18. A Death March Horror Film (a group of people go on a trip and slowly get killed one by one, but keep moving).

I had no idea what to expect out of this movie. The poster gave me The Town That Dreaded Sundown vibes and that’s never a bad thing. Yet for some reason, I just never watched this. Director and writer Christopher Smith really shoots for a high bar on this one and I was astounded that it came together so well. I barely want to discuss what happens — I mean, I have to, that’s what this site is all about — because as quickly as you figure out what’s going to happen next, the movie’s smart script pulls the rug out.

Jess (Melissa George) is a single mother who is invited to take an ocean cruise with her friend Greg (Michael Dorman) and his closest comrades Sally (Rachael Carpaini), Downey (Henry Nixon), Heather (Emma Lung) and Victor (Liam Hemsworth). A sudden storm flips their boat and Heather is lost at sea and the survivors make their way onto an abandoned ocean liner that somehow still has fresh food — Death Ship? — called the Aeolus, which is the name of three mythical characters that have been confused even by experts. That — and the nature of the number three — will be very important for what happens in this movie. Yes, it’s a triangle.

I’m really astounded by how well this came together and how dark it gets. I really thought it was just going to be a slasher on a cruise ship and I can’t even tell you how happy I am that I gave this adventurous movie a chance.

17. A Horror Film From the Hong Kong New Wave(1979-1984).

Did Italian horror cinema have an influence on director Tsui Hark? Well, between the title of this movie — which comes from the tagline for Zombie — and the fact that it stole its soundtrack from Suspiria, I would say yes. There’s also a fair bit taken from Sacrifice! and Cannibal Holocaust as well as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Also called Hell Has No Gates, No Door to Hell and Kung Fu Cannibal, this is about Agent 999 (Norman Chu) who is after Rolex (Melvin Wong), a thief, all the way to a cannibal village. Yet Rolex ends up saving him from the cannibals just in time for he himself to get chowed down on.

This is like a film noir detective against flesh eating ghouls mixed with comedy and ill-advised transvestite comedy. It doesn’t work as much as you’d hope, but Hark would move on from thie and The Butterfly Murders to Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind and Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain.

16. A Horror Film Featuring Caroline Munro.

The Last Horror Movie reunites those wacky lovebirds Joe Spinell and Caroline Munro from Starcrash and Maniac and makes another appearance for Joe on the video nasty section 3 list.

Director David Winters was one of the few stage actors and dancers in West Side Story to be in the film version. He then became a choreographer and was the first to choreograph the Watusi as well as the originator of the Freddie and helped Elvis and Ann-Margaret dance in Viva Las Vegas. His first directorial effort was the Alice Cooper film Welcome to My Nightmare and he produced everything from Linda Lovelace for President to Young Lady Chatterley, Killer Workout and owned Action International Pictures. He also dated Lovelace after she divorced Chuck Traynor. She credited him for introducing her to culture. The guy did so much! He directed Racquet, did the choreography for Roller Boogie, made Mission Kill with Robert Ginty and oh yeah, also directed Thrashin’!

Anyways, both Spinell and Munro are two people who make me love life the moment I see them. The blonde highlights in her hair in this movie got me through the rest of a very hard week. This film is very 1982 and therefore, it is very good.

Spinell is Vinny, a cab driver who lives with his mother (Filomena Spagnuolo, Spinell’s real mother, who ends the movie by asking if she can take a hit off his joint; that’s also Spinell’s real apartment) but dreams of making a horror movie with scream queen Jana Bates (Munro), who is going to be at Cannes to promote her latest film Scream along with her manager and ex-husband Bret Bates (Glenn Jacobson) and producer and current boyfriend Alan Cunningham (Judd Hamilton). She gets a note that says, “You’ve made your last horror film. Goodbye.” and finds Bret murdered, but the body disappears when the police come to investigate. This turns into more of a whodunnit than a slasher, but I mean, Spinell still gets to chainsaw someone to death.

Just like the movie within this movie, this was shot with no permits at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. If you think it’s not realistic for an actress in a horror movie to win an award, that very year Isabelle Adjani won the Best Actress award for Possession. 

PS: In no way am I as obsession with Munro as Vinny was with Jana.

15. A Horror Film With Special Effects by Olaf Ittenbach.

Olaf Ittenbach is something else. I mean, if you thought Black Past or The Burning Moon was all he was going to do, this movie takes those movies and blows them away.

Premutos is the first of the fallen, predating Lucifer, and his son has been preparing the world for his rule since before time. Meanwhile, Mathias begins to have flashbacks of being the son of this dark god and remembers being crucified next to Jesus, the diseases of the dark ages and Russia in the time of war. Now, he’s found an ancient book and a potion that will mutate him into his true form, which means he’s about to ruin his human father’s birthday and usher in the dark age of Premutos.

Shot on 16mm and blown up to grainy and gory majesty, as the human body is destroyed in so many ways. Chainsawed, exploded, shot, stabbed, pierced, split, sliced and so many more ways to see how much blood is inside a person.

This movie makes it seem like Ittenbach had taken a personal mission in making Germany the gore and splatter leader. I mean, how much blood is enough? Obviously that answer is infinity if you follow this one, because everyone and everything is covered in it. It’s like he saw Raimi, saw Jackson and said, “Hold my Schneider Weisse Aventinus Eisbock.”

You know how people were throwing up — allegedly — during Terrifier 2? This movie has a scene where a man has metal rods appear out of his body, pushing their way out of his teeth and his body is pulled apart by wire as it shoots blood all over an apartment.

This movie almost has too much in it and I love it for that. It was like its creator was worried he’d never make another movie, so he made every movie he wanted to make for the rest of his existence all at once. We’re all the better for it, unless you try and eat during this. Actually, I had a whole bunch of Extreme Sour Warheads and just kept adding them to my mouth at the end as everything went crazy and I went into a sugar rush and started screaming at the TV.

This is, as the assholes say, cinema.

You can watch this on Tubi.

14. A Horror Film About Insects (No Bigger Than Humans)

Directed by Terence H. Winkless and written by Robert King — and based on the novel by Eli Cantor — The Nest has a great poster going for it. I stared at it in the video store for the longest time and now, decades later, I’ve finally watched it.

Sheriff Frank Luz (Richard Tarbell) has a lot to deal with. Dead dogs are showing up all over town. Books are falling to pieces. And his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Johnson (Lisa Langlois, Happy Birthday to Me, Deadly Eyes) is back.

I dated a bug scientist — an entomologist — for a few months and I always told her that her experiments would lead to situations like this. She thought I was stupid and she was right, but I know that Dr. Morgan Hubbard (Terri Treas) is behind all of this, experimenting on cockroaches until they get cat sized and who needs that? How was that supposed to help?

This movie has human cockroaches and a cat cockroach, because it wants to make you puke. I mean, well done, you know?

Also: the studio this was made in dealt with cockroach infestations for years.

Also also: All of the explosions came from Humanoids from the Deep.

13. A Horror Film That Takes Place at a Fair, Carnival or Amusement Park.

Leonard Kirtman mostly directed adult, churning out titles like The Seduction of Cindy, Up Desiree Lane and Confessions of a Candy Striper, often using the name Leon Gucci. This is one of the few movies he made without penetration yet it has all the feel of a New York City-made porn from 1970.

Shot in Coney Island — I would not be surprised if there were no permits and no one had any idea they were even filming — this movie revolves around the people who are killed after winning a teddy bear at the booth of Tom (Earle Edgerton) and his hunchback-heaving assistant Gimpy (John Harris, the stage name for Burt Young!).

There’s a district attorney called Dan (Martin Barolsky) who gets called down to investigate, but he’s so dumb that he brings his fiancee Laura (Judith Resnick) along to the carnival and man, defund the slasher police.

No set dialogue. Scuzzy looking footage. Gore from the Herschell Gordon Lewis school of pause on the guts. A great moment where a tunnel of love ends with a screaming survivor and a headless blood spraying victim. So much repetition. Sound effects out of nowhere. Folk music. Cool jazz. A drunken sailor. Bad relationships. Death is everywhere.

12. A Horror Film Written by Nigel Keale.

Nigel Keale exists at the center of two lines, between horror and science fiction, finding ancient evil with modern technology, placing learned men in the howling maw of ancient occult terror. Also: this movie has informed so much of my own theories on hauntings. We aren’t seeing ghosts. Reality is like a videotape that has been taped over so many times that some things, often the worst things, keep reappearing through the new footage.

Peter Brock leads a team at Ryan Electrics that is trying to create a new recording media to get ahead of the Japanese. Instead of an office, they all move into an old Victorian mansion with one room no one will ever finish, because the builders claim that this place has been haunted since it was built some time in the time of the Saxons.

When they go into the room, they hear a woman screaming and one of the team, Jill, claims she has a vision of a woman falling to her death. Instead of working on their real mission, the team starts digging up the past, like how a maid killed herself here and there had been an exorcism inside the walls of the building.

Peter belives that the ancient stone that forms the room can act as a recoding device for memories and emotions. He wants to exploit this but no one experiences the stone the same way. They fail to replicate the recording and are soon forced to share the space with a team seeking to create a better washing machine. Peter cruelly sends Jill away and refuses to let her share the theory that the past recording has now been erased. She’s right, as the room overpowers her, recording her last moments, screaming for Peter.

England being England, this aired as a ghost story over the holidays. It ended up influencing several filmmakers in America. Just a few moments of watching this and you can see that Prince of Darkness starts as nearly the same movie and then Carpenter decides to stop paying homage to Keale and switches channels to Italian horror.

Director Peter Sasdy also made Taste the Blood of Dracula, Hands of the Ripper, Countess Dracula, Nothing but the Night, Welcome to Blood City and, perhaps most essentially, The Lonely Lady.

11. A Thai Horror Film.

Life is cheap and Dr. Tar and his seven nurses have been sellingbodies on the black market, a scam that just might fall apart when he has an affair on one of the nurses with her sister. That girl, Tahwaan, tries to call the cops and gets killed by the doctor and other six caregivers, ending with her on dry ice in a black garbage bag.

All of the women have their own obsessions which Tahwaan uses to kill them, including a scene where a purse gets sewn to someone’s neck. Dr. Tar was totally into this scheme to kill off his staff and it turns out that — are you ready for this spoiler? — the dead girl was once a boy and she had a sex change to marry the doctor and is reborn into our world out of her sister’s ladyparts, then asks Tar to marry her.

Yeah, Thai horror does not care at all if you’re offended.

Anyways, this looks way better than the budget would suggest and it has some interesting kills. I mean, like I said above, a full-grown woman gets born again out of her sister’s privates and if you think that’s boring, I mean, I don’t know how to entertain you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

10. A Horror Film Scored by Paul Zaza.

Frank Stallone as Tony Mareda Jr., a former Olympic athelete and now a detective who fights with the mob the whole way to a drive-in located in Beamsville that soon has a meteor crash down and transform all of the women in sex-obsessed maniacs. Soon, Tony and news anchor Bruce Pirrie are trying to save the men of the town from Mary Anne Kowalski (Elizabeth Edwards) and her literal army of women. And their pink tank, too.

The meteor has the voice of Earth Kitt. Along with Stallone, she performs the Paul Zaza-written songs.

Why do I keep doing this to myself? Don’t I need sleep?

This is the only full-length movie that Tony Currie directed and wrote, but he also worked on sound for Prom Night, Naked Lunch and Eastern Promises.

But seriously, this movie doesn’t have much to say. I was hoping that this would be some kind of secret classic — I mean, look at the poster art — but I struggled throughout. In a world where Invasion of the Bee Girls and Voyage of the Rock Aliens are already made, why did this even happen? What new could it say?

The filmmakers did, however, get all they could out of Art of Noise’s “Peter Gunn theme.”

9. A Film Directed by Jeff Leroy.

With movies named Rat Scratch Fever, Frankenstein in a Women’ Prison and Giantess Attack, Jeff Leroy knows that some of the battle is fought when you name your movie.

Also known as Grand Auto Theft: L.A. — a title that is pretty good you know? — this takes a Mad Max-style name to tell the story of the Calles de Infierno neighborhood in L.A., a place where a gang of women is trying to get rich or die trying. But to get there, they have to fight other gangs, the cops, a vigilante and even one another.

Vixen, Sarita, Kandy, Electra and Katie sell drugs, sure, but their drugs don’t kill people. So they decide to kill — well, Vixen decides to — kill Kane, the dealer behind it, only to learn that he has another boss Andre. But the real boss selling this Death Meth is The Phantom. Or The Shadow. Who knows, the movie bounces around a lot and has cut scenes to look like, yes, a video game.

Also: a band called the Reach Around Rodeo Clowns have two songs in this and they play more than once. It is rockabilly. In a movie about street gangs.

Jeff Leroy also knows that you need a nice looking piece of art. He did that twice, once for each title.

Women, drugs and violence all sell. This movie is proof yet again.

You can watch this on Tubi.