< 100: Overlooked, Intriguing or Boombastic!

A surrealist comedy starring Simon Pegg in a captivating role as a paranoid writer who thinks that people are out to get him, but he eventually has to do things such as visit a laundromat that force him to socialize in really blown out and hilarious consequences. The stop-motion animated sequence in the end is one of the more touching single scenes in recent films. For some reason this movie is apparently really hated by most audiences, and I can see it's very clearly film-buff-esque structure and visuals taking their toll on the more uninitiated, but if you have the ability to mentally process more than the barrel of a gun you should be fine.

When speaking of Jean Vigo's far too short filmography, people often focus on L'Atalante and Zero for Conduct as his definitive masterpieces. I was personally hypnotized by this fantastic piece of frantic camera work where the French town of Nice is successfully transformed into a mesmerizing myriad of suggestive, symbolic or descriptive imagery about social classes, ending in a form of bleak beauty as smoke rises to the sky after a long carnival finally comes to a close.

The Assault is a reconstruction of a plane hijacking by terrorists that took place in the early 90s, and mostly follows a French SWAT-team that's about to storm the plane. The intensity borders on unbearable especially during a particularly frenetic scene where the team does a fast face-first approach to the landed plane on an abandoned airfield. I have no idea why so few people have seen this, as it's even streaming on Netflix as we speak.

Something of a polar opposite of the sensationalistic drivel that is Precious, Ballast follows a few african-americans in middle America trying to cope with less than ideal living conditions and emotional trauma. All emotion is understated in minimalistic frames and dialogue, but you can always see the melancholy brewing underneath. It's a sad picture, sure. But it is not without hope. This is a film that's on it's way to being forgotten, but it shouldn't be, as it gives a striking, definite portrayal of the lives of a specific group, or class, of people.

Brand Upon the Brain! is something of a modern classic as it is absolutely the arthousiest arthouse you can get, while also being as accessible as any Tim Burton-movie. The visual look, editing and narrative structure are all very unique and fantastic, and the decision to keep the film silent aside from narration works well. For a film that seems so heavy to watch, the running time flies by. The personal nature of the story is also a fun addition, making the whole movie seem a touch closer to a sort of Truffaut-esque biography.

This revisionist western is a brutal watch. We start off with a group of cowboys chasing after blood-thirsty natives in the wild west, only to find something much, much worse. The tone changes successfully from a classically dark western to a really screwed up horror film, and the eventual ending is as bleak as the fate of the villains victims here. This is truly a gem, with a strong emphasis on characterization and mood.

David Sieveking has always been a fan of David Lynch. As he gets a chance to go see a lecture of Lynch of transcendental meditation, he immediately takes up the chance and becomes inspired to try it out himself after interviewing Lynch briefly for his own purposes. Little did he know that this would start off a much larger project. David Wants to Fly documents the ensuing years in heartwarming detail as we see David fall for transcendental meditation and then become disillusioned by it's economical side. He periodically seeks guidance from Lynch, who becomes reluctant to see him by the end of the film as Sieveking becomes even more prying about the fishier sides of the meditation movement. This doc shows a level of putting yourself on the line that I think more documentaries should. David's personality comes through from all the scenes and his narration is wonderful. The footage he eventually manages to get is occasionally ludicrously good, such as when the German head of the meditation movement chants "Long Live Pure Germany" alongside a very awkward Lynch in a not-so-crowded auditorium, with the audience booing in obscene offense. Great little documentary, this is.

Dementia has no dialogue in it. Or well, there's a version named Daughter of Horror that features awful, film-ruining narration from Ed McMahon. See the proper version where no one ever speaks, but the mood is just so thick that it brings to mind the strongest of film noirs and the most anxiety-inducing of horror movies. The story is an impressive mind-fuck with memorable characters, and that's saying something when no one ever says anything. The climatic scene with the shots of hands bursting out from everywhere on the frame is absolutely awesome.

A fantastic documentary where we follow a Japanese WW2-veteran who tries to get his former superiors to admit the atrocities he saw them commit during the war. However the methods he uses to achieve this are so over-the-top and flamboyantly offensive that they can't be cheered on. He goes to a man's house and offends him until he starts beating the man up. He drives around in a van with offenses towards the emperor written all over it. Yet what he is trying to achieve is right. He is trying to uncover the truth that should be uncovered. He just takes every wrong turn he can in doing so. It's so awkward and fantastic to follow.

The subway in the middle of the night. Cheerful religious men coming home from church, carrying crucifixes. The odd bum or two. You close your eyes for a second, only to awaken to all the religious folks stabbing you with knives. The crucifixes. What went wrong? This is the scenario End of the Line presents. The imagery is thoroughly disturbing and distressing. And the reason for why these zealots begin killing everyone... That's what makes people hate this movie. Here's an advice if you end up watching this: Follow the cupcakes. CHEMTRAILS

Arrabal is apparently one crazy filmmaker. This movie contains enough mutilated penises, poo, cannibalism and outright weirdness to fulfill any needs you may have for a whole year. This is truly the closest good films have gotten to being like Jodorowsky's classic Holy Mountain, and a real hidden gem. I shan't spoil the film for you, because the surprises the surreal story have in store for you make the whole that much more worthwhile.

An intense experience on par with movies such as Funny Games and Mother's Day, and I would argue in sheer terror this is much more terrifying than any of the other representatives of the home invasion-genre. There is minimal set-up and the story is a polar opposite of something like Funny Games. Kidnapped sets out to do nothing more than make your hands shake like hell after it's over, and it has a great bag of surprises to achieve that, that I won't spoil here.

There's a distinct melancholy to everything in Last Train Home. A mother and father work day and night in a Chinese factory to support their daughter's upcoming education. The daughter eventually gives up hope of a better life and succumbs to the temptations of life in the big city and goes there to work in similar circumstances as her parents. This effectively means that what the parents have spent their entire lives doing, ensuring the better life for their child, has been for nothing. Possibly one of the saddest documentaries of the decade from a country not exactly renown in recent years for it's docs.

Mathieu Amalric's fantastic directorial effort (the first since his debut in the 90s) is made in the vein of Fellini and tells of a burlesque show ran by Amalric as a sleazy manager who tries to make sense of his life in the midst of crisis. The stars of the show also have their own lives and problems, and all of these singular internal conflicts form a very compelling whole. One of the best existentialist films of recent years and a joy to behold.

Nina Paley's boyfriend dumped her, and she made Sita Sings the Blues to recover. It's a fascinating and frantic cavalcade of stories from The Ramayana narrated by amusing historians combined with Paley's own experiences, and occasionally we get gorgeous musical numbers set to Annette Hanshaw's public domain jazz-recordings. This entire film is public domain by the way, which is a shame, because a film this masterful should have made it's owner boatloads of cash if all was right in the world.

Superstition is the result of Canadians trying to make a trashy Italian horror movie, and it's great. There's so much absurd gore and thick Gothic mood that it fills the soul. The plot is completely ridiculous in true Italian fashion, featuring a demon-possessed house that people constantly try to move into and keep dying. My favourite death is that of a priest who comes in to survey the construction site as the church is sponsoring the remodeling of the house. Suddenly, a nearby circular saw flies off the machine it's attached to and spins into the priest's chest and spins in place there for almost a full minute before anyone does anything about it!

A weird short film with owls talking to one another about... something. I have no idea, all I know is those owls and the absurd "dialogue" they have form a post-modern nightmare of sorts in this short from Chris Marker.

Burning Bright was actually spotted from JayTrotter's much better than this-list of amazing and obscure films. I didn't enjoy it as much as he seemed to, but this movie goes to astonishing lengths to flesh out it's characters and setting before trapping a teenager into a house with a tiger and her autistic little brother. Garrett Dillahunt does a wonderful job as their scumbaggy father, and by the time the tiger comes in you're already forgetting that this is supposed to be a horror movie. The events the tiger sets to motion really hit home emotionally when they change the relationship between the two siblings.

Eduardo Sánchez hasn't really done anything worthwhile since the first Blair Witch. I keep hearing good things about that Altered-flick, so maybe that. But otherwise, nothing. Lovely Molly sort of continues this trend, but at the same time it's very weird and interesting. Molly is a former drug addict who lives in a secluded, raggedy house with her husband. Her life becomes increasingly disturbed by ghostly things and whatnot, and eventually things escalate to psychosexual levels as ghosts begin raping her. This is all basic stuff. Then the interesting part kicks in. The movie makes a point of constantly disputing Molly's perception of reality just enough to make us question whether this is her or are ghosts really attacking her. Drugs also return to her life, as does solitary melancholy. She begins changing into a hyper-sexualized creature who can't talk to a priest without wanting to sodomize him. By the end she has become an incredible wreck of a.. a being, and walks out of the house to meet a disturbing angel of death of sorts. She simply fades away from the world. Add a dose of incest to the mix and you have yourself a very hypnotizing mess of a movie.

It's a musical. Based on Reefer Madness. And it isn't bad. If I haven't already convinced you with that, you are not in the target audience for this hilarious cult comedy. I never knew Alan Cumming could pull off such a great Roosevelt...

This is a Brian Yuzna-film. If you know your horror movies, that will make you expect famous B-actors making cameos, good and goofy special effects. With Rottweiler you instead get a pretty cool attempt at a serious character drama. A mentally damaged convict escapes a prison and they sent a robotic Rottweiler after him, and the dog kills everything in it's way. The convict runs into people, families and the like on his escape, and he inevitably gets them all killed. The ending hurts. The budget is low and it shows, but the cheese-factor is lessened if you actually accept this movie as an attempt in drama from people who don't usually do it very well.

Not only is this Kiyoshi Kurosawa's directorial debut, but it's also one of the first western-esque horrors to come out of Japan alongside Evil Dead Trap. The ending has special effects that contest with The Thing, but the pace is a bit slow overall. There's plenty of gore throughout nonetheless, and it also spawned a fantastic NES-videogame by the same name that was basically the starting point for the Resident Evil-series.

A must-see for slasher fans, Torso is two parts giallo and one part slasher flick. The concept of the final girl might make it's first appearance here, as the third act of the movie revolves around a killer stalking his final victim, a girl he didn't murder the night before when he killed all her friends. The abrupt transition from what happens before this to the aftermath of these horrific murders from the traumatized near-victim is fantastic. Shame the first half of the film doesn't really live up to all of this, and the finale is a letdown in the sense that it is the same as in probably a fourth of all giallos.

Another cool giallo. The first half hour is fantastic, with clever editing used to great effect after a couple tries to recover from the death of their child in Venice. A funeral is inter cut with them having teary-eyed sex with Ennio Morricone's haunting music playing in the background. The killer's appearance is completely unique within the giallo-spectrum as it appears to be a giant old lady underneath a silk veil. The main theme Morricone composed remains one of my favorites from him. The movie all but falls apart during the last hour, but the opening is pretty much some of the best Italian cinema from this era.

If I really have to explain to you why a film called Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo is the very definition of boombastic, I don't want you to read this list.

Circle of Iron is something I've written of extensively in another list, so I'll just paste that here to ease the burden of you clicking a link:

There exists a term among the Finnish film community called "pallinaama." This translates to Ballface (as in scrotum, not the round thing you kick). It is often used to describe male action B-movie stars who have a rather chiseled, 80s masculine look to their faces, but are completely devoid of all charisma and acting talent. Their chins often resemble a ball sack or a single smooth testacle, hence the title. What's intriguing about actors like this, such as Michael Dudikoff, Reb Brown, Casper Van Dien and Eric Roberts, is that staring into their blank eyes is the equivalent of staring into a black hole of charisma, or as Nietschze put it, it's like staring into the abyss, but this time the abyss never stares back, as that requires some level of existence that these ballfaced stars never seem to occupy. Why am I bringing this up? Because I have found a new king for these men. I give you... Jeff Cooper!

This man is amazing. Not only can he not act to save his spectacular pecks, he looks like the ill-conceived child of Malcolm McDowell and David Hasselhoff who was way into MacGyver as a kid and never cut his hair after that period. Now when you throw this man aside David Carradine and Christopher Lee, you get some real awesome contrast between men who ARE charisma and a man who is devoid of such.

What is Circle of Iron, though? I don't know. The film opens with a text box informing us that this movie is based on the Zen-philosophy of Bruce Lee, and that it was never made during his life as Lee knew it would be controversial. The opening credits also credit James Coburn aside Lee as the storytellers of this script. The movie opens in a coliseum, where our hero fights some people in order to win the right to go chasing after Zetan, a wizard who has a book that contains the answers to everything in the world. He loses though, but whatever, he still goes after the book. To get to it, he must pass several (two) trials. In the first, he has to beat a monkey man (David Carradine) and in the second, he has to beat the king of a harem (David Carradine) who occasionally transforms into a man in a really bad panther suit (David Carradine) or into the monkey man (David Carradine). Our hero is aided in his quest by a blind man (David Carradine). Did I mention that David Carradine is in this movie?

Anyway, the blind man tells... Jeff Cooper, all sorts of awesome stuff, such as that you can't step on the same piece of water twice. Thanks man, that really helped beating all these warriors trying to kill me. At one point, the blind man punches a small boy so hard in the face that his nose breaks and starts bleeding profusely. He says that he did this because the boy was too beautiful. By the end of the film, the mentor and pupil play the pan-flute and dance on top of a mountain. Also, early on in the film, Cooper's character runs into non other than Eli Wallach in a desert. He has been sitting in a pot of oil for the last ten years in an effort to shrink away his penis so that he may be more holy. I don't even... God damnit, just take a look at this:

Hell yeah you should watch this movie, I can't even believe you're still thinking about not doing that.

Some of the goofiest sci-fi you will find from the 50s, but in the utmost positive sense unlike some of Ed Wood's endeavors. In the story, a criminal is condemned to live in Europe for a few years as punishment for his crimes (the horror!), but as he returns to the states he brings along a Nazi scientist who can make anyone into a "zombie" that can be controlled by talking into a large speaker in his science lair. A pipe-smoking wifebeater who is also a doctor, a policeman, and an all-around superman takes on the task of tracking down these fiends and does so visiting bars with a geiger counter as he realizes that the scientist loves beer and has been irradiated like Indiana Jones's fridge. Despite all his smarts, he still boards a car driven by a man who...talks...like...this and has a giant scar across his forehead. Ahh, such fun this movie is. The climax is also noteworthy for featuring the most inefficient grenades of all time.

Jason Blade, an Australian ninja, fights bad guys who wear pig masks and kill his girlfriend. Unlike most bad action movies, the action here is great, containing a level of kinetic energy and choreography rarely witnessed with this low a budget. The plot is astonishingly bad for the first half but disappointingly sort of calms down as the movie goes along. Still, it's so much fun to see this type of filmmaking where you can kind of see the enthusiasm of the makers in the final product. Also, the main character's name is Jason Blade. JASON BLADE

This fucking movie! It's named Demons 6, but it's also Suspiria 3, Inferno 2 and Mother of Tears 0, and it's also a metafilm about writing a sequel to Suspiria, featuring a scene in which a film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat is filmed, and that's also an alternate title for the movie. What the hell? The special effects are awfully funny, and the shameless use of that cool theme from Suspiria is so profoundly in-your-face that it becomes enjoyable. Also, that's a good theme to rip off if you need to rip off a theme.

Disco Godfather, despite having the best set-up for any film to be ever made, is a profound disappointment. An hour or so of the movie goes along with an insanely slow pace, and the disco scenes where Disco Godfather hypes people up in a disco playing the most awful funk I've ever heard go on for like fifteen minutes at a time. Thankfully the entire movie switches gears for the last fifteen minutes, during which we get the most exciting fucked up material I've seen in blacksploitation, period. I won't spoil it, but the film manages to fit in oodles of horror and action elements into a blend that amounts to about fifteen minutes of non-stop laughter. Not for the faint of heart, this one.

Equinox is the precursor to Evil Dead, but it's almost as awesome. Changing the gore-enthused visions of Sam Raimi to something more akin to the sci-fi movies of the 50s, this movie sports giant flying lizard-devil things and giant blue cavemen haunting a group of kids who find an old book and read transcripts from it. The plot is full of great surprises and the overall experience is so enjoyable that despite outwardly seeming such I don't see Equinox as bad filmmaking any more. It's too much fun to be a fun bad movie.

Roger Corman getting a Fantastic Four-adaptation made in a matter of weeks with little to no money and no script only so the production company got to keep the rights can bear no good. Right? Right? Well, actually, this is better than the Hollywood-movies that came years later. Doctor Doom's performance in this movie is on par with the greatest villains of our time, as he acts maniacally with his hands since he can't use his face due to the large metal mask. The final showdown is a priceless combination of no-budget special effects and men in rubber suits beating up random goons.

Richard and Danny Elfman made this awesome musical in the 80s. It's all black-and-white and tells of the Hercules-family, the daughter of which walks through a door in their basement to enter The Forbidden Zone, a domain ruled by a woman-loving dwarf and an evil queen with gigantic boobies. The music is insanely catchy and the impressionistic sets are certainly unique even if the humor doesn't always hit it's marks. Also, dat frog, man. Dat frog.

This is a Finnish comedy that is absolutely disgusting. The lead character is a one-note sketch character with an obnoxious voice and he teams up with a mentally delayed fat man to take on a challenge of investing a million marks to earn more money than their competitors. This naturally involves dressing up as women, buying woolly hats and performing in their own restaurant with such acts as jumping over a 3 cent high pole or shooting a bird from the ceiling. All of this is bizarrely charming and especially a scene where a car is being chased by a tram for minutes before they realize that maybe they should just drive away from the parts of the streets where the tracks are. I think that scene describes this movie perfectly.

I love The Last Hunter because it really gives a surprising insight into how Italian exploitation was made; taking thoughts and concepts from various big American releases and then trying to imitate them with relatively large budgets and ridiculously low filmmaking talent. The film is a weird compilation of scenes where a group of soldiers run around in Vietnam, being all hardcore and whatnot, running into either enemies, naked women or friendly troops. When they run into the friendly troops, the first thing that happens after they try to rape a woman who our group of soldiers has picked up on the way, is challenge each other to a game of "fetch the coconut" where one soldier runs into enemy territory and fetches a coconut from a tree as angry Vietnamese people try to gun him down from not two feet away. After this scene ends the main character comes on screen to have dialogue about how horrible, terrible and wrong war is. I love this movie.

This insane kung-fu movie features mystical masters, vases that become mimes who pee on our main character, horrifying long-haired kung-fu fighters and most of all oodles of training segments and well choreographed fight scenes. There's little to hate here.

Possibly one of my favorite modern B-movies. Octopus starts off in the Cuban ocean during the Cuban missile crisis, as a USSR submarine is transporting liquid anthrax to fellow communists. The sub gets shot down, and forty years later a giant octopus, caused by the poison, reigns terror on another submarine, this time filled with marines and a tough-as-nails terrorist who they're transporting via sub because otherwise he would escape. The octopus is so awful in it's CGI-squishiness that it's totally hilarious, and everyone acting in this movie seems to have taken some form of hallucinogenic drugs beforehand. Everything just clicks, making this a ridiculously fun flick to watch.

Theater of Blood is Vincent Price's show. He runs this theater with an iron fist as a disgruntled actor who faked his own death to come back on stage and kill his critics while dressed up in various Shakespeare-costumes and playing appropriate roles. Every appearance from the man is oozing with cheese, charisma and laughs in a perfect combination. The gore is minimal, but fits in with the funny tone. My favorite scene is when Price kills one of his victims in a hair salon dressed up as a hairdresser from the 70s, afro and all. Groovy, dude!

Thirsty for Love, Sex and Murder is a Turkish giallo. Turkish. Giallo. My god! What abominable bastard came up with this, I don't know, but the curiosity value is satisfied here as the Turks try their best to imitate the unique visual flair and social critique of their Italian counterparts in a movie that's just one big party during which a raincoated killer (whose face we see in the first scene of the movie but it's still treated as a huge mystery throughout) does his bidding in horrific ways. The results are absolutely unique and priceless.

I know you've seen that clip before. It's from this movie. And the rest of it? As much fun as that clip. Sold, thank you so very much.