CORRUPTION
This, one of several porn films made by the late Roger Watkins in the eighties, is a highly downbeat and surreal work
THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER
Arguably the masterpiece of England’s Peter Greenaway, an unrestrained blast of grossness and bad behavior that was and remains a repellant yet undeniably beautiful mutant of a movie
THE CHEKIST
A blistering look at an executioner going about his work in the wake of the Russian Revolution that’s guaranteed to traumatize the most hardened viewers
THE FRIEDKIN CONNECTION
This isn’t the greatest memoir by a film director I’ve ever read, but it is essential
IRREVERSIBLE
An extraordinary piece of “shock art.” It seems curiously appropriate that, in the midst of the rabidly anti-French sentiment that saturated the US in the early 00s, this is the major French movie we got
IN A GLASS CAGE
This 1986 Spanish shocker is one of the most repellant, upsetting and relentless movies of all time, but it’s also a superbly made, endlessly thought provoking dissertation on the persistence of evil
NIGHT DREAMS
Although little known today, this was one of the most revolutionary porn films of the 1980s, and remains a high point in a format that contains very few
HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (Film)
Serial killer biopics are a dime a dozen these days, but in 1986 there was nothing quite like HENRY, which remains a stunner
2013: Bedlam in Print
Here we have the latest (admittedly quite belayed) installment of my annual overview of the previous year’s horror-minded publications