METAL SKIN
This is one of the finest Australian films of the past couple decades, and also one of the most underappreciated: a bleak and upsetting stew of post-teenage ennui, witchcraft, psychosis and death!
MARAT/SADE
Peter Brook’s infamous filming of Peter Weiss’ MARAT/SADE is one of the screen’s great depictions of unfettered insanity, as well as a historical drama with definite contemporary relevance
THE MANSION OF MADNESS
This phantasmagoric spectacle, loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” remains a landmark of Mexican horror/fantasy
BUG (2007)
It’s been awhile since director William Friedkin made anything to match his seventies masterworks THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST, but BUG handily accomplishes that task
BRUISER
After an eight-year absence George Romero, one of the horror film’s grand masters, returns. BRUISER doesn’t live up to Romero’s best work but it’s not a complete disaster, either
BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
A quest for the eponymous head becomes a deranged trip into blood-soaked psychosis in this, the late Sam Peckinpah’s most personal and outrageous film
BLOOD SIMPLE
A quintessential American independent film from the eighties, and still a one-of-a-kind masterpiece
A BELL FROM HELL
A vaguely surreal, darkly comic and deeply shocking exercise in Euro-styled anti-bourgeoisie subversion, the Spanish production A BELL FROM HELL is a one-of-a-kind gem
EVIL WORDS
Good mystery-horror from Quebec that mixes crime, detection, hallucination and the supernatural to satisfying effect
ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW
This is the already-infamous indie that was filmed surreptitiously at Walt Disney World. The film is fairly affecting, although the crummy final third does it in