GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED
A trashier-than-average Jim Jones cash-in, directed by Rene Cardona Jr. and featuring several slumming movie stars
GREMLINS
You’re probably familiar with GREMLINS, one of the greatest Hollywood blockbusters of the eighties, as well as a signature film by the sometimes-great Joe Dante
FORBIDDEN WORLD
The second of Roger Corman’s early eighties ALIEN rip-offs, and makes the first, 1981’s middling GALAXY OF TERROR, look like a masterpiece in comparison
GOTHIC
I’m one of the very few people who’ll admit to liking this movie, an ostensible historical rendering of the conception of FRANKENSTEIN, filtered through the mad vision of the one and only Ken Russell
THE GOLD OF LOVE
Germany’s Eckhart Schmidt’s little-seen follow-up to DER FAN/TRANCE was this bizarre film, which offers a strikingly hallucinatory variant on many of that earlier film’s themes
GEEK MAGGOT BINGO
A pivotal film in the Cinema of Transgression that was directed by one of the its key practitioners Nick Zedd
THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE
Yes, this is it: the 1987 Hollywood flop based on the Garbage Pail Kids stickers from the eighties
GAME OVER
This is the scary inverse of HOME ALONE, a French thriller that replaces the former film’s family-friendly pukiness with darkness and perversity
GALAXY OF TERROR
GALAXY OF TERROR isn’t the best of the many ALIEN wannabes, but it is the most outrageous—and, hence, the most fun
LOVE RITES
From the great Walerian Borowczyk, a uniquely spare and poetic erotic reverie with extremely dark overtones that erupt in the horrific final scenes