EL TOPO
EL TOPO is the most famous film ever made by the incomparable Alejandro Jodorowsky, an early-seventies counterculture mainstay that retains much of its off-kilter brilliance
EATING RAOUL
This is the most famous movie directed by the late Paul Bartel, a highly successful indie black comedy about sex, murder and cannibalism
EATEN ALIVE
Director Tobe Hooper’s follow up to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, EATEN ALIVE was one of the innumerable JAWS knock-offs that flooded Hollywood in the late 1970s, the shark stand-in here being a massive crocodile to which a loony old man feeds his enemies
SZAMANKA
SZAMANKA is frenzied, subversive and cinematically invigorating, at once a provocative art film and a lurid thriller
SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE
This isn’t a revenge movie per se, but a dark, brutal exploration of fate and consequence from one of the world’s most interesting filmmakers. That filmmaker is Korea’s Chanwook Park, who’s created a deeply odd, and deeply personal, cinematic universe unique unto itself
SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD
The final installment of George Romero’s DEAD saga is about on par with his previous efforts LAND OF THE DEAD and DIARY OF THE DEAD: flawed in many respects, but pretty good for the most part
SUMMER OF SAM
From Spike Lee, a wildly overbaked yet vital account of the seventies-era “Son of Sam” killings. The film has much to say about the effects of fear and paranoia, none of it comforting
SUICIDE CULT
This ultra-obscure train wreck of a movie is a colossal embarrassment, but it is undeniably fascinating to watch the film’s hideously confused storyline—which somehow mixes astrology, mass suicide, CIA intrigue, mind control and the Second Coming—unfold
THE STONE TAPE
A signature work from the British writer Nigel Kneale, one of the genre’s true masters. Rigorously constructed, thought provoking and deeply disturbing, this was made for the BBC in 1972, and may just be the finest TV horror movie ever made
STALKER
I say this is the masterpiece of Russia’s late Andrei Tarkovsky, an unforgettable trip through one of the cinema’s most vivid and unsettling dreamscapes