13. Italian Horror!
I was in love with this movie from the first couple of minutes, where we see rehearsals for a musical about a serial killer who wears a giant owl mask and a cat suit and dances around the stage after he murders ladies of the night. I got so frustrated for the security guard, who repeatedly had to put his job on the line when some white girl decided her problems were more important. But this has some great, gory kills and a fairly good story (I mean, it’s Italian, so we’re talking certain values of “story”). There are also some wonderful moments of tension, particularly the key scene. There are also some flat-out ridiculous elements, especially in the stage show. I will never be over the one woman playing the saxophone while wearing Marilyn Monroe’s iconic Seven-Year Itch dress.
14. Blaxploitation!
Trailers: Across 110th Street, Hell Up in Harlem
Isaac Hayes plays the titular role and is joined by Yaphet Kotto, Nichelle Nichols, Scatman Carothers and Dick Miller, among others. It has a pretty standard exploitation plot, with the main character getting on the wrong side of some very bad people who want him dead. But the cast makes it stand out. If you’ve only ever seen Nichelle Nichols as Uhura on Star Trek, this is something wildly different. I love that her character is as tough as the toughest men in the film. My favorite scene by far is a funeral scene, which has some incredible 1970s fashion, as well as a scene where people drop pinches of cocaine on the deceased’s casket. It also has some very recognizable music, if you’re familiar with Kill Bill.
15. Bugs!
Trailers: Phase IV, Kingdom of the Spiders
This was almost too much for me, as I get pretty squicked by bugs. I’d always thought of this movie as being about cockroaches who fart fire, but I don’t think that’s quite how it works. They do *start* fires, though, and it’s surprising how scary it ends up being. There's a lot of downtime, with characters figuring out or explaining what's going on, but there are some definite high points (like the bugs spelling out messages on the wall to our protagonist). The third act is when it really starts to sing, but it wraps up too quickly and we don’t get to see the new and improved super-engineered bugs really go nuts. But it’s a respectable entry in the killer creatures subgenre.
16. ‘80s Action!
Trailers: Savage Streets, Vigilante
This movie goes HAM from frame one, and I loved it. It reminded me a bit of Rolling Thunder, but this veers more toward vigilantism than strict revenge. The plot is pretty simple: two war buddies come home from Vietnam, having experienced a lot of horrors; when one of them is attacked, the other gets revenge and then some, eventually becoming a vigilante (who the press dub the "Exterminator"). There are some absolutely gruesome deaths in this thing. Especially upsetting is a subplot where our antihero discovers and ultimately lays waste to a child sex trafficking ring. The ending doesn’t really make sense, and I wish Samantha Eggar had more to do than canoodle with the detective character. But I mostly loved it.
17. Fulci!
Trailers: Murder Rock, Velvet Dreams
Something quite different than what Fulci tends to be known for, this is a fairly graphic erotic drama in which a woman whose boyfriend has just died kidnaps the doctor she blames for his death and performs a series of borderline kinky tortures on him. Even before the revenge stuff, there are some sexual elements in this that are just weird (I will never look at a saxophone the same way again). I do like the direction the movie takes in making its protagonist realize the guy she’s doing all this for was pretty shitty to her. But the ending is a little mystifying and I'm not sure I buy the character motivations -- the guy's maybe, and perhaps after enough time has past, the woman's, but it just doesn't sit right for me as the movie presents it.
18. Cannon!
Trailers: Lady Oscar, The Sentinel
This was Faye Dunaway’s feature film follow-up to Mommie Dearest and it does not exactly rehabilitate her. She looks fabulous, of course, but the movie straight-up hates her character. I can cheer her on to some extent, since there were so few options for women (even wealthy women) at the time the film is set. And Dunaway in highway robber cosplay is pretty awesome. But she truly gets what’s coming to her in the end, and as someone who likes to root for female characters in general, I had mixed feelings about it. And for someone who is supposed to be so independent, she's awfully easily influenced by the opinions of others she fears might have a better life than she does.
19. Free Space!
Shelley Winters in the 1970s is hit or miss, but this is one of her better latter-career performances. Loosely based on the life of Ma Barker, this follows her and her criminal sons as they blaze a path of death and destruction across the American South. I liked this but didn’t love it. The best things about it are the cinematography – from John A. Alonzo, who would go on to shoot Vanishing Point, Harold and Maude, and Chinatown – and the cast (including Robert DeNiro in definitely the earliest of his roles I’ve seen).
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