31. THAT’S A RAP: Watch one with a rapper-turned-actor in it, even if Samuel L. Jackson does not approve.

The Washington Post said that this movie was vile, vicious, despicable, stupid, sexist, racist and horrendously made.”

Maybe they hadn’t watched the blaxploitation movies of a decade and a half before, because instead of the guys from Hollis, Queens making a Beatles style fun film, they decided to remake something like Slaughter crossed with an Italian Western and yet filled it with everyone on Def Jam and had the amazing weird brains to make Rick Rubin the racist super villain.

I’m here for all of this.

The film starts with Jam Master Jay and Run picking up D.M.C. from prison. He’s done a nine-month bid and it feels like we spent at least a few of those days with the camera as it searches the prison halls for him. Then, Jam Master Jay relates a sexual dream that ends with him getting his penis eaten.

Like I said, this isn’t the fun rap movie people probably wanted.

They go to visit their manager Russell Simmons, played by their manager Russell Simmons, who gets them and the Beastie Boys signed to a record label run by Vic Ferrante (Rubin, who directed and co-wrote this with Ric Menello, who directs Doro’s “Bad Blood” video, as well as Danzig’s “Mother,” LL Cool J’s “Goin’ Back to Cali” and the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!” and “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn.” He was going to make the Beastie Boys into movie stars with the film Scared Stupid, which New Line was going to pay for, but the Beasties left Def Jam and went off to build a house and make Paul’s Boutique so things worked out as they should have).

Yet before the guys can celebrate being big stars, one of their friends Runny Ray gets killed and this sends them off on a mission of vengeance. And have sex with gangster molls. And break fingers. And go see Slick Rick. And shoot people. Lots of people.

The album of the same title — Run DMC’s fourth — contains some of their best known songs like “Run’s House,” “Mary, Mary” and “I’m Not Going Out Like That,” which had the bravery to sample bands that were currently taking hip hop past what the group had started like Public Enemy and even themselves. The sessions also led to seasonal favorite “Christmas In Hollis,” which samples Clarence Carter’s “Back Door Santa” and used to infuriate me every time people tried to perform it at karaoke. So yeah, while the album is remembered today as a classic, it had a mixed reception back in 1988. As for the movie, well, no one talks about it today.

I am. And despite some people — Nathan Rabin, for one — claiming it ruins Run DMC for them, I kind of love it. Because these guys got to make the movie they wanted to make, even if it may not have been the right movie for their fans or their fame.

You know what? I live for Run DMC tearing apart some racist dudes at a bar. And by that, I mean that Jam Master Jay and Rev. Run are beating everyone up while Darryl McDaniels just drinks beer, eats peanuts and breaks the bartender’s wrist. They then leave the bar with Jam Master Jay launching a full bottle of booze at a gigantic mirror.

“I always wanted to do this,” he says.

I get it.

You can watch this on YouTube, because it isn’t available on DVD.

30. MARTINI SHOT: Blow off some Challenge steam with a hardy party scene.

This movie is one big party but it is not that you’d want to be at.

Brent is dealing with the death of his father — that he inadvertently caused when he swerved to miss a bloody man in the road — and trying to get through high school. Luckily, he has a pretty loving girlfriend Holly. But he’s made the mistake of turning down Lola Stone’s prom invitation, so that means that she’s going to do what any other young girl who has been turned away will do: she’s going to kidnap him, inject bleach into his vocal chords, knife his feet into the ground and slice her initials into his chest at the prom that she’s made for herself.

Look, if she wants to have an incest-filled dance with her father during all of this, it’s her happening and it freaks everyone else out.

Brent deals with a lot of damage in this movie. In addition to all the brutal abuse detailed before, he also gets a hole drilled into his head for a home-brew lobotomy and he only escapes by getting the drill bit stuck in his wrist. Yeah, this movie isn’t going to skimp on the horrific imagery, like a basement filled with lobotomized former boyfriends.

Sean Byrne has only made this and The Devil’s Candy. He really needs to make something new, because for a debut, this is pretty wild. It also inspired a real life crime where someone was stabbed more than forty times and had cleaning fluid poured into their eyes by a fan of this movie.

29. DOUBLE TROUBLE: There’s gotta be some twins in there somewhere. 

Brian De Palma was inspired to make Sisters after reading an article in Life magazine about how Soviet conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova were separated. A photo at the end of the article — along with a mention that the girls were developing psychological problems — struck him, as one twin looked happy and the other appeared to be deranged. And, as always, Hitchcock loomed large, as the script that DePalma wrote with Louisa Rose was directly inspired by his films Rope — the tracking shot that follows the murder of Phillip — and Psycho, as the main character shifts during the movie. He even got Bernard Hermann to come out of retirement and record the music for the movie.

In fact, DePalma had cut his movie to another Hermann score. When he showed it to the composer, he answered back, “Young man, I cannot watch your film while I’m listening to Marnie.”

The film has since influenced countless others. I can see echoes of the documentary within this film on the film within Get Out that details another sinister operation.

An operation is behind much of the horror in this film, as Danielle Breton and Dominique Blanchion (Margot Kidder, as always perfect) were separated and perhaps one of the two did not survive. Then there’s Emil Breton (William Finley, the literal Phantom of the Paradise), who is either Danielle’s ex-husband or the doctor who helped take the twins apart or both. And an investigation into the murder that starts the film and the hypnotic suggestions that perhaps there was no real murder at all.

DePalma has a career that some would say is filmed with misogynistic films, but here, this is the rare slasher with female killers and male victims. Of course, you can also read into this that women’s liberation — somewhat literally — has caused all of these issues.

This is the film where DePalma found his way. Of course, he found it by following in the footsteps of someone else, but if anyone could be the next Hitchcock, he made the best attempt.

28. THESE FISTS BREAK BRICKS: In celebration of the excellent new book, watch a martial arts movie.

John has two jobs: he’s a maverick NYPD cop. And, well, he’s also a ninja. A super ninja.

Alexander Rei Lo is the guy for this role because a look across his IMDB resume tells us that he sure was in a lot of ninja movies. Don’t believe me? How about this list: Ninja Kids, Ninja vs. Shaolin, Mafia vs. Ninja, USA Ninja, Ninja vs. Shaolin Guard, Ninja Death (three films), Wu Tang vs. Ninja, the nine-hour long Ninja: The Final Duel, Ninja Condors, Ninja: The Battalion and two Ninja in the Deadly Duel films.

Anyways, it’s the 80s, drugs are everywhere and John the ninja cop gets framed. Using his shadow skills, he escapes and uncover a plot to steal his girlfriend’s father’s life work, so he travels to China to face the 5 Element Ninjas.

Honestly at this point, I’d get you $20 for the blu ray.

But then there’s an impossible long sex scene* set to the smoothest sax jazz and I want the UHD, I want to Kickstart a web series, I want to make two sequels to this with the original cast. I want Eugene Thomas to make a whole series of Spencer side stories. I want Stallone to watch the way they ripped off the first Rambo movie and say, “Heyyyyyyy alight!”

This movie taught me that if I want to beat the five elements of ninja — silly me thought there were only four elements and metal was a man-made thing — and a tiger ninja, I just need to “draw strengths from your future and past and see beyond the illusion of this world.”

Then again, one of these ninjas sets his hands on fire before he punches you.

You can watch this on Tubi or download it from the Internet Archive.

*The sex scene is so long that nearly two complete songs play during it.

27. ARTIFICIAL LIMBS: Robot arms, wooden legs or even a transplanted thing… whatever grabs you.

Never go home again and never go to an abandoned tropical island with a coke-using film crew and never swim in the ocean and never go to camp. This camp has a reason, I guess, as the kids are addicted to the internet and must go phone free, which is a great way to future proof this slasher, as so many times you just wonder, “Why not just use your phone?”

So while there’s Iza, the character that knows the rules of horror movies, no one else listens and has sex in the woods, as they always do, and then a set of massive twin meteorite mutated monsters start killing people, as these things happen, and then everyone is really in for it.

The film has some beautiful locations while planting its soul firmly in the 80s slasher world, although the science fiction backstory for the killers is really fun, as is the makeup.

Since this got added to Netflix — and did quite well — its been confirmed that a sequel is coming, reuniting director Bartosz M. Kowalski and most of the crew the film’s lone survivor.

Someone said to me the other day, “What did you expect, it’s a slasher,” and then I was like, “You realize that’s like slapping me and not expecting me to fight, right?” And that was about a bad slasher. This is a decent one.

26. DAY OF THE SERPENT: There better be a motherf*ing snake in this motherf*ing movie.

Les Tremayne, who was one of the most popular and well-known voices of the Golden Age of Radio, working on shows like The Jackie Gleason/Les Tremayne Show, Ford Theatre, Inner Sanctum, The Whistler and more. He even had a breakfast show with his second wife. As entertainment moved into television, he was all over the dial, as well as showing up in movies like The War of the Worlds, The Monolith Monsters, The Monster of Piedras Blancas, The Fortune Cookie, Forbidden Planet, The Angry Red Planet, King Kong vs. Godzilla and The Slime People. He even played Big Daddy Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard, Dr. Frankenstein on The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo and the titlular mentor on Shazam!

None of those roles could have prepared him — or us — for Fangs.

As Snakey Bender, Tremayne plays a man of obsessions, obsession that we as mortal people just may not understand. There’s one day a week that he cares about and that’s Wednesday. On that day, he makes his journey into town where he visits the attractive schoolteacher Cynthia (Bebe Kelly, If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!), whose students perform the task of hunting down small rodents for him so that his beloved pets — he claims to be part snake by the way — have some food for the week. Then he harasses the general store employees before meeting up with his one true friend, Burt (Richard Kennedy), and they have a concert where they blast the music of John Philip Sousa.

Basically, Snakey is one of those people who seem harmless but if one thing impacts their life’s routine, the mental damage will not be visited upon him. No, it will be meted out to everyone in his path.

The first chinks in his armor appear when Brother Joy starts preaching against him, saying that snakes are the devil’s animals and that he’s making the children play on the left hand path.

And then Burt marries Ivy (Janey Wood, Pamela from Terror at Red Wolf Inn).

Unlike Snakey, Burt realizes that he’s old and that if he wants to marry a showgirl who really only cares about his money but will give him the kind of companionship a life of hard work deserves, well, he’s going to do it. And sure, the Wednesday concerts will end for awhile, but what’s the harm in that?

You can just imagine how Snakey reacts.

Actually, you can’t. Because things get worse.

It turns out that that schoolteacher likes having the snakes around because those visits are conjugal. That’s right, while Snakey is out with the kids, she’s doing whatever one does with a snake in a Biblical way. Her secret gets outed to the general store owners Bud and his lesbian sister Sis, who is played by Alice Nunn, who really has the best cameo of all time as Large Marge in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure who start blackmailing her, cutting off Snakey’s rodent supply and therefore pushing him on the path to no return.

The weirdest thing about this movie is that it has such a level of scum and sleaze all over it yet has no nudity and little to no violence. Heck, it barely has all that many snakes in it. But what it has is a man who realizes that the world is changing around him and no matter what he does, it keeps moving past him. And people use his snakes as sermons or for pleasure but never really see him as anything other than that old weird man from the desert that lives with all the serpents. Except the kids, and when the kids aren’t allowed to see him and hunt vermin, well, I mean, how dare you take away vermin-gathering little ones from an old man ready to explode?

Somehow, Snakey becomes a Bond villain, able to kill people with all manner of objects and traps and, yes, snakes. All along, he told the townspeople how moronic they were and now, he’s proving it. You should have let him keep air conducting and marching around the house and paying kids for mice and just let him be. But some people have Hell inside them and you should just keep them on their maze-like path so that they don’t solve the riddle inside their head and realize that they’d be better off if they just went and killed you.

Also known as Snakes, Snakelust and the wonderful title Holy Wednesday, this was directed and co-written with John T. Wilson by Art Names, who was mostly a sound man on all sorts of movies, including being the post-production sound guy for The Astrologer, which had to be the kind of experience that destroys your mind. Actually, his sound resume is packed with aberrant films that I adore, such as Alligator; Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker; Savage Streets and The Jesus Trip. He and Wilson also co-wrote Girl in Gold Boots and The Black Klansman, so their partnership wasn’t a one and done on the weird writing ability.

By direct, I mean he put the camera down and said action, really. You don’t really consider the direction or cinematography in this, but that’s the best part of it. It just plays out in front of you, with you as the casual observer to one man’s meltdown. He just wants to be alone with his snakes and needs the help of others. And he needs that one night of marching band concerts. I guess it really was too much to ask, huh?

There are weird movies that have been made to be weird and there are weird movies made because someone had a vision that perhaps nobody could ever understand. This would be the latter and that’s perfect. My dream is to go back in time and sit in a drive-in where the blockbuster baiting tagline for this movie got some cars in the lot and then this starts playing and people start wondering, “What is this? Who is this for? Why did they make this?”

Movies are awesome, everyone.