping on a supporting cast that includes Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith and Cherie Currie of The Runaways (played by Dakota Fanning in the 2010 movie of the same name).

Filmed in 3D, Parasite never passes up an opportunity to have its creatures leap out at the viewer, most predictably when a street gang open a mysterious canister they’ve just found. Stan Winston created the parasites, and considering the obviously low budget he does a good job, designing slimy, eyeless creatures with rows of razor sharp teeth they use to tear through their prey.

One of the best effects has a parasite rip through a dead woman’s face and fly straight at the camera (obviously), so if you get a chance to see the film as it was originally presented, don’t pass up the opportunity.

Patrick Lives Again (1980)

So intent were the Italians on ripping off other pictures that they even swooped on 1978’s Patrick, which was neither very good nor a sizeable hit. A legit remake, starring Charles Dance and Sharni Vinson, appeared in 2013.

Filling the movie with gratuitous nudity and fake gore, director Mario Landi gives us one of most outrageous clones that ever met a projector bulb. In this version, Patrick is comatose following an accident and has (for reasons unexplained) developed psychic powers, which his mad scientist father uses to punish those he holds responsible for his boy’s condition.

Bodies are boiled alive in swimming pools, decapitated by car windows and graphically violated by a flying poker, but what really startles is Landi’s determined pursuit of the lowest common denominator. In one scene, a woman discovers a body hanging from a hook and, instead of raising the alarm, stops by a fountain to splash water on herself, causing her negligee to turn transparent.

Peeping Tom (1960)

Peeping Tom opened shortly before Psycho in the UK – and promptly wrecked the career of its director. In 1960, Michael Powell was the much-lauded co-director of The Tales Of Hoffmann, A Matter Of Live And Death and The Red Shoes, but here he was directing a sleazy film about a photographer who murders women and captures their expressions on film. Had he lost his mind?

It may involve a psychopathic killer, but Powell’s film couldn’t be more different from Psycho. It’s a cold, detached film that never skimps on the portrayal of London’s seamier side. The first scene shows the main character meeting – and then murdering – a prostitute, which is very different from Psycho’s “controversial” shots of Janet Leigh in her underwear.

Grim and unrelenting, this is by no means a “fun” picture, but it appears to have influenced Hitchcock’s later career. Returning to London in 1972 to shoot Frenzy, Hitch not only cast Anna Massey, Peeping Tom’s lead actress, but when it came to staging the first murder, Hitch showed it in full close-up, just like Powell.

Phantom Of The Paradise (1974)

In between borrowing from Alfred Hitchcock and adapting Stephen King, Brian De Palma made this trashy, thoroughly enjoyable rock opera version of The Phantom Of The Opera, which brought camp horror to the screen a year before The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Come to think of it, De Palma’s movie foreshadows Rocky Horror in several ways, from a deliberately OTT rocker named Beef (who looks like a cross between Frank N Furter and Meat Loaf) to the casting of Jessica Harper, who also appeared in Shock Treatment.

Wrongly promoted as a spoof back in 1974, the movie flopped when audiences failed to embrace songwriter Paul Williams (“We’ve Only Just Begun”) as an evil record tycoon whose duplicity results in a freak accident that disfigures a composer and causes him to take refuge inside The Paradise, a rock palace. You can probably guess the rest, but don’t expect to hear to hear anything classical – Williams composed the film’s score.

Pieces (1983)

In the hands of Juan Piquer Simon, the Spanish auteur who gave us flesh eating molluscs in Slugs, what should’ve been a simple Friday The 13th knock-off becomes an outrageous bloodbath where heads and arms are lopped off and a woman is cut in half by a chainsaw.

Pieces begins the way all movies should, with a boy taking an axe to his mother before cutting up the body and hiding in a closet as the police arrive. Forty years later, a black-garbed maniac carves up the female students on a Boston campus, using the body parts to create a human jigsaw. Could they be the same person?

Legendary among hardcore horror fans for its bad acting, absurd storyline and over the top direction, Pieces is a masterpiece of so-bad-it’s-good cinema. After nobody witnesses a student being decapitated on the front lawn in broad daylight, the Dean declares it an “unfortunate accident” and decides against closing down the campus. This leads to several more murders, most amusingly when a victim steps into an elevator with the killer, who she doesn’t realize is carrying a chainsaw until he revs it up.

Pink Flamingos (1972)

Pink Flamingos opens on a shot of a trailer home, setting the tone for a movie about drag queen Divine’s determination to retain the tabloid-bestowed title of “filthiest person alive” in the face of challenges from “two jealous perverts who hate Divine more than anything in the world.” The Marbles, played by David Lochary and Mink Stole, run a “baby ring”, selling the offspring of abductees to lesbian couples and ploughing the profits into porn stores and heroin operations that target inner city elementary schools.

But they can’t compete with a cross-dressing trailer resident who keeps his/her mentally ill mother in a playpen, allows her delinquent son to rape a woman sent to spy on them and is willing to break into their home and perform indescribable acts on their furniture.

For bad measure, John Waters also throws in Divine bestowing upon his/her son “a gift that only a mother can give”, a party montage that includes a guest contracting his sphincter in close-up, a kidnapped hitch-hiker being impregnated with a sperm-filled pipette and Divine eating a dog turd(set to How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?). How did Waters become so mainstream that he appeared on The Simpsons?

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

Everything you’ve heard about Ed Wood’s signature film is true, more or less. When his friend Bela Lugosi passed away, Ed decided to incorporate footage he’d shot of the actor into the movie, using a stand-in who was a foot taller and looked nothing like Lugosi to “seamlessly” integrate the scenes into the narrative.

You see, Lugosi’s character has been resurrected by some pompous aliens that want to destroy mankind before it can discover Solaranite, a means of exploding sunlight that will devastate the universe. With Lugosi, wrestler Tor Johnson and TV host Vampira under their command, the aliens’ plot is curtailed when their space ship catches fire, turns into a flying hubcap and explodes. The End.

Shot in 1956, this anti-masterpiece sat unreleased for three years until a distributor placed it on the bottom half of a double bill with Time Lock, a British thriller notable for an early appearance by Sean Connery. Becoming a staple of late night TV, the picture came to the attention of Stephen King (who called it “the worst horror film ever made”) as well as Harry and Michael Medved, whose book The Golden Turkey Awards elevated Wood from obscurity to the lofty position of “The Worst Director Of All Time.”

Psychomania (1973)

What can be more British than a film about a motorcycle gang that “terrorizes” a small town by being insufferably rude? Well, the leader is played by Nicky Henson (Downton Abbey), his mother is Beryl Reid (No Sex Please We’re British) and the Inspector on Henson’s trail is Robert Hardy (All Creatures Great And Small).

Following a Faustian pact, Henson commits suicide and immediately returns from the grave as an invincible version of his former self, prompting his friends to follow suit. Which they do – by leaping off buildings, throwing themselves in front of traffic, wading into lakes carrying rocks etc.

Played with its tongue firmly in its cheek, Psychomania has confounded viewers who don’t “get” the movie since its 1973 release. In amongst the dream sequences and a scene where Reid turns into a frog (long story) is a bizarre moment where Henson is buried with his motorcycle – only to drive his way out of his own grave seconds later. Moments like this are a litmus test for the audience – if you like your horror straight up and without irony, don’t bother watching.

The Psychopath (1966)

Leave it to Robert (middle name: “Author Of Psycho”) Bloch to concoct this bizarre tale of a killer who leaves dolls with each of his victims, which marked a highpoint in Freddie Francis’ otherwise patchy career as a director.

Intended to capitalize on Hammer’s psychological thrillers such as Taste Of Fear (which, because it’s a small world, were trying to capitalize on the success Psycho), The Psychopath could easily have been just another hacked-out thriller loaded with pop psychology, but there’s enough weirdness and gallows humour in Bloch’s script (he also wrote The House That Dripped Blood and Asylum) to keep it from becoming routine.

Weirdest of all is the sequence where one of the lead characters disappears and is discovered dressed in make-up and baby clothes, having been transformed into a human doll. Incidentally, the film’s American tag line (“Mother, may I go out to kill?”) inspired the Misfits song of the same name.

Quatermass And The Pit (1968)

Originally created for a 6-part BBC TV serial, Professor Bernard Quatermass is a pioneer of the UK’s space programme who, in the manner of all TV scientists, finds himself confronting alien forces on a weekly basis.

In Quatermass And The Pit, those forces explain how mankind evolved on Earth, and the answer holds up remarkably well, especially for a 1967 movie made on a meagre budget, featuring no major stars. There are several familiar faces, though: Julian Glover (For Your Eyes Only) is a pompous Colonel, while Hammer regulars Barbara Shelley and Duncan Lamont also appear.

Literate, fiercely intelligent, yet also capable of appealing to a mass audience, this is the ultimate filmed version of Kneale’s work (he was considerably less enthusiastic about Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment) as well as one of Hammer’s best films.

Queen Kong (1976)

Laughable in every respect apart from when it attempts to be funny, this no-budget sex comedy knock-off of Dino de Laurentiis’s King Kong (which itself was trying to capitalize on the success of Jaws) is so lame-brained and amateurish you can’t imagine anyone queuing up to see it. In fact, viewers never had the chance – “legal difficulties” meant it was never released theatrically and remained unseen until its DVD debut twenty-five years later.

Rula Lenska is looking for a “real man” to star in her jungle adventure film, but in 70s England the best she can find is Robin Askwith, who also played Timothy Lea in the Confessions movies. Venturing to “Lazanga, where they do the konga”, Askwith is kidnapped by the bikinied natives (led by Valerie Leon’s “Queen of the Nabongas”) who want him as a mate for their goddess, Queen Kong.

Portrayed by a female dancer in the World’s worst monkey suit, and looking even lamer than the creature in King Kong Escapes (1967), Queenie fights a plastic pterodactyl and, in a scene so bad it looks like a Saturday Night Live parody, a T-Rex that knocks over the “scenery”. Incredibly, the movie manages to get worse: witness the end credits song that includes the couplet, “You would stop yelling ‘rape’/ If I was just an ordinary household ape.”

Rampage (2009)

The first Uwe Boll movie to receive mostly positive reviews, Rampage follows Bill Williamson (Brendan Fletcher), a particularly unpleasant young man who for no clear reason decides to go on a killing spree.

Largely improvised, the film takes place in a world of minimum wage jobs and branded stores with indifferent staff, where casual misanthropy and “fake news” are broadcast 24/7 on radio and TV. Is Williamson a product of his environment? He certainly speaks like one of the radio shock jocks, pointing out that seventy million people are brought into the world each year just to suck up our resources.

“There’s too many people,” he says. “So what do we do? Just keep them around? Let’s kill them!”

Embarking on a shooting spree, he indiscriminately kills beauty shop employees as well as bank tellers, whose money he steals while telling them, “Everything you use it for is stupid and senseless – have a nice day.” He burns some of the money, but he also keeps some for himself, which seems to contradict his statement that his mission was to “clean the world” for the rest of us.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

Imagine the Coen brothers remaking The Thing and you’ve got Rare Exports, Finnish writer/director Jalmari Helander’s bid to turn Santa Claus into a horror icon.

Following on from the shorts Rare Exports Inc and The Official Rare Exports Inc, where wild Santas are captured by hunters and trained to be child-friendly bearers of seasonal gifts, Helander shows us how it all began in this feature length prequel.

When a villager finds several local reindeer torn to pieces, he resolves to find the perpetrator and soon captures a snarling, bearded old man. Could this be connected to a local archaeological dig where a creature was discovered trapped in ice? It is, it’s not long before the old man’s “little helpers” turn up to free him and assist him in wreaking havoc.

Dismissing the modern Santa as a commercialized myth, Rare Exports digs deep into Finnish folklore and returns the character to his roots as a figure more interested in punishing the naughty than rewarding the good. Expect lashings of violence and dark fun in the style of Gremlins.

Rat Man (1988)

Any hope that this was going to be a superhero parody in the vein of Ray Dennis Steckler’s awesome Rat Pfink A Boo Boo was quelled by the tagline: “He’s the critter from the shi**er!”

In the main story, swimsuit model Eva Grimaldi is taunting her photographer (“The only thing he’s got that clicks with me is a shutter”) when an attack by the eponymous creature, who does indeed emerge from a latrine, forces them to seek help at a nearby doctor’s residence. Unfortunately, the doc seems to know more about ol’ ratface than Ms Grimaldi is comfortable with, ultimately ranting about how his “Greatest achievement” was to fertilize a monkey ovum with the sperm of a rat, which he thought would win him the Nobel Prize but instead created a monster (what’re the odds?).

Intercut with this is the arbitrary sub-plot of sister Janet Agren (City Of The Living Dead) and writer David Warbeck (The Beyond) searching for Grimaldi by puttering about in dark, deserted houses and storming ideas for Warbeck’s new novel. Since they never do very much or share screen time with the other performers, their scenes feel like an afterthought tacked on in post-production, as does the abrupt, unbelievable ending.

Raw Force (1982)

A trio of bozos from “the Burbank karate club” meet some bikini-wearing kickboxers and take a boat to Warriors Island, unaware it’s home to machete-wielding zombies, mad monks and a slave trader with a Hitler moustache. When the boat is attacked by Village People-ish pirates (there’s a construction worker, an Indian, plus a biker in a Nazi helmet) our heroes manage to save the day before reaching their destination.

Once ashore, they’re attacked by Hitler who despite being armed with a bazooka and surrounded by henchmen simply panics and runs away. Appealing to the island’s monks for help, our heroes are told that they’ll only be granted assistance if they can demonstrate “superior fighting skills” against a zombie army.

Making his directing debut, the brilliantly named Edward D Murphy doesn’t exactly keep a firm hand on the tiller, randomly throwing in comedy, thriller and sexploitation elements, but it’s certainly not your typical kung-fu zombie movie.

Re-Animator (1985)

An outrageous gore movie that purports to be based on classic literature, Re-Animator is the Citizen Kane of HP Lovecraft adaptations and even after 30 years, it still delivers the goods. It’s also the only truly successful modern version of Lovecraft’s work.

The plot: loose-in-his-shoes medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), convinced he has perfected a formula for the re-animation of fresh corpses, begins using the cadavers in the morgue at Miskatonic University for his research, but don’t go thinking that this is your standard issue zombie movie.

Re-Animator was about as OTT and blackly comic as horror got in the 80s, and even today most films draw the line at a disembodied head going down on a naked starlet. Anyone who thinks that modern horror is too much of a muchness should investigate the past – here’s where you start.

Red White & Blue (2010)

When aspiring rocker Franki (Marc Senter) realizes he’s contracted HIV from the promiscuous Erica (Amanda Fuller), he snaps and kidnaps her, little realizing that she has a platonic friendship with Nate (Noah Taylor), an Iraq War veteran skilled in interrogation.

Billed as a “slacker revenge movie”, Red White & Blue is a deceptively simple tale about three very different people and how their choices result in escalating violence. It’s so low-key that once the story takes hold, you don’t notice how economical Simon Rumley’s script and direction are or how perfectly cast the movie is, a true sign of high-quality filmmaking.

Released in the same year as the Elm Street remake, Red, White And Blue would, in a fair world, have blown that turkey out of the water and bagged a few awards in the process. After playing a few festivals, it disappeared before eventually resurfacing on DVD with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever – the critics were too busy gushing over Paranormal Activity and Insidious to notice.

Repo: The Genetic Opera (2008)

Set in a not too distant future where an epidemic of organ failures has allowed a company named GeneCo (which offers organ transplants to those in need) to rise to prominence, Repo is one of the most outlandish musicals you’ll ever see. It has cult film written all over it.

Thanks to Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), surgery is now so commonplace that face and limb transplants have become a fashion statement, but there’s a terrible price to be paid by those who can’t keep up with the payments. Default on your new set of lungs and you’ll be visited by the Repo Man, who will come when you’re at your weakest and reclaim what’s legally GeneCo property.

This makes the Largo clan the most powerful family in the country, a position they secure with saturation advertising that advises the masses to vote to keep organ repossession legal “otherwise the company won’t be able to sell affordable hearts to those we love.”

Revenge Of The Ninja (1983)

This in-name-only sequel to Enter The Ninja (1981) is a marked improvement over its predecessor with better staging and more action and, crucially for the film’s success, the lead is played by Sho Kosugi, a real-life practitioner of Ninjutsu.

When Kosugi discovers that his best friend is a heroin smuggler with ties to some Eye-talian mobsters, the scene is set for a showdown, but what our hero doesn’t realize is that his buddy is also a ninja who’s been killing his competitors. Following several car chases and shootouts, this leads to a climactic rooftop duel where the weapons utilized included flamethrowers and a mask with glowing green eyes that hypnotize their opponent.

Revenge is a thriller without filler, 88 minutes of unapologetically fun action that at no point attempts to be deep or goes off on meaningless tangents. Sure, you can complain about the B-movie production values (is that the cameraman’s shadow during the van chase?), but as long as Hollywood keeps churning out joyless and oppressive dreck like Transformers, these films will retain their appeal.

Riki-Oh: The Story Of Ricky (1991)

No list of outrageous splatter movies is complete without this Manga adaptation, the first non-erotic Hong Kong movie to receive a Category III (Adults Only) rating. Though not as much silly fun as director Ngai Choi Lam’s The Seventh Curse, Ricky is just as cartoonishly excessive, with enough crushed heads, severed limbs, gouged-out eyeballs and exploding bodies for two movies.

It’s the not-too-distant-future – well, 2001 – and prisons are run as for-profit franchises by corrupt wardens that grow opium poppies on the grounds, use the inmates as cheap labour and terminate with extreme prejudice anyone who stands in their way. Business is a-boomin’ until the arrival of Riki-Oh, a seemingly indestructible martial artist who can tear off jaws, gouge out eyes, hack off limbs and punch holes through his opponents.

This makes Riki-Oh a fly in the ointment, so the warden hires an army of thugs to torture him. One of these fellas is so tough that, rather than admit defeat, he disembowels himself and starts strangling Ricky with his intestines.

Robo Geisha (2009)

By Japanese standards, RoboGeisha is reasonably restrained – in the first 10 minutes, only a handful of people are killed. True, they’re killed by shuriken fired from a girl’s butt, but for the country that gave us Horny House Of Horror (2010) and Rape Zombie: Lust Of The Dead (2012), death by butt shuriken seems almost respectable.

The film tells the story of Yoshie (Aya Kiguchi), a downtrodden teenager inducted into a mysterious company that trains geisha girls to be assassins. After genetic modification, the girls can shoot bullets from their breasts, release samurai blades from their armpits or unleash their most powerful weapon, a flesh-eating substance known as “breast milk from hell.”

When Yoshie goes rogue, it leads to everything you want to see in a movie called RoboGeisha – lots of fight sequences involving scantily-clad women. However, special mention must be made of the climactic duel, where each opponent employs her “butt sword.” It’s moments like this that define Japanese cinema in the 21st century.

Robot Monster (1953)

Here’s the pitch: a $40-a-day stuntman, wearing a gorilla suit and a diving helmet, wipes out mankind with the “Calcinator Death Ray” except for six people hiding in Bronson Canyon. Then he spends the rest of the movie trying to find them.

Ro-Man (George Barrows) is a “robot man” from the planet Ro-Man, which has declared war on Earth for….oh, some reason or other, but director Phil Tucker couldn’t afford to stage the invasion, so he relies on footage lifted from One Million BC (1940) instead. He also couldn’t afford sets, so the picture takes place outdoors, with six of the stiffest actors you’ve ever seen delivering lines like “You’re so bossy you ought to be milked before you come home at night.”

The least competent alien ever to arrive on Earth, Ro-Man spends most of his time living in a cave with a bubble machine, and proves surprisingly easy to defeat. When a character calls him a “pooped-out pinwheel” before running away, Ro-Man stands there shaking his fist in the air, as he is wont to do to anyone more than three feet away.

Rock N Roll Nightmare (1987)

Jon Mikl Thor, lead singer of the real-life Canadian hair metal band Thor, plays “Triton The Archangel”, a heaven-sent ass-kicker who wears a cape and leather thong. He’s infiltrated a band that’re recording some tunes in a studio that, years earlier, was the scene of a multiple homicide.

The murders were committed by some hilariously unconvincing rubber demons, and it just so happens that they’re still around, so as soon as the band arrives, everyone except Thor starts dying in a series of gruesome set pieces.

This can only be building towards one thing – a confrontation between Triton and the Prince of Darkness. Sadly, budgetary constraints mean Satan doesn’t put in an appearance, so instead a hand puppet taunts Thor before announcing “You win this time” and vanishing in a cloud of purple smoke.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Based on the successful British fringe musical, The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s mix of sex and rock n roll was never going to appeal to matinee audiences accustomed to watching Chuck Heston save the day, and the movie bombed on its initial release.

As a midnight attraction, though, it had everything: the songs encouraged audience participation, the dialogue was tailor-made to be quoted aloud and fancy dress aficionados could arrive wearing the costume of their favourite character. The film challenged the passive nature of moviegoing, which is what midnight cinema is all about.

You didn’t have to be a fan of the genre that was being sent up, know that Charles Gray’s character was a parody of 1950s True Life crime shorts or even understand the references in the opening song (“Science Fiction Double Feature”) to have a good time. A good movie is only half the experience; the rest hinges on a receptive audience.

If any one movie can be called the gold standard of “cult” movie musicals, then it’s Rocky Horror, which unfolds with one memorable scene and quotable song after another. In an era where humourless corporate product splurges across multiplex screens with all the grace of a train wreck, it’s reassuring to remember that movies like this exist.

The Room (2003)

The Ed Wood of the YouTube generation, Tommy Wiseau wrote, directed, produced and appears in The Room, playing a bizarrely accented character who despite looking like a genetic experiment that sampled DNA from Willem Dafoe and a lizard turns out to be the film’s romantic lead. Over the course of 99 unintentionally hilarious minutes, this unappealing lothario will be betrayed by his fiancé and best friend before committing suicide.

That’s it – that’s the film’s entire plot. But it doesn’t do justice to Wiseau, the only thespian in history to bring down the house with the line, “Hi, Mark.” Whether delivering soap opera dialogue in his impenetrable East European accent or constantly chuckling apropos of nothing (even while describing a woman being beaten), he is a magnetic screen presence for all the wrong reasons.

According to Variety, viewers who watched the film on its initial release were asking for a refund thirty minutes later, but when word spread that it was “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”, the movie became an underground phenomenon and inspired actor Greg Sistero to document the experience in his memoir The Disaster Artist. James Franco plays Wiseau in The Masterpiece, the film adaptation released in 2017.

Rogue (2007)

Rogue is Greg McLean’s follow-up to Wolf Creek, and if you’ve never heard of it, that’s because Dimension Films released the movie in 10 cinemas before burying it on DVD.

It’s hard to fathom their lack of faith in the film because not only is there a solid cast of up and coming Australian actors, including Sam Worthington, Radha Mitchell and Mia Wasikowska, but it’s also a decent creature feature in its own right. There’s the usual group of tourists stranded on an island with the tide rising and darkness creeping in, but the arrival of an enormous crocodile rules out swimming to safety.

Perhaps Dimension were mindful of The Asylum’s cheap creature features and figured people wouldn’t pay to see something they could watch on television for free, but whatever their reasoning, they passed up a good movie.

Samurai Princess (2009)

From the writer of Tokyo Gore School and the FX team behind Meatball Machine comes Samurai Princess, which casts Japanese porn star Aino Kishi as a genetically modified warrior who takes takes revenge on the bandits that left her and her friends for dead.

Rebooted as a ninja android by a mad scientist, her built-in weapons include swords, chainsaws and explosives, including a very special kind of “booby trap.” She’s still anatomically correct, though, and reveals as much to the viewer whenever the villains are offscreen.

Along the way, faces are sliced in half, a man’s brain is removed so that Kishi can “question it directly” and skeletons are torn from bodies. In one scene, Kishi cuts off one unfortunate’s nose, ears and hands before serving them up in a stew to his colleagues, disproving the adage that revenge is a dish best served cold.

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (1964)

Shot in a converted aircraft hangar by an inexperienced crew, with thrift store costumes and props made from household items, Santa Claus Conquers The Martians is a perfect example of what happens when an enterprising producer attempts to make a children’s Christmas movie, but can only afford to mount it on a budget of half a shoestring.

The Martians here are not the malevolent creatures depicted in War Of The Worlds but unemployed stage actors wearing green costumes, green face paint and, for some reason, TV antennae, which prompts one Earth girl to enquire, “Are you a television set?”

Ironically, the Martian children have intercepted Earth television signals and, exposed to broadcasts from the North Pole, become despondent at the prospect of never meeting a well-fed alcoholic in a red suit. Considering what the lack of a proper childhood did to Michael Jackson, it’s understandable that the parents decide to kidnap Santa and bring him to Mars, but the mission is endangered by Voldar, who we know must be the epitome of evil because he has a moustache.

Called “the worst science fiction flick ever made” by The Monster Times, the movie marked the screen debut of Pia Zadora, who is here surrounded by cardboard robots, a guy in a polar bear costume and aliens armed with Wham-O Air Blasters. The future ‘star’ has precious little screen time and says next to nothing, but boy did she start as she meant to go on.

Santo And Blue Demon Against The Monsters (1970)

Never mind Universal’s attempt to create a shared cinematic universe for its monsters, this cheap and cheerful oddity pits the eponymous wrestlers against The Mummy, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, a vampire, a cyclops and assorted henchmen led by a hunchbacked dwarf.

Reanimated by a mad doctor to take revenge on El Santo and Blue Demon after the duo foiled his latest caper, the creatures spend the next 85 minutes chasing our heroes through forests and across rooftops while delivering the obligatory body slamming action. Being a Mexican production, there has to be a sequence where the heroes confront their nemeses in the ring so if you’ve ever wanted to see The Mummy defending himself with his fists, you really need to see this movie.

The picture’s makeup is in a class by itself, with Frankenstein’s creature looking like an actor in a shabby rubber mask with hair glued to the sides. Best of all is the cyclops, one of the funniest, least convincing monsters yet to appear on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

If you love campy, fast-paced and sincere “bad” films, say hello to your new favourite movie.

Santo Vs The Martian Invasion (1967)

Have you ever noticed how visitors from outer space always speak the language of the country they’re invading? Not only are the Martians in this entry fluent in Spanish, they even resemble the people they’re attempting to conquer. You can still tell they’re aliens, though – the men wear hats without a shirt.

The only person capable of stopping them is Mexican wrestler El Santo, who the Martians call “the one that dresses strangely” (“pot”, “kettle”, “black”, anyone?). He challenges them to a wrestling match, which must be popular on Mars because they accept immediately, then once Santo starts kicking their butts they head back to their spaceship that – spoiler alert – just happens to have a self-destruct lever in the middle of the room.

In a movie with no shortage of did-I-just-see-that moments, the best has to be the sequence where the Martians use their “Transformation Chamber” to allow them to pass for human, even though all it does is alter their hair and clothes. Furthering their anonymity, they adopt such everyday names as Argos, Kronos and Aphrodite, which is odd because the actors call themselves Wolf Ruvinskis, Natanael Leon Frankenstein and El Nazi.

Santo Vs The She Wolves (1976)

Moving with the times, She Wolves owes less to Hammer than the Euro horror of Paul Naschy, meaning it’s more explicit and less kiddie-friendly than its predecessors. It’s still astonishingly silly, though – where else can you see a masked wrestler taking on werewolves with his fists?

It’s time for Luba, the Queen of the Werewolves, to be reborn in a younger body, which will begin the downfall of mankind. Only two people can stop her – the head of a family of good werewolves and Santo, who because he wears a silver mask must be a guardian angel sent to rid the world of lycanthropes. Obviously. No other explanation is possible.

Added gore and nudity aside, this is still good cheesy fun on a B-grade level, and the poor werewolf makeup just adds to the enjoyment. Disengage brain before watching for a good time.

Santo Vs The Vampire Women (1962)

Confusingly, Santo was renamed Samson in this English dubbed version, which appeared on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in 1995. If you’re familiar with the film at all, that’s probably where you first saw it.

Made in 1962, Vampire Women emerged during a peak in popularity for horror films in Mexico, so the film takes visual cues from the Universal and Hammer Dracula pictures and even throws in a Professor in the Peter Cushing mould. He’s not the hero, of course, just a supporting character who recruits Santo to save his daughter from an army of vampires.

In common with the Hammer films of the time, the female vampires are all astonishingly beautiful, yet the men are about as far removed from Christopher Lee as it’s possible to get. Impossibly muscular and about 100 years too contemporary to be believable, the actors look ill at ease in their cheap rubber capes and don’t really come into their own until they attempt to take Santo in a headlock.

Satan’s Sadists (1969)

The sleaziest biker movie you’ve never seen, Satan’s Sadists focuses on a gang called The Satans who, for no particular reason, descend on a diner and decide to kill everyone inside, with only a waitress and a Marine managing to escape.

The rest of film is a cat-and-mouse game as the bikers set off in hot pursuit, and for a movie directed by Al Adamson, the maestro who gave us Blood of Ghastly Horror and Horror of the Blood Monsters, it’s surprisingly well done. It’s coherent, it’s not patched together from at least 5 different movies and it’s never boring.

When Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family shortly after the film’s release, Adamson’s producing partner, Sam Sherman, decided to exploit the obvious marketing possibilities by tying his film in with the tragedy. According to Harry and Michael Medved, exhibitors were encouraged to bill the film as “The real story of California’s Sadistic Tate/Manson Hippie Cult”, a move that paid off with $10,000,000 in worldwide grosses from a $50,000 investment.

Scherzo Diabolico (2015)

Going nowhere at work and ignored at home, a bored accountant devises what he thinks is a foolproof plan: he’ll kidnap his boss’ daughter and when the stress causes his boss to quit, the top job will be his for taking. Simple.

Nothing goes according to plan in this Mexican thriller, and anyone expecting a standard issue kidnap drama with cops, wiretaps and a scene where a ransom is delivered will be surprised by what must be the oddest (and nastiest) movie of its type since Fargo. Revealing any more will spoil your enjoyment because this is a movie that’s best viewed without the usual spoilers, but know this: however you’re expecting things to turn out, you’re wrong.

Part Coen brothers, part Takashi Miike, Scherzo Diabolico (Italian for diabolical practical joke) is the perfect movie for viewers tired of slick, conventional Hollywood product. It won’t change your life, but at a slender 91 minutes it’s time well spent.

Severance (2006)

Christopher Smith made his directing debut with 2005’s Creep, but he really put himself on the map with this outrageous horror comedy. The plot involves a bunch of wishy washy corporate employees, in Eastern Europe on a team-building weekend, who encounter a group of bloodthirsty maniacs armed with machine guns, machetes and flamethrowers, but this is no stand-issue slasher movie.

Like all the best horror comedies, Severance works on several levels – the gags are funny, the action is crisp and the tension is never compromised by throwaway jokes or stupid supporting characters. Also, the film deserves credit for doing something considered hitherto impossible and putting Danny Dyer in a good movie.

Smith has great fun mocking conventional slasher movies, in one scene even resorting to black and white and title cards to explain the backstory. Just because it’s a comedy, though, doesn’t mean it skimps on the bloodletting – characters are decapitated, doused with gasoline and set on fire and, courtesy of an abandoned minefield, blown to pieces.

She Wolves Of The Wasteland (1988)

With the male population destroyed by the “bacteriological apocalypse”, evil dictator Cobalt (former Miss India Persis Khambatta) leaves the females (young, blonde, barely clothed etc.) to wander the Mojave Desert while she plots world domination from the plastic-draped soundstage she shares with the Reverend Mother, a wheelchair-bound hag apparently being kept alive by an army surplus radio.

When a genetic experiment known as “the seed” is stolen and used to impregnate Keela (Playboy model Peggy Sands), the Immaculate Conception brings forth the first male child born in decades, allowing the Playmate to show off her parenting skills by teaching him how to use throwing stars. Kidnapping and sacrificing the child will somehow grant the Mother great powers, so Cobalt locks him up in a giant birdcage and hands Keela over to the Airwave Worshippers, who wear masks and burlap sacks and inhabit a graveyard strewn with broken TVs and skeletons in armchairs.

Surprisingly, director Robert Hayes (not the Airplane! Actor) seems more interested in catfights than narrative logic, so once the general idea has been sketched in he’s free to indulge his passion. And no, we never learn how they were able to procure headbands, hair dye and breast implants in the wastelands.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

Twelve years after retiring from acting after Godzilla Final Wars, the big G returns to the screen in Shin Godzilla (aka Godzilla Resurgence), which simply put is the most thrilling reinvention of the character in years.

Unregulated dumping of radioactive material has resulted in the creation of a creature codenamed Godzilla, but this is no po-faced American rehash that beats around the bush, this is a movie that cuts right to the action. The characters make sense, the plot has no room for nonsense and the effects will leave your jaw on the floor. This is spectacular stuff.

It’s the movie that Hollywood promised (and failed to deliver) in 1998 and 2014 – a fast-paced blockbuster short on build-up but long on city-smashing mayhem. Within the first 20 minutes, we’re watching Godzilla stomp cities and evade helicopter gunships, but the excellent effects mean we never feel like we’re watching footage from a video game.

There’s no shortage of fun, but the movie has something else the American remakes failed to include – mischievous satire. When the Japanese turn to the US for support, an American team humourlessly deliver their verdict: the only way to stop Godzilla is by dropping a third bomb on the city.

Shock Treatment (1981)

Scripted by Richard O’Brien and directed by Jim Sharman, Shock Treatment is the belated sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and let’s get this out of the way first: it is not of the same quality.

Filled with unmemorable songs, gags that fall flat and guest stars who don’t so much perform as simply appear, the movie fizzles where Rocky Horror soared. Brad and Janet return but this time they’re played by Cliff De Young and Jessica Harper, who sad to say don’t exactly rival our memories of Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon (maybe they should’ve hired actors with alliterative names?).

It’s not a total write-off, however: when Brad and Janet are chosen to compete on a gameshow, their host is the improbably named Bert Schnick, a role Barry Humphries embraces with his trademark flamboyance. Also among the supporting cast are O’Brien, Rik Mayall, Ruby Wax and, encoring from Rocky Horror (although playing different characters), Patricia Quin, Little Nell and Charles Gray.

Shock Waves (1977)

One of the earliest and most entertaining examples of the Nazi zombie subgenre, Shock Waves is at heart a good old-fashioned B movie about a bunch of innocents trapped on an island with a mad scientist.

Peter Cushing plays the scientist and it’s hard to imagine a less reassuring host than his disfigured former SS Commander, dubious accent and all. Needless to say, it’s not long before the dead rise from the ocean, but these zombies are as far removed from George Romero’s flesh eaters as it’s possible to get. Clad in Nazi uniforms and black goggles, these guys don’t shuffle after their victims, they run, kick down doors and smash through windows.

It turns out that Cushing was in charge of the German army’s “Death Corps”, a group of aquatic zombies created to win the war….somehow. Now they’ve returned for their former commander and refuse to accept his commands, leaving him in charge of a group desperate to escape the island.

Silent Night (2012)

This is a remake of Charles E Selliers’ Silent Night Deadly Night (1984), but all that remains is the plot device of a serial killer in a Santa costume and a sequence where a female victim is impaled on a set of antlers. Everything else has been jettisoned in favour of a more traditional (to say nothing of entertaining) narrative where a small town’s police force search for the killer.

The film’s LA Times review should’ve been plastered across the DVD box: “The movie’s intended audience will be satisfied by its parade of gory mayhem, cheap thrills and groan-worthy dark humour. Everyone else: you’re on your own.”

Considering that the original was picketed on its release by groups who took issue with the portrayal of Santa as a homicidal rapist, that was probably a good idea. Then again, Steven C Miller’s film gives Santa a flamethrower and in one sequence has him chase a naked starlet through the snow before feeding her to a shredder.

Snuff (1976)*

Credited as the picture that helped mythologize the snuff film, Snuff began life as Slaughter (not to be confused with the Blaxploitation movie starring Jim Brown), a 1971gore film that depicted the depredations of a Manson-like cult. Filmed on the cheap in Argentina, it was the first horror picture from Michael and Roberta Findlay, the husband and wife team that had hitherto made primitive sexploitation movies.

After playing in only three theaters, Slaughter would’ve fallen into well-deserved obscurity but for a producer named Allan Shackleton who, sensing an opportunity, changed the title and added a brief epilogue. In Shackleton’s footage, a young actress (she’s supposed to be the female lead in Slaughter, but looks nothing like her) is murdered while the camera keeps rolling, but the sequence is so badly handled that it has an unintended comic effect.

Bad acting aside, the gore is so obviously fake that it ruins the intended shock when the screen goes black and the cameraman is heard announcing that they’ve run out of film. Still, it was enough to fan the flames and before long, the existence of snuff films became an acknowledged “fact”.

Society (1989)

“The rich have always fed off the poor,” explains the poster for Brian Yuzna’s satire. You don’t know the half of it.

Not only are the rich different from the rest of us, they’re descended from an alternate species that survives by sucking the nutrients from the bodies of the less fortunate and once you’ve uncovered their secret you’re next on the menu. The secret to fitting in lies in remaining on the sidelines and allowing the rich to have their way.

Such a story could only be set in Beverly Hills, where nobody’s too weird or too rich and every perversion is justified. Anything goes in a restricted neighbourhood, and anyone who disagrees clearly isn’t “one of us.”

The theme of fitting in runs throughout the film but when hero Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock) discovers the reason he’s always felt like an outsider, he has no problem beating a hasty retreat but first he stops to pull a creature’s head out of his own ass. It’s moments like this that are missing from most contemporary satires.

Sorority House Massacre II (19

Harlan Ellison once dedicated a book to Jim Wynorski, the “great cinematic auteur” who gave the world such cultural treasures as The Hills Have Thighs and House On Hooter Hill. He’s up to his usual tricks in Sorority House Massacre II, a movie that’s only interested in cheesecake shots.

Massacre I was your typical 80s slasher movie with screaming damsels in distress, a synthesizer score and lots of power tools, so Massacre II is more of the same, only played for laughs. After moving into the sorority house from the first film, 5 girls use a Ouija board to contact the dead killer (why not?), who knocks them off one by one while they attempt to slip into something more comfortable.

“There may have been better horror movies made,” claims Joe Bob Briggs, “but not with this many women in their underwear.” Put it this way: if Melissa Moore (36C-26-36) and former Page 3 girl Robyn Harris (34C-24-34) were cast for their measurements, Wynorski got his money’s worth and then some.

Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone (1983)

Wolf (Peter Strauss), who in no way resembles Han Solo, is cruising through the galaxy when he learns of the reward offered for the safe return of three women who’ve crashed on Terra 11, a barren wasteland ruled by pasty-faced mutant Overdog (Michael Ironside).

Because he has alimony payments, rent arrears and 165 parking tickets, Wolf accepts and immediately runs into Washington (Ernie Hudson), who in no way resembles Lando Calrissian, and Niki (Molly Ringwald), who might’ve been intended as a Princess Leia-type but comes across more like Chewbacca – every time she opens her mouth, you want to cover your ears.

In plot terms, that’s all she wrote. Until their climactic encounter with Overdog, our heroes fight off Terra 11’s residents, including Amazon women, mutant children with Molotov cocktails, stunt performers in fat suits etc. Spacehunter may not have Star Wars’ snap, but there’s no cute droids, either.

Split Second (1992)

Nobody saw Split Second on its release because it was overshadowed by Basic Instinct, so the time is right to check out this futuristic cop thriller. You’ll be glad you did, especially if you’ve ever wanted to see Rutger Hauer fight a monster in the London Underground.

Hauer plays Detective Harley Stone, an American-accented Dutchman living in a London of the not-too-distant future – well, 2008 – where he’s chasing his partner’s killer with the assistance of a cop named (wait for it) Dick Durkin. After several victims are discovered with their hearts torn out, the dynamic duo deduce that they’re not chasing a man at all, but a rather cheap-looking Alien-like creature.

Yes, it’s silly, derivative and doesn’t make a lick of sense (the original director was fired during shooting), but it’s also fast-paced and loads of no-brain fun. Plus, when was the last time you saw Hauer go off to fight a monster with the zinger, “Satan is in deep shit!”

Starcrash (1979)

Tell a Star Wars fanatic that this cheap Italian knock-off (distributed by Roger Corman) has more heart than the prequels and, once they’ve finished laughing, they’ll bust your beak for you. Or they’ll slap you with a comic book and run away. You know what nerds are like.

Luigi Cozzi’s movie has everything that George Lucas’s space opera had: a score by an Oscar-winning composer, larger-than-life characters, quotable dialogue, and a truly memorable villain. Here, the villain is cackling Joe Spinell, who wants to rule the universe with “red monsters” that appear to have escaped from a lava lamp.

On the side of the angels are lightsabre-wielding David Hasselhoff, a police robot with an inexplicable Southern drawl and, most memorably, Caroline Munro, who spends half the film wearing a leather bikini, even when sentenced to hard labour in a mining colony.

There are, of course, bigger-budgeted (and therefore ‘better’) movies, but they don’t have an ounce of Starcrash’s dumb fun (no Amazons on horseback, either). Call it kitschy and juvenile, but it has a B-movie charm that’s as entertaining as it is endearing.

Staunton Hill (2009)

Maybe it’s lack of production polish, but Cameron “Son Of George” Romero’s film feels more like a grindhouse movie than Grindhouse did, and despite an obviously low budget it’s a more credible period horror film than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot.

Set in 1969, Staunton Hill could be TCM redux as a group of stranded teens arrive at an isolated farmhouse where they encounter the murderous Staunton clan, who run a different kind of slaughterhouse. Because it’s a small world, the head of the family is played by Kathy Lamkin, who had a very similar role in Chainsaw.

Staunton Hill isn’t for everyone: it’s a grim, downbeat movie without heroes, where the lack of budget contributes to the claustrophobic sense of impending dread. Originality may not be its strongest suit, but it makes up for it by not pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Sting Of Death (1965)

Here’s the one you’ve been waiting for: a movie about a man-jellyfish hybrid who attacks bikinied starlets while Neil Sedaka sings “Do The Jellyfish”, a ska-tinged number that encourages the listener to “Forget your Cinderella/ And do the jella/ The jilla jalla jella/ It’s really kinda swella/ To do the jalla jellyfish.”

So enamoured of this finger-snapping froth are the cast that they fail to notice the hybrid has taken up residence in their pool, which comes as something of a surprise to the first drunken bimbo to dive in fully clothed. However, given the hilariously unconvincing costume, you’d think it’d be hard to miss.

Wearing flippers, a wetsuit adorned with beads and an inflated trashbag over his head that gives him an uncomfortable resemblance to Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, actor Doug Hobart whisks his victims away to polystyrene cave furnished with a fish tank, TV antennae and a machine with dials and flashing lights. Once inside, he proceeds to….well, let’s not go there.

The Strangers (2008)

So similar in plot and tone to the French chiller Ils (2006) that it’s often considered a remake, The Strangers tells a simple story and tells it well, with minimal dialogue and an emphasis on atmosphere. Director Bryan Bertino is clearly familiar with Carpenter, Craven et al, but he’s learnt from them and isn’t content merely to duplicate shots. Young filmmakers, take note.

It’s a very simple, very basic home invasion tale, far more bare bones than, say, You’re Next or The Purge. Bertino isn’t interested in “high concept” storylines or clever twists and he eschews the comically over the top gore of Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension in favour keeping the focus on the main characters and their struggle to survive.

By refusing to identify his killers, whose faces remain hidden behind masks throughout the film, Bertino makes them more mysterious – and scarier. When Liv Tyler asks why they’re doing this to her, the reply comes, “Because you were home.”

The Street Fighter (1974)

You know a lead character is going to kick ass when he’s introduced with the line “He’s a karate man, sir – a mean bastard.” Sure enough, Takuma Tsurugi is exactly the right person to defend an heiress against thugs that want to kidnap her. Tsurugi is of course played by Sonny Chiba, the kind of fighter who can break boards just by staring at them.

Well-staged, and loaded with bone-crushing action sequences (be sure to watch the 91 minute version for the full impact), Street Fighter not only confirmed Chiba as the rightful heir to Bruce Lee, but also breathed new life into the kung-fu genre after the Little Dragon’s passing.

If the climactic confrontation looks familiar, that’s because this is the film that Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are watching in the cinema at the start of True Romance. With such an enthusiastic endorsement from Quentin Tarantino, you know the movie’s going to be something special and it doesn’t disappoint.

Street Trash (1987)

Expanded from a short film, Street Trash is your average story about homeless alcoholics who begin to melt after consuming Viper, a mysterious liquor peddled by a sleazy store owner. Made for $500,000, the picture belies its budget with decent effects (our favourite: the exploding fat man), which go some way to making up for the lack of actual plot.

There’s a sequence where people play catch with a severed penis that’s as funny/tasteless as anything filmed by John Waters, and James Lorinz (Frankenhooker) is amusing as a mob doorman. In a move certain to divide audiences, the film makes its characters as vile as possible, all in the name of setting up the next gross-‘em-out gag. There’s necrophilia, casual racism, police brutality, misogyny and, in the film’s biggest misstep, gang rape.

After following Fred (Mike Lackey) for half the movie, the viewer expects more from their “hero” than to see him kidnap and rape a gangster’s wife. That floats a little too close to what Waters called “bad bad taste”, but then again, Waters loved the movie, so judge for yourself.

Strike Commando II (1988)

Don’t worry if you haven’t seen Strike Commando I because this sequel features a different actor and has more on its mind than being just another Rambo clone.

The director is Bruno Mattei, who doesn’t make movies so much as recreate scenes from Hollywood blockbusters on a budget of half a shoestring. This becomes apparent early on when Mattei restages Raiders Of The Lost Ark’s drinking game and its subsequent brawl, throwing in some ninjas for good measure as well as John Williams’ score.

More ‘homages’ follow: a recreation of Predator’s ‘killing the scorpion’ sequence; a torture scene that switches from Raiders (red-hot poker) to Lethal Weapon (snapping your opponent’s neck with your feet); a climactic one-on-one in the mud that must’ve given Mel Gibson and Gary Busey déjà vu and, best of all, Lost Ark’s truck chase restaged at 15mph, with clearly terrified performers clinging to the vehicles for dear life.

Supersonic Man (1979)

By uttering the phrase “May the great force of the galaxy be with me” into his wristwatch, a mild-mannered reporter transforms into Kronos, aka Supersonic Man, the Spanish version of Superman. His powers include the ability to see through walls, lift bulldozers (once they’ve turned into wooden props) and turn handguns into bananas, though he spends most of the film being dangled in front of rear-projected aerial footage while chintzy music plays.

He’s on Earth to stop Dr Gulik (Cameron Mitchell), an evil genius who lives in a toy model volcano (accessible only by wire-supported helicopters) with a robot guard that’s either Marvin the paranoid android’s big brother or an escapee from Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.

A sub-Bond villain must have a sub-Bond masterplan and the doc’s seems to revolve around forcing a “famous” and “brilliant” scientist to create a laser that’ll allow him to rule the world. Nothing comes of it because Gulik spends the whole movie puttering around the ‘sets’ quoting Shakespeare and comparing himself to Julius Caesar until Sonic turns up and puts the kibosh on the enterprise with suspicious ease.

Teenagers From Outer Space (1959)

When a group of youthful, English-speaking ‘Martians’ (named Thor, Moreal, Saul and Derek) arrive in Bronson Canyon in a flying saucepan lid, it’s revealed they intend to use Earth as a breeding ground for their Gargon herd (lobster puppets shown in silhouette), a plan that alarms the hippie-ish Derek. He’s been reading their history and has “learned how it once was….families, brothers and sisters. There was happiness. There was love.”

You see, these Martians are from a race so overdeveloped they’ve lost their humanity, have never known the meaning of family and passionlessly execute each task without question (also, not much acting experience). Switching his allegiances, Derek’s attempt at sounding the alarm brings him into contact with Betty (Dawn Anderson) and her Grandpa (Ed Wood regular Harvey B Dunn), who are so unperturbed by the sight of a bizarrely-garbed young man with no belongings or means of support that they allow him to live with them rent-free, unaware his former colleagues are in lukewarm pursuit.

Strange but true: director Tom Graeff later underwent a nervous breakdown and changed his name to “Jesus Christ II.”

Tenebrae (1982)

Dario Argento’s Inferno escaped prosecution but Tenebrae was less fortunate, which is too bad because it shows Argento at the top of his game. It’s a demented giallo full of arresting camerawork (by Luciano Tovoli, who also shot The Passenger) with an equally memorable synth-heavy music score composed by several former members of Goblin. In order to keep it from corrupting British viewers, it was unavailable in its uncut form until 2003.

In March 1984, the film was cited as one of the most offensive Video Nasties in the UK and subsequently banned. The major bone of contention was a 4-second shot where, after losing an arm to the killer’s axe, a woman’s bloody stump continues to spray crimson across her apartment.

Did Quentin Tarantino take inspiration from this for a similar scene in Kill Bill Vol 1? You know, he probably did.

They Live (1988)

A political revolution is afoot, but it’s being run by aliens from another galaxy, “free enterprisers” from outer space that have taken control of the planet and won’t stop until they’ve depleted its resources. Then they’ll move on to another world, then another.

To keep the population docile, they’ve hypnotized people with subliminal messages through their TV sets, telling them that self-esteem is linked to material wealth, fashion trends must be followed and greed is good. The aliens recruit people to work for them, luring them with the promise of wealth and an easy life, and it’s surprisingly how quickly they sell out.

When Roddy Piper sees the world as it really is, billboards that hawked consumer goods now say OBEY, CONFORM or NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT while money bears the words THIS IS YOUR GOD. Then Piper walks into a grocery store and sees an alien on television: “The old cynicism is gone. We have faith in our leaders. We’re optimistic as to what becomes of it all. It really boils down to our ability to accept. We don’t need pessimism.”

Released in the United States on November 4, 1988, four days ahead of the Presidential election, They Live was John Carpenter’s reaction to the insensitivity of political institutions that, together with the commercialization of popular culture, suggested a country that had lost its soul. “I’m disgusted by what we’ve become in America,” the filmmaker said at the time. “I truly believe there is brain death in this country.”

The Thing (1982)

Just like They Live, John Carpenter’s remake of the 1951 original was trashed by critics (Vincent Canby called it a “foolish, depressing, overproduced movie”) and ignored at the box office, yet still went on to become a cult classic.

Overshadowed by the release of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial two weeks earlier, The Thing debuted at #8 and spent three weeks inside the top ten, earning little more than its $15 million production budget. If you watched the picture on network television, however, you saw an edited version shorn of violence, gore and profanity, with added voiceover and a pointless “alternate” ending that recycled footage from earlier in the movie.

It was enough to send fans scurrying to the rental version, where they saw Rob Bottin’s effects in all their uncut glory – and immediately resolved to become filmmakers. Famous fans include Robert Rodriguez (who references the movie in Planet Terror) and James Gunn (check out the store owned by “R.J. MacReady” in Slither).

The Thing With Two Heads (1972)

A staple of All Time Worst movie lists, The Thing With Two Heads might live up (or down) to its reputation if it pretended to be anything other than a deliberately goofy exploitation film, but its ability to amuse (intentionally, we think) and entertain places it several rungs above, say, Blackenstein, The Black Frankenstein.

Viewers of the previous year’s The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant must have experienced déjà vu all over again as they watched Ray Milland’s terminally-ill surgeon attempt to cheat death by having his head grafted onto a healthy body. His confidence stems from the two-headed gorilla (played by Rick Baker) he keeps caged in his basement, a previous recipient of spare-head surgery. When Baker escapes and drags his knuckles around town in search of bananas, Milland, unfazed by this bit of monkey business, declares the operation a success and moves forward, despite an understandable lack of volunteers.

When his deteriorating condition necessitates that the first willing donor be used, Milland regains consciousness to find himself attached to the considerably beefier shoulders of former Los Angeles Rams star Roosevelt ‘Rosey’ Grier. A wrongly convicted man on Death Row, Grier just wants to buy some time so he can prove his innocence, while an unimpressed Milland (“Is this some sort of joke?”) tries to arrange another check-up from the neck-up.

30 Days Of Night (2008)

Before becoming part of the Twilight saga with Eclipse, David Slade directed this full blooded (and bloody) adaptation of Steve Niles’ three-issue comic book which has a shot at being the best vampire movie of the 2000s.

It’s a simple premise, and a damn cute one: in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost community in North America, the sun doesn’t rise between November 18th and December 17th, meaning that the town is plunged into darkness for 30 days each year. On day one, the town is attacked by a group of vampires (who’ve had the foresight to seize and destroy every phone in town) leading to a cat and mouse game between the survivors and an enemy that proves difficult to kill.

Well-paced and loads of fun, 30 Days boasts some terrific cinematography (by Jo Willems, who also shot The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 & 2) that captures the isolation of the locale and heightens the sense of claustrophobia. What could’ve been a cheap and forgettable knock-off (see: 30 Days Of Night: Dark Days, the dismal sequel) and played on The Horror Channel at 4pm instead gives the vampire movie a thrilling modern day makeover.

The Tingler (1959)

If you’ve never seen The Tingler on the big screen, with the “Percepto” gimmick recreated for a modern audience, you haven’t lived. When first shown, random seats were rigged with war surplus motors, causing them to vibrate at key moments during the film and (in theory) make the viewer scream.

You see, Dr Warren Chapin (Vincent Price) is convinced that “there’s something inside every frightened person that’s as solid as steel.” Using his cheating wife as a guinea pig, he discovers The Tingler, the organism that attaches to the spine in moments of terror and can only be released by screaming. If someone died unable to scream, their body would contain a perfect Tingler specimen….

Enter theatre-owner Martha Higgins (Judith Evelyn) and her louse of a spouse Ollie (Philip Coolidge). Martha, being a deaf mute, cannot scream. She also faints at the sight of blood and Ollie, unbeknownst to the Doc, is planning to do away with her. Can you see where this is going?

In the film’s most famous sequence, the screen goes blank while Price tells the audience, “Do not panic….but scream! Scream for your lives! The Tingler is loose in this theatre! Keep screaming!”

Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

A must-see for fans of gore-soaked ultra-violence, Tokyo Gore Police is a career high for special effects creator Yoshihiro Nishimura (who also directed), who designs the kind of creatures you don’t see in Hollywood fare, including a crocodile woman, a gangster with a six foot penis gun (whose lethal projectiles never miss) and breasts that produce flesh-devouring toxic waste.

Anyway, the plot: genetically modified super-criminals are on the loose in Japan and their ability to grow weapons from any injury means they’re proving tough to defeat. Known as “engineers”, they’re re hunted across Tokyo by Ruka (Eihi Shiina, who’s also in Takashi Miike’s Audition) a samurai sword-wielding heroine who self-mutilates in order to stave off flashbacks to her father’s murder.

Intercut with all this are fake TV advertisements that make Robocop seem subtle. Best of all is the ad extolling the virtues of Tokyo’s privatized police force (“We will protect you!”) who claim to have no mercy for criminals….and immediately gun down a murderer live on film.

“Privatizing the police force will lead to more plentiful lives for us,” claims the narrator. “For a better society – Tokyo Police Corporation!”

Blood, monsters and satire – why can’t Hollywood make films like this?

Tombs Of The Blind Dead (1971)

If you go down to the abandoned medieval town of Berzano today, you’re in for a big surprise. The Templar Knights, who were excommunicated for worshipping the Devil (and taking an unwholesome interest in busty young women), have returned from the grave as hooded skeletal zombies who roam the town on horseback, seeking anyone foolish enough to be out after dark.

This being sleazy 70s Eurohorror, the victims are mostly beautiful women who have a problem remaining clothed and think the best defence is to back themselves screaming into a corner. When one such damsel spends the night in Berzano’s cathedral, she’s attacked and left for dead but rises from her slab and attacks the creepy morgue assistant, who in turn attacks the rest of the cast, and so on.

The first part of director Amando De Ossorio’s Blind Dead quartet, Tombs Of The Blind Dead has more in common with Jean Rollin’s erotic artistry than George Romero’s apocalyptic vision, and marked a career high for De Ossorio, who followed up the picture with the equally berserk Return Of The Evil Dead.

The Tournament (2008)

Every seven years, the world’s top thirty assassins congregate in an unsuspecting locale to duke it out with each other for a $10m prize, unaware they’re being monitored by smarmy Liam Cunningham, who invites rich assholes to bet on the outcome.

The contest must be decades old, with all the romantic locations having played host to previous ventures, because this is Middlesborough’s year, meaning that, in trying to kill each other, the likes of Ving Rhames, Kelly Hu and Ian Somerhalder read tabloid newspapers, drink tea in greasy spoon cafes and complain about the bad British food.

Rhames is in it not for the cash but to find whoever’s responsible for killing his old lady (the revelation comes as no surprise), even if it means stealing a tanker and mowing down some innocent people. He flips the tanker, causing a motorway conflagration that’d do James Cameron proud, and emerges with a few cuts and bruises. That’s right – it’s that kind of movie.

A trashy, ridiculous, cartoonish, silly, over-the-top, in-your-face movie, sure, but it’s also a ton of indefensible fun. Disengage brain and enjoy.

Train To Busan (2016)

Hot on the heels of Shin Godzilla comes another foreign language movie whose scope, pacing and breakneck action places it in a different league to bland Hollywood product.

The plot is easily summarized: during a sudden outbreak of a deadly virus in South Korea, a carrier boards the eponymous train and infects several people who in turn infect their fellow passengers. Which sounds like 28 Days Later on a train, but Train To Busan has much more up its sleeve than that, including several large scale action sequences that leave World War Z in the shade.

Sensibly, the movie eschews setting up soap opera characters (just to knock them down) in favour of keeping the pacing brisk and the action taut. Far from being just another grubby zombie movie, this is high calibre filmmaking, with pin-sharp cinematography, terrific effects and stunts that provide more thrills than most recent action movies.

Gaumont snapped up the rights in late 2016, so check this version out before they remake it very badly with Jennifer Lawrence, Gerard Butler and – the horror, the horror - Dakota Johnson.

Trick R Treat (2007)

Trick R Treat is an anthology film, but unlike the old Amicus movies it dispenses with the connecting segments and instead weaves the narratives together in clever and innovative ways. Hollywood still considers such films to be toxic, though, so Warner Bros dumped the movie on DVD and threw their promotional muscle behind The Reaping instead.

Among the stories: Anna Paquin plays a virginal trick or treater who’s not all that she seems, a group of kids that stage an elaborate practical joke get more than they bargained for and Brian Cox has his peace shattered first by neighbour Dylan Baker (who’s burying a murdered kid in his back garden), then by the arrival of a pumpkin-headed monster.

Written and directed by Michael Dougherty and produced by Bryan Singer, Trick R Treat’s fate was fallout from Superman Returns’ disappointing box office performance - or maybe Warners didn’t think it was shallow and stupid enough to compete against the Friday The 13th reboot. Either way, you need to beg, borrow or steal a copy, because this movie deserves to be seen.

Troll 2 (1992)

Lensed in Utah under the title Goblins, Troll 2 is your typical movie about vegetarian dwarves in rubber masks and burlap sacks that lure unsuspecting families to the town of “Nilbog” and devour them once they’ve been turned into vegetable matter by consuming green gloop. The only people that can save the Waits family are young Josh (Michael Paul Stephenson) and his dead Grandpa (Robert Ormsby), who can freeze time, cause objects to move and appear as a disembodied head but can’t manifest himself in the correct room.

In the most memorable sequence, Josh has to devise a split-second plan for preventing his family from eating the contaminated food, which he does by urinating on the table to the understandable surprise of his father, who delivers the immortal line: “You can’t piss on hospitality – I won’t allow it!”

The popularity of this bizarre trainwreck owes a great deal to the efforts of NY comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, whose screenings made it a smash on the midnight movie circuit. Not bad for a picture sneaked out on VHS three years after being shot, whose cast claimed not to understand the script or, due to a post-production title change, even know of its release.

Watch it on a double bill with Best Worst Movie, Stephenson’s documentary about the film.

28 DAYS LATER (2003)

Many pictures claimed to be the “best British horror film since Hellraiser” but 28 Days Later is the real deal, and just like Clive Barker’s film it’s a landmark picture that ushered in a new era of horror.

Taking its inspiration from George Romero’s zombie films (though without a single walking cadaver in sight), the film offers one of the most uncomfortable (and uncomfortably believable) accounts of social collapse ever seen in a British film. Working from a script by Alex Garland (Ex Machina), director Danny Boyle remains true to the spirit of Romero’s films while eschewing their humour and pseudo-scientific explanations. The result impressed Stephen King so much that he bought out a showing of the picture in New York City.

The film achieves its extraordinary effects by dropping many of the traditional motifs associated with zombie films in favour of playing on the more modern fear of disease, and will remain the ultimate apocalyptic vision for some time – until our fears change, anyway.

2019: After The Fall Of New York (1983)

In the Nevada Desert (or its Italian equivalent), road warrior Parsifal (Michael Sopkiw) literally defies death in a vehicular gladiatorial contest, bringing him to the attention of Pan-Am president Edmund Purdom, who’s clearly seen Escape From New York because he wants Sopkiw to go on a search-and-rescue mission.

With the population rendered sterile courtesy of radiation, there hasn’t been a child born in fifteen years, but Purdom’s computer has thrown out the name of the world’s last fertile woman located somewhere in (you guessed it) New York City. If she’s young enough, Purdom reasons, her ovaries may contain as many as five hundred unfertilized eggs: “That’s five hundred uncontaminated human beings!”

Even though Sopkiw prefers to “work alone”, he’s partnered by a claw-handed ex-schoolteacher and Robowar’s Romano Puppo, cast here as an eyepatch-wearing muscleman who may not be all that he appears. Along the way they encounter a succession of colourful supporting characters, including a sadistic villain who knows ways of making you talk, a dwarf named Shorty and Big Ape (George Eastman), who’s either a man/ape hybrid or an ugly sumbitch.

Despite an unfortunate resemblance to Bela Lugosi’s Ape Man, Eastman just happens to be the World’s last fertile man with an unwholesome interest in the last fertile woman, who he finds hibernating in a Perspex tube clad in transparent clothing. If that seems a tad unlikely, bear in mind that director Sergio Martino’s next sci-fi flick was Hands Of Steel, the greatest arm-wrestling cyborg movie ever.

The Twilight People (1972)

Distributed by Roger Corman, The Twilight People is The Island Of Dr Moreau done on the cheap in the Philippines. John Ashley is Matt Farrell, a “soldier of fortune” who’s kidnapped while skin-diving and forced to become a test subject for Dr Gordon (Charles Macauley). Like any self-respecting mad scientist, Gordon has a comely daughter (Pat Woodell), a psychotic henchman (Jan Merlin) and a cellar full of “experiments”, including an antelope man, a wolf woman and a bat man. Naturally, they escape and….well, you know the drill.

Also among the creatures, but barely recognisable, is Pam Grier as Ayessa, the panther woman. Having achieved prominence (and prominent billing) in The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage and Women In Cages, her non-speaking role here, which amounts to little more than a glorified cameo, could hardly be considered a ‘career move’.

Fortunately, following Black Mama White Mama and Scream Blacula Scream AIP gave her Coffy, and a Blaxploitation icon was born. Ashley moved on too, later becoming a producer on The A-Team, for which he provided the opening narration.

Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl (2009)

When Monami (Yukie Kawamura), the weird new girl who avoids sunlight, confesses her love for Jyugon (Takumi Saito) with a customary gift of chocolate, it infuriates his girlfriend Keiko, played by Eri Otaguro, who’s unaware her rival is a centuries-old vampire. What they don’t know is that Keiko’s weedy father is really “The scientist of the century”, a Frankenstein descendant conducting strange experiments in the basement while wearing garish facepaint and a fright wig.

The girls’ rivalry comes to a head when Monami transforms Jyugon into a bloodsucker, which in turn leads to an untimely demise for Keiko, much to her father’s delight (“I can chop up her body! Every father with a daughter dreams of this!”) as he’s able to reanimate her as a pieced-together creature whose detachable limbs can be used as lethal boomerangs or propellers that allow her to fly around the room. Thank goodness a zombiefied killer nurse and a hunchbacked custodian named Igor are around for credibility.

A non-stop fusillade of no-holds-barred manic invention, where the geysering blood hits the lens on several occasions, Vampire Girl has no ambition other than to top its predecessors, which with its snappy pacing, brilliant make-up and agreeably demented narrative it does several times over, even throwing in a Japanese schoolgirl taking a blood shower for good measure.

Virus (1999)

Released between the similarly themed Deep Rising and Ghost Ship, Virus is another story about a group of potential victims (including a square-jawed hero and a damsel in distress) who board a seemingly derelict ship and are subsequently picked off one by one.

This kind of picture requires some very game actors and with a cast that includes Donald Sutherland, Jamie Lee Curtis and William Baldwin, Virus has it. Originality may not be the film’s strongest suit, but it’s never boring and avoids taking a camp approach to the material. The script is by Chuck Pfarrer (who also wrote the comic book) and Dennis Feldman, who between them also scripted Hard Target, Barb Wire, The Golden Child and Species, so you know in advance what kind of movie you’re going to get.

It’s the type of film where characters with “dead meat” written all over them wander alone down dark corridors asking if there’s anyone there….moments after witnessing their colleagues being torn apart by a monster. Throw in some bizarre dialogue (“You couldn’t pull a pin out of his ass with a tractor!”) and you’ve got one of the most entertaining B movies in the Dark Horse cannon.

The Wicker Man (1973)

If you’re only familiar with this film through the 2006 remake with Nicolas Cage, please be aware that the 1973 original features neither an American cop haunted by visions of a girl he couldn’t save nor an island of tyrannical women. Also, at no point does the hero perform kung fu or steal a bicycle at gunpoint.

Quizzed about the remake on its release, director Robin Hardy said it removed all the songs, sex, and atmosphere from his movie and substituted nothing worthwhile. A remake was never going to work because the plot requires the audience to believe in the existence of a Pagan cult on a remote Scottish island that lures an outsider to their commune. Without giving too much away, there’s a reason why the character has to be an adult male virgin.

With a cast that includes Christopher Lee, Edward Woodward, Ingrid Pitt and Britt Ekland, The Wicker Man is both uniquely British and one of the most thrilling films ever made in the UK, as well as a fine example of what can be achieved on a low budget.

Willow Creek (2013)

Described as the “Bigfoot capital of the world”, Willow Creek is the California mountain town where creature sightings are not only commonplace, they’re a way of life. Route 96 is colloquially known as “the Bigfoot scenic highway” and the town honours the creature with its annual “Bigfoot Daze” festival.

Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, Willow Creek (the film) follows a couple whose determination to capture Bigfoot on film leads them to enter an area where sightings were recorded, and you can imagine how things play out. The fact that the customs, businesses and beliefs shown in the film are real makes this a much, much weirder film than The Blair Witch Project.

It’s also a better sustained piece because at no point do the characters throw away their map and stand around whining instead of finding a way out of the woods. Unlike Blair Witch, it’s not a glorified student movie and the legitimacy of the premise – to say nothing of the decent acting by the leads – does a better job of creating an atmosphere of fear and anxiety.

Without Warning (1980)

A time capsule of vintage pleasure, Without Warning stars two future Oscar winners (Jack Palance and Martin Landau), was shot by Dean Cundey (Halloween, Back To The Future) and prefigures Predator to the extent that it casts the same actor, Kevin Peter Hall, as an alien that arrives on Earth to hunt human prey.

Budgetary restraints mean that the movie’s antagonist isn’t as impressive as the Predator, but if you can put aside his unfortunate resemblance to Megamind, there’s fun to be had watching him stalk his victims. His arsenal includes slimy missiles that attach themselves to their human targets and suck the life out of their bodies, allowing him to mount the corpses in his lair as trophies.

The low budget means that his “lair” looks more like someone’s garden shed, and director Greydon Clark (who gave us the immortal Satan’s Cheerleaders) makes sure that one of the victims is a bikinied Playmate, but if you like B grade escapism, put this on your viewing list.

CSI fans will definitely want to check it out – David Caruso makes his movie debut as one of the victims.

The Wizard Of Gore (1970)

The Wizard Of Gore demonstrates Herschell Gordon Lewis’ developing skills as a filmmaker – his gore still looks cheap and fake, but this time there’s much more of it than was seen in Blood Feast. Women are sawn in half, eyeballs are ruptured and spikes are hammered into heads – all by a psychotic magician known as Montag The Magnificent (Ray Sager).

Montag, you see, has hit upon the perfect way to murder comely young starlets. After his audience gasps in horror as he drills a hole in a woman’s stomach, she’s revealed to be completely unharmed but is then found dead several days later, her body bearing the exact same wounds.

After one girl is set ablaze and another is crushed in a press, the magician comes to the attention of TV presenter Shelley (Judy Cler). Because the police are unable to find any evidence linking the murders to Montag, Shelley decides to investigate, but if you think you know how the story will end, you’re wrong.

Witchfinder General (1968)

Witchfinder General is one of the most downbeat horror films ever made in Britain, so it follows that its central character, real-life witch hunter Matthew Hopkins, should be one of the most coldblooded people Vincent Price ever played.

There’s no underlying campiness to Hopkins, no sassy one-liners and certainly no nudge-wink acting from Price (in one of his most commanding performances) to let you know that it’s all in jest. Whether inserting needles into the back of a suspected witch (in order to locate “the Devil’s mark”) or allowing his assistant to torture a young woman (after raping her first), Hopkins is not someone you take lightly.

The approach to the character reportedly caused tension on the set, with Price telling director Michael Reeves, “I’ve made 87 films – what have you done?” To which the 24-year-old filmmaker replied, “I’ve made 3 good ones.”

Wolfcop (2014)

Here’s the pitch: there’s this drunk named “Lou Garou”, who despite being a cop goes out of his way to avoid confrontation until he’s transformed into a werewolf. Then he regains his confidence as he bites, slashes and beheads the bad guys in his small town.

If you’ve ever despaired of digital monsters and longed to see a non-CGI werewolf movie, you should check out Wolfcop. Emerson Ziffle’s transformation scenes are pretty damn good (especially for the low budget) and it goes without saying that if you’re looking a movie about a talking lycanthrope with a badge, this will suit your needs quite nicely.

Agreeably silly from start to finish, Wolfcop is a better night at the movies than the $150 million The Wolfman with Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. The film concludes with the promise of a sequel, and if Another Wolfcop is as funny as its poster (which mock Stallone’s Cobra) then director Lowell Dean has another winner on his hands.

Wolf Creek (2005)

If you were disappointed by the recent mini-series, then there’s never been a better time to revisit the original Wolf Creek, which unlike its TV equivalent maintains the mystique surrounding Mick Taylor (John Jarrett). There are no flashbacks to Mick’s messed up childhood here, no psychobabble and the movie avoids the trite is-he-dead-or-isn’t-he ending.

Greg McLean’s debut feature is so potent, in fact, that the film’s Australian release had to be delayed lest its story of a psychopath hunting tourists in the outback influence the trial of an Australian accused of murdering a British backpacker. Had the movie been a stylized gorefest about a masked lunatic with a chainsaw, it wouldn’t have been half as controversial.

Jarrett once fronted a TV gardening programme, which is curiously apt because when we first meet him, Mick is playing to an audience, gaining their trust with his superficial charm and old school know how before allowing his mask to drop. In a movie with no shortage of disquieting moments, it’s a toss-up which moment is the most unnerving – the sequence where the backpackers realize Mick’s true intentions or his casual threats of violence, including turning one girl into a “head on a stick.”

WRESTLING WOMEN VS THE AZTEC MUMMY (1964)

Lorena Velazquez, who played the Vampire Queen in Santo Vs The Vampire Women, becomes luchadora Gloria Venus who together with her partner Golden Rubi encounter a Fu Manchu-like villain and a mummy that can transform into a bat.

The Black Dragons, a gang of evil Orientals who try to hide their ethnicity by wearing sunglasses, have two-thirds of a three-part Aztec treasure map, and since Gloria and Rubi have the third piece, they naturally decide to send two female wrestlers to fight our heroines for possession of it. There are unintentional laughs to be had from the bad dubbing and unconvincing stunt doubles, and if you do watch it for a giggle, then don’t miss the final 20 minutes.

When the mummy finally appears, unleashed by the luchadoras to fight on their side, it’s somehow able to transform itself from a moaning and groaning mass of bandages into a rubber bat at will, leading to cries of “Look, he’s a vampire now!” and “He’s a mummy again!” Strange doesn’t begin to cover it.

You Can’t Kill Stephen King (2012)

You Can’t Kill Stephen King is a real surprise: a dirt-cheap horror movie , starring nobody you’ve ever heard of (and shamelessly exploiting King’s name) that’s actually worth watching.

We’re in B-grade slasher movie territory as a group of fans who’ve decided to pay the author a visit start getting knocked off one by one, but this is no mean and senseless Friday The 13th knock-off. YKKSK never takes itself too seriously and just wants to give the viewer a good time, which considering the budget was a smart move.

It helps if you’re a fan of King’s work (the in-jokes come thick and fast), and a fan of comedy slashers in general, and those who are will have fun. Those who aren’t should stay away and stop bleating on social media about how it’s the worst movie ever.

Zombie Creeping Flesh (1980)

At a chemical plant in New Guinea, a leak transforms the staff into bad actors in shoddy make-up that seem to think they’re auditioning for Dawn Of The Dead. Meanwhile, in what feels like a completely different movie, a hostage rescue team encounter a female journalist and her cameraman, who’ve just encountered more bad actors in even less convincing make-up.

It seems that an epidemic of bad acting is sweeping across New Guinea, so the rescue team, which is comprised mainly of hair-trigger psychos, decides to blow them all to pieces. Along the way, they also encounter badly dubbed supporting players and enough stock footage for three Ed Wood movies.

The film’s first cut reportedly contained so much unusable material that most of it was junked and re-shot, with documentary footage haphazardly edited into the narrative, which perhaps explains why the first thirty minutes feels like three films overlapping. Throw in some acting styles best described as “unsubtle”, and you’ve got an incoherent mess that deserves to seen by all lovers of ‘So Bad It’s Good’ cinema.

Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)

Originally intended for director Enzo G Castellari, Zombie Flesh Eaters is the kind of picture the Italians excelled at in the late 1970s, a cheap rip-off of a big American hit, in this case George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead.

What’s remarkable about the film is how well it stands up compared to other knock-offs such as Burial Ground (1980) and Zombie Holocaust. For an exploitation film made quickly and cheaply, it’s astonishingly well-shot (by Sergio Salvati), with astute use of its New York and Caribbean locations. Giannetto De Rossi’s make-up effects are similarly top notch, and Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Tucci contribute one of the most memorable scores of any Fulci movie.

The scene where Paola (Olga Karlatos) loses an eye to a wooden splinter was absent from the 1979 UK theatrical release but present on home video, much to the dissatisfaction of the recently elected Conservative government. Banned and prosecuted for obscenity, the film wasn’t available to watch in its entirety until 2005.

Zombie Self Defence Force (2006)

Remember when Peter Jackson made zombie films that were heavy on blood and bad taste gags? Naoyuki Tomamatsu does, so here’s a movie that packs flying saucers, mutant babies, cyborgs and samurai zombies into its 76 minutes.

The plot is best described as “uncomplicated.” When a flying saucer crashes in rural Japan, it brings the dead back to life (“How unscientific,” remarks one character), causing a disparate group that includes a pop star, a soldier and a gangster to seek shelter at a nearby hotel, unaware that the owner has just killed his pregnant mistress. You can probably guess what happens next.

You don’t watch this sort of thing expecting to see finely nuanced characters delivering Shakespearean soliloquies but to see a zombie baby using its umbilical cord as a lasso while a cyborg soldier, the prototype for a proposed invasion of America, shoots up the place. As such movies go, Zombie Self Defence Force is top of the list.

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WATCHING PORN WITH LEATHERFACE

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SCHLOCK THEATER VOLUME ONE

BY DUANE BRADLEY

BLOOD FEAST (1963)

Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis

Starring Connie Mason, William Kerwin, Mal Arnold

June 19 1905 – put that date in your history books as the start of the modern movie theater because that is when John P Davis and his brother-in-law Harry opened a movie house in a converted storefront on Smithfield Street in downtown Pittsburgh. Obviously the Nickelodeon, whose name literally means “five cent Movie Theater”, wasn’t the first place to show motion pictures but it was the first business established exclusively for that purpose.

Pittsburgh, as you may know, was home to George Romero for many years and provided locations for his first three zombie films. It was also the birthplace of Herschell Gordon Lewis, another pioneering filmmaker whose movie Blood Feast, while arguably not as accomplished as Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead and its sequels, still makes an impression on everyone who watches it.

Herschell entered the film industry aged 34 with The Prime Time (1960), a lost film that is notable for two reasons: it was Karen Black’s film debut and it introduced Lewis to his producing partner David F Friedman. The protégé of legendary exploitation producer Kroger Babb, who like him came from a carnival background, Friedman gave up a job at Paramount to roadshow Babb’s productions Mom And Dad and Because Of Eve while Lewis was busy acquiring a knowledge of advertising and marketing. Using the names “Lewis H Gordon” and “Davis Freeman”, the duo cranked out a series of “nudie cuties” but by 1963 audiences were tired of watching starlets prancing around in various stages of undress so a new gimmick was called for.

While shooting Bell, Bare and Beautiful in Florida, the pair stayed at the Egyptian-themed Suez Motel, whose décor gave Lewis the inspiration for a mad story about an Egyptian caterer who serves human flesh. This would allow him to promise (and deliver) an experience the moviegoer had never enjoyed before: female victims having their tongues torn out and brains smashed in by a saucer-eyed lunatic – in “blood color”, yet!

We get a taste of what’s in store in Blood Feast’s trailer, which opens with the following statement: “This picture, truly one of the most unusual ever filmed, contains scenes which under no circumstances should be viewed by anyone with a heart condition or anyone who is easily upset….We urgently recommend that if you are such a person, or the parent of a young or impressionable child now in attendance that you and the child leave the auditorium for the next ninety seconds.” Thus intrigued, we’re shown a succession of ‘highlights’, including bashed-in heads, ripped-out hearts and torn-off limbs. To make sure we fully understand, an onscreen caption reads: “Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror!”

In most other cases this bit of ballyhoo would be a flat-out lie to advertise a dull picture whose best bits all took place during the film’s climax, but Lewis and Friedman are as good as their marketing and open the movie with one of their most memorable sequences, a graphic mutilation where a woman taking a bubble bath has an eye gouged out and several limbs hacked off.

Viewed today, we know that the limbs are parts of department store mannequins decorated with the internal organs of dead animals supplied by a meatpacking plant and that the murders were usually done in one take in case the cranberry juice they were using for stage blood stained the actor’s wardrobe. How effective was Blood Feast in 1963? When John Waters caught up with it at his local drive-in he saw moviegoers rushing from their cars to vomit in the bushes and realized he’d found a filmmaker after his own heart.

Less impressive is the plot, especially when the lead detective, despite attending a lecture on Egyptian blood feasts, can’t connect the wave of mutilation murders to a weird local caterer named “Fuad Ramses”. Then there’s the way the cast attempt to express shock by raising their hands to their faces, show their consternation by crossing their arms and try to look pensive by touching their chins. And of course we can’t forget Connie Mason.

Casting the Playmate made sense commercially but also tasked Herschell with pulling a performance out of her and judging by his comments over the years (“You have to give Connie credit,” he says in his DVD commentary, “she was decorative.”) he must’ve had his work cut out. If she looks like she’s reading her lines off cards taped to the furniture in some scenes that’s because she’s reading her lines off cards taped to the furniture, but while she’s a fascinatingly vacuous lead she’s also the perfect choice for a film that’s laughably amateurish in every respect. Blood Feast, as its maker liked to point out, is like a Walt Whitman poem – it’s no good, but it’s the first of its type.

Shot in four and a half days, the $24,500 picture reaped millions in box office receipts, launching Lewis’s career in a new direction and incidentally birthing the splatter movie. Before dropping the director’s name became fashionable, before his movies were even available on VHS, he was a major influence on such filmmakers as T.L.P. Swicegood (The Undertaker And His Pals), Brad Grintner (Blood Freak), Mario Landi (Patrick Lives Again) Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case) and of course John Waters. Lewis, though, remained refreshingly unpretentious, objecting to the auteur label while cheerfully admitting that the acting, effects and staging in his signature film were all terrible.

When Blood Feast hit UK video shelves in May 1982, its reputation preceded it. The videocassette sleeve read: “Released in 1963 to large crowds of shocked and horrified people, “BLOOD FEAST” has acquired an incredible cult following as the “first full-fledged splatter movie!” Produced, directed, photographed, and scored by Herschell Gordon Lewis, the godfather of gore, “BLOOD FEAST" tells the story of a modern day Doctor Frankenstein who wants to bring a dead Egyptian princess back to life! But to satisfy his lust, he goes much further into the depths of moral depravity. Our hero doesn't even bother to wait for his victims to die before “disassembling” one part of the body to reach another! See “BLOOD FEAST,” a veritable orgy of blood and gore!”

A year later the authorities flagged the movie but Blood Feast wasn’t a threat, it was a museum piece from the director of The Magic Land Of Mother Goose. Long retired from filmmaking by then, Herschell probably committed more sins as an authority on “direct mail marketing” (junk mail), a business that by his own admission runs on fear, guilt and greed, than he ever did behind the lens.

By the time you could watch the movie uncut in the UK – it was passed in April 2005, 42 years after it first played drive-ins - Herschell had made the belated Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat which because God loves irony the censors passed without cuts. Times had changed and Herschell had too. In between films he wrote several books about marketing as well as Everybody’s Guide To Plate Collecting, an indispensable guide to trading and selling plates.