Quint

Tony Williams manages to extract more than you would expect from an unknown director from a bland gothic haunted house tale full of hackneyed clichés. Just the fact that the film is set in the middle of the Australian outback makes it special in itself. It's an Australian film, but it feels very European. Most memorable, however, is its obscure atmosphere, evoking a sense of vague menace whose origins are not clear until the end of the film. The moments of greatest terror, shot in slow motion, have a surreal and otherworldly quality. The frequent steadicam passages through corridors and dreamy bathroom scenes are a little reminiscent of Kubrick's The Shining, but without feeling like the film is ripping it off. You can tell in every shot that it was carefully planned, and the sets of the house where the film takes place were all carefully tailored to everything. All that's missing to make Next of Kin a horror masterpiece is a more polished plot. The film wasn't seen by many audiences in its time, and if it wasn't for Quentin Tarantino (who considers it the best Australian film ever made), it would probably have fallen into obscurity. But it will finally be dusted off in full glory on Blu-ray this summer, along with other Australian genre gems.

The Shark Hunter doesn't have that much to do with sharks. Franco Nero, sporting a weird wig, is here most of the time fighting, drinking, having sex, treasure hunting or running on the beach in slow motion like David Hasselhoff. And during all this, he sometimes wrestles with sharks – with his bare hands! Which brings me to the fact that Castellari had previously turned down directing Zombi 2 (which was eventually given to Fulci), which features a similarly bizarre scene in which a zombie wrestles a shark for a change. The people behind this film were clearly having a great beach holiday, during which they improvised some crazy chases on land, water and in the air, and some tedious and woefully boring underwater scenes.

A film that became famous for being (and still is) banned in the US because of how much it resembles Jaws. Anyway, the scene where the shark attacks the helicopter is more kickass than in Jaws 2. Then there's the most boring windsurfing race in cinema history. That's all I remember of it.

Not as stylish and extravagant as 1990: The Bronx Warriors, but much more action-packed. The entire film is one long scene of people running around the city burning themselves with flamethrowers or blowing themselves up in peckish slow motion. There's an attempt at some kind of political commentary, but it's basically just a parade of nonstop explosions. Mark Gregory has aged a bit after a year, still wearing a perm and jeans so tight he can barely walk, but he looks a little less effeminate than in the first film. The biggest badass here, however, is his kid sidekick, who has by far the highest kill count of all the characters and kicks ass just as well as Hit-Girl from Kick-Ass. The title of the film (Escape from the Bronx) is quite misleading - nobody actually walks out of the Bronx, but who cares.

The middle piece of Castellari's loose post-apocalyptic trilogy is basically a spaghetti western in a post-apocalyptic setting. Imagine typical western confrontations, but in cars. The result is an extremely low-budget imitation of Road Warrior, which was also inspired by westerns. Castellari, however, takes this approach to a stylistic (almost ridiculous) extreme in his film. His novel widescreen compositions, crazy sets (golf carts converted into combat vehicles with flamethrowers or armour made of transparent plastic), infantile script as if from the pen of a 15-year-old teenager and stoner music make it a pleasantly bizarre experience. And now I know where Rambo got those explosive arrows! Fred Williamson.

The post-apocalyptic B-movies that came right after Mad Max took great pride in style. It didn't matter where you lived or what you did for a living, the main thing was that you had the fanciest costume, makeup or hairstyle and the coolest ride. While The Bronx Warriors exceptionally doesn't copy Mad Max, but rather Hill's The Warriors and Carpenter's Escape from New York, it nevertheless makes a painstaking display of style, from the opening credits, which revel in the fetishistic details of leotards, leather gloves, studs and pads. The gangs that dominate the post-apocalyptic Bronx of 1990 (in the 1980s, it was all about the future) understandably differ from one another in their dress styles and specific means of transportation (from bikers dressed as Blue Oyster customers to skaters to cave mutants), as well as in the weapons they use and the ways they fight (the members of one gang tap dance during fights, for example). Bronx Warriors feels a bit like an eccentric musical without the singing, in which the characters are constantly grouped in front of the camera in mixed, pre-rehearsed formations and poses. Even the simple arrival at a meeting between two gangs has to be done in style. In one such wonderfully absurd scene, we watch several minutes of bikers lining up in a succession of W shapes (an obvious reference to Hill's Warriors). The camera meticulously captures the details of the faces, vests and bikes of even the least important extras (if you can recruit them from the ranks of the real Hells Angels, you have to sell them properly on screen). Adding to the drama is the drumming of a live band that happened to be on location and the director thought it was cool to include them in the plot. The gang members exchange long looks, the drumming builds to a dramatic climax, but the scene has virtually no climax. The bikers just exchange a few words and then calmly disperse again. And that's what the film is like. It's nothing, but it's got style! The plot is extremely stupid and nonsensical, but formally it's a fascinating spectacle in its own way. Castellari once again shows how well he can work with a wide-angle camera. And the real locations of the Bronx at the time look convincingly desolate (though not downright post-apocalyptic). It makes you shudder to think what it was like in the 80s.

Films in the 1980s revelled in toxic waste (Toxic Avenger, C.H.U.D., The Return of the Living Dead, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), but we had to wait until 1990 for a comedy about garbage men who uncover a conspiracy to dispose of toxic waste. This is probably the only star-studded movie about garbage men that did about as much for garbage men as Baywatch did for lifeguards. You'll find in it, without a doubt, the best montages of garbage removal in the history of cinema. In addition, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez show you that being a garbage man is a tough job. On the job, you have fun looking at other people's rubbish being thrown at you or competing with your garbage rivals. And since you finish early, you can spend the rest of the day surfing, partying or having sex on the beach. And after all that, watch your neighbours through binoculars. It is, in part, a very infantile variation on Rear Window, drowned in literally fecal humour. It's comedy trash (about trash).

An obscure horror film that tries to talk about serious issues like environmental concerns, pre-natal depression or social injustice, but the most you'll remember from it is one of the strangest deaths in cinema history. Here, one of the characters is thrown into the air by a mutant bear while wearing a sleeping bag and literally explodes into a pile of feathers on impact. It's indescribable, a must-see. The rabid raccoon attack is actually worth watching too. That's all. Frankenheimer freely admitted that he filmed it when he had a drinking problem. Maybe that explains a lot.

An unusually conceived giallo, mixed with another popular Italian subgenre of the time (I won't reveal which one, as it is related to the final twist). There may be no leather-gloved killer, but stylistically and thematically it's still a giallo. The use of colour, expressionistic camera angles and fetishistic details is not self-indulgent like in many other giallo films. Even the tiniest details in a painting have meaning here, forming gradually fitting pieces of a mosaic. At the same time, they impressively reflect the inner state of the protagonist, who gradually loses her mind as memories of traumatic events from the past begin to come back to her. The boundaries between reality and fantasy or past and present are blurred in a very imaginative way. In addition to this, there is a subtle side-line that is only fully revealed at the end. The ending doesn't make much sense, it's rather metaphorical, but this is a pure horror dive into madness that doesn't make sense. It's almost as good as Polanski's Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby. Francesco Barilli is a very capable horror director, and it's a shame he's only made two features.

This strange indie horror film from the makers of the (actually, also strange) Howard the Duck gives the impression of having been cobbled together from several different films. However, the plot's disjointedness and apparent underdevelopment somehow evokes the feeling of watching a nightmare come to life or a revived horror version of Edward Hopper's paintings, with alienated characters wandering aimlessly through the night's empty streets. The film is certainly not for everyone, but it contains some memorable, extremely well staged horror scenes that after watching will make you wonder why it has become so memorable yet so little known. The scene in the movie theatre, whose aisles gradually fill with zombies behind the back of one of the unsuspecting characters, is as impressive as the similarly constructed school scene in Hitchcock's The Birds, while the zombie scene in the mall beats out the famous Dawn of the Dead (even with its conception of the zombie film as a critique of American consumerism). Messiah of Evil is one of the most remarkable unknown horror films, with its original treatment of zombies that we don't realize are zombies for a long time, precisely staged horror scenes, and stunning widescreen Antonioni-like visuals.