CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER
A far weirder-than-average potboiler from the sixties. It’s a druggy adventure set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, starring the one and only Vincent Price
CONFESSIONS OF A PSYCHO CAT
This lunatic late sixties obscurity, a hippified take on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, is hardly a buried treasure. It is fun, though, an unforgettably whacked-out wallow in gore and sleaze!
JACK HILL: THE EXPLOITATION AND BLAXPLOITATION MASTER, FILM BY FILM
The first and thus far only book about Jack Hill, arguably the greatest exploitation movie director of the grindhouse era
NICE GUYS DON’T WORK IN HOLLYWOOD
This posthumously published memoir is a frank and fast moving book about which my only real complaint is that, at just 197 pages, it’s far too short
IREZUMI
A key work by one of Japan’s neglected masters of cinema, director Yasuzo Masumura, who in IREZUMI created a starkly violent and perverse account of obsession, revenge and elaborate tattoos
INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER
This 1969 short is the darkest and most psychotic of Kenneth Anger’s films, a fragmentary evocation of black magic and late sixties-era psychedelia
THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES
The magnum opus of the late Ray Dennis Steckler, who lavished his largest-ever budget—a whopping $38,000—on this screwball horror-musical from 1963
HOUSE OF USHER
The first of Roger Corman’s stately and refined Edgar Allen Poe adaptations. An affecting film, but I prefer my Corman pictures down and dirty
HOUR OF THE WOLF
An Ingmar Bergman horror movie! THE HOUR OF THE WOLF was largely dismissed by critics, and truth be told it is quite dumb
HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN
Like many cult movie buffs the world over, I’ve been curious about this long-banned Japanese film for years. It’s inevitable, I guess, that I was disappointed