Quint

A clean, undistilled grindhouse flick that makes up for its obviously low budget with shocking unpredictability, sick inventiveness, bizarre humour and great passion for the cause. It’s shot on grainy 16mm in the dirtiest corners of New York that would make Scorsese's Taxi Driver envious. Someone on the internet aptly summed it up by saying that “it's like E.T. if it was directed by a psychopath”. Basket Case has a premise similar to Larry Cohen's horror film It's Alive, about a murderous baby, except that here the murderer is a tiny mutant Siamese twin being carried around in a wicker basket by his brother. Unlike It's Alive, however, Basket Case doesn't take itself seriously at all, it has drive and manages to sell its main monster perfectly. You won't get its visage and loud roar out of your head right away.

Some audiences consider Beyond the Law to be a forgettable cheesy B-movie with a ridiculous, wannabe Charlie Sheen that comes across like in Hot Shots but someone cut all the jokes out. Others, on the other hand, consider it an underrated, serious thriller with a convincing Charlie Sheen and a well-captured biker subculture (some of whom even bought a motorcycle for it). I guess it depends on how old you are and how seriously you can take it. Sheen was an odd choice for the role of the undercover cop who gradually turns into a tough, hairy biker until he goes nuts. From the moment he grows his hair long and starts acting tough, you just can't help but think of Topper Harley from both installments of Hot Shots, between which he made this film. But Sheen puts such energy into his role that there are also times when you believe him. And the tension between him and the leader of the biker gang, played by Michael Madsen, also works at times. The film is otherwise a hodgepodge of the most clichéd crime thrillers about undercover cops (even though it was supposedly written by life itself and based on a true story). It doesn't for a moment deny the time of its creation, and its plot regularly moves forward through silly montages, where you again can't help but think of Team America and the song “We're gonna need a montage”. Sheen meets the bikers – montage. Sheen learns to be a biker – montage. Sheen having sex – montage. Sheen dresses up in a biker suit – montage. Sheen riding a motorcycle – montage. They obviously didn't have enough footage for some of the montages, so there's no shortage of moments like when Sheen slides a gun into his shoe during the armament montage that he'd already slipped in a few shots earlier. But why not, when it's pretty cool to watch. There are cool motorcycles, cool western locations, cool wisecracks, cool rock music, and Linda Fiorentino (where is she these days?).

It's like a cheaper Top Gun. Only instead of pilots, there's infantry, Charlie Sheen instead of Tom Cruise, And instead of the legendary volleyball montage, perhaps an even more unintentionally homoerotic golf montage. Otherwise, it's just another pure propaganda recruitment film that supposedly got a lot of guys to join the Navy Seals, where the movie says you'll make a lot of great friends, with whom you'll then play golf or kill terrorists. The soldiers don't have much time for women (one of them even runs away from the altar after he gets the news that he's about to go into action), but they always find time for “bro moments”, bonding with each other, patting each other down and chatting in the locker rooms.

A forgotten crime drama from the 1980s that clearly influenced one of the biggest contemporary film franchises, The Fast and the Furious, as well as one of the most famous video game franchises, GTA. The film, which kind of looks like a cheap TV rip-off of Michael Mann's thrillers, is stylish but not stylish enough. It has a potential, however, that has been better exploited and perfected by the aforementioned franchises. As a result, the film offers nothing more than an enjoyable nostalgic experience for fans of the 1980s and Charlie Sheen, who here plays a role that is the complete opposite from Wall Street. This time he plays a mentor who teaches the main character to steal cars and introduces him to the glamorous world of yuppies. The more observant viewer may notice a young Brad Pitt with a mullet as an extra in the role of a waiter.

Finally, a slasher whose protagonist is not a silicone damsel running around in distress, but a hardened survivalist who is not the least bit afraid, and who dispatches home invaders with insidious traps with a similar zeal as Kevin McCallister in Home Alone and with similar ingenuity as MacGyver himself (she only needs a kitchen blender to eliminate her opponent). It's not very horror, nor is it very comedic. It's more of a frantic adrenaline ride where everything happens terribly fast and unexpectedly. Fans of the genre will appreciate a lot of cool ideas, drawing attention to genre conventions. It's nothing revolutionary like, say, Scream, but in the flood of all those stereotypical slasher films, it's a pleasant surprise. You can just feel from the film that it was made by horror enthusiasts (there are funny cameos by horror directors Ti West and Joe Swanberg, who spends most of the film with an arrow stuck in his back).

Relentlessly stupid but self-aware trash, that amusingly reflects the 1980s era of tastelessness and kinky subcultures. A parable about how television sucks people's brains out, brimming with so many (sometimes silly, sometimes clever) meta-humour ideas that it won't let you breathe for a moment. Here, consumers are consumed by a delightfully hideous monster (looking like a deformed Omicron from Futurama) that, with its grotesquely asymmetrical appearance, kind of embodies the crazy, extravagant pop culture of the time. The director, Ted Nicolaou, is said to have made the film to spoil twelve year olds with it. So don't let your kids see it.

You'll probably only see grinning zombies with wigs and chainsaws crawling out of the TV in this film, which tries to differentiate itself from the classic Romero zombie films as much as possible. The zombies here do everything but the traditional brain-eating. And it's good to see something unorthodox in this subgenre. However, there aren't enough ideas here to keep you from being gradually put to sleep by boring dialogue filler. A much more entertaining horror freakout about a TV monster is TerrorVision, which came out a year earlier.

A surprisingly unexploitative Corman film with a weaker start, but with an excellent Don Keith Opper as a lonely android on a space station who wants to become human. The funniest thing about the film is his “mental” transformation from an infantile naif, learning about the world through 20th century movies, to a reprogrammed killing machine (James Cameron was involved as a production designer, and quite possibly picked up the inspiration for his later Terminator here). The film basically has no single positive character, but Opper (who playfully outshines the otherwise dominant Klaus Kinski as the mad scientist) manages to retain our sympathy even when the bad human qualities and emotions that gradually strip him of his innocence begin to stir. Android has a very cheesy production design, even by Corman's standards (the sets look like something out of kid’s show and the props like something out of a toy store), but it doesn't take itself too seriously and doesn't come across as unintentionally funny, even as it asks deep existential questions like “what does it mean to be human?”

A minimalist slasher set in a single house, whose landlord is the deranged son of a Nazi surgeon who stalks and murders his female tenants. They could not have chosen a more suitable actor for the lead role than Klaus Kinski. As usual, filming with him was hell for the entire crew (see the short documentary Please Kill Mr. Kinski). Kinski didn't like being directed, he refused to say lines he didn't like, which sometimes interfered with the clarity of the dialogue. He liked to direct himself. In fact, he considered himself the most important part of all his films. And in this case, it really is his one man show. If it weren't for his presence, you'd be yawning yourself to death. Most of the film is practically nothing. Kinski, however, manages to uncomfortably hypnotize the audience with his creepy gaze while simply crawling through ventilation shafts or writing a diary, which is his focus in most of the film (although the story is told mostly from his character's point of view, most of the murders end up occurring off-screen). Fulci's cinematographer Sergio Salvati and De Palma's favorite composer Pino Donaggio also help keep the audience's attention. The film was shot in Italy and much of the crew was Italian. This makes Crawlspace a bit like a giallo film in terms of form.

A surprisingly little-known documentary about sharks that was a big inspiration for Peter Benchley when writing “Jaws” (some of the crew even provided underwater footage for Spielberg's film adaptation). This is not a traditional educational documentary, but a first-hand account of the adventurous expedition of a few daredevils. In the 1960s, when a bored millionaire hired a group of people to go out to sea in search of the great white shark, which at the time had never been filmed in its natural habitat. The crew consists of divers, shark experts, and even a folk singer who plays guitar during the voyage (yes, just like in The Life Aquatic). Blue Water, White Death feels more like a realistic adventure film. For a documentary, it is unusually suspenseful (and widescreen). It doesn't intrude with any descriptive commentary. It makes you feel like you've actually spent some time with the crew of the ship. You gradually get to know all of its members, who you then worry about as they leave the safety of the ship and eventually the diving cages while dozens of hungry sharks circle around them. It took them several months to find the great white shark, but in the process they managed to film a large number of other sharks (and the then still permitted whaling, which is not a pleasant sight). But the whole film also makes you anxiously await the moment when you finally get a glimpse of the promised man-eater. Blue Water, White Death has an almost horror-like atmosphere at certain moments, the likes of which you don't often experience in nature documentaries. Nowadays such dives are quite common even for tourists taking selfies with the sharks, but in its time it was something groundbreaking, and you can feel it in the film. You're not likely to find a more evocative documentary on the subject