The 10 Sickest Exploitation Movies

Movies don’t get much stranger than Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Directed by sexploitation guru Russ Meyer, it’s a black-and-white oddity about three tall, breast-blessed knockouts, led by Japanese-American bombshell Tura Satana (who’d be a surefire WWE Diva today), who pointlessly kill a man in the desert, bound and gag his cutie girlfriend, and then try to rob an old man in a wheelchair.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a smorgasbord of amazing ridiculousness. To kill the aforementioned male victim, Meyer has Sutana karate chop the guy to death. Overwrought narration pretentiously, yet also hilariously, states the obvious (“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence!”), and, just because the cool hip cats of the ’60s loved it so much, groovy jazz music plays loudly throughout.

None of it makes a lick of sense, which, really, is the first sign that an exploitation movie is both authentic and great fun to watch while under the influence.

Behold one of the most dysfunctional families imaginable. The three main psychopaths in writer-director Jack Hill’s twisted cult classic are inbred siblings (two girls and one dude) who live in a literal house of horrors.

One of the girls, Virginia (a.k.a. Spider Baby, played by the sexy Jill Banner) kisses her dead dad’s skull every night before bedtime. Dinner consists of freshly killed cat with a side of crunchy insects. And their braindead aunts and uncles live in the basement and eat whatever humans are tossed down the garbage disposal. Aside from all of that, though, the house in Spider Baby is quite idyllic.

Hill’s sick imagination is on full display throughout this black-and-white tingler. The conceit behind the title character is enough to send Spider Baby straight into the hearts of sleazy exploitation devotees: Spider Baby gets off on trapping people in a giant web and stabbing them with butcher knives, which, in her disturbed mind, simulates a spider’s stings. We’re all for experimentation in the bedroom, but that’s the wrong kind of freaky.

“Sickest” doesn’t always have to mean “the nastiest,” or “the craziest.” In the case of Vampyros Lesbos, the term is meant more in the “those girls have amazing racks” sense.

Directed by schlock veteran Jesus Franco, this erotic, soft-core horror flick is literally about lesbian vampires, though not just any old same-sex-loving bloodsuckers—we’re talking about some of the hottest Spanish chicks your eyes will ever see. And they’re all about sex, fondling each other’s boobies, and bathing naked in the red stuff.

When they’re not sunbathing naked, Franco’s game actresses shed their clothing in front of all-black backgrounds that look like some creepy guy’s basement walls covered in licorice-colored drapes. There’s a sordid charm to Vampyros Lesbos; it’s pretty much an ambitious porno flick disguised as promiscuous exploitation. But Franco’s cult favorite is a must-see nonetheless.

Fans of gangster movies have Martin Scorsese, while comedy heads swear by early John Landis. Beneath the realm of good taste, however, champions of gore worship at the throne of Herschell Gordon Lewis.

With a lengthy resume that includes such lovely titles as Color Me Blood Red, Scum Of The Earth!, and Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, Lewis is regarded as a pioneer in plot-deficient shockers with excessive amounts of gruesome, though cheap-looking, imagery and mediocre acting.

The Wizard Of Gore—perhaps his most popular flick—is about a creepy magician performing deadly tricks on unsuspecting female volunteers who are later murdered in grisly ways. Girls’ bodies are dismembered, drills pierce through their heads and limbs, and gallons of ketchup disguised as blood cover the screen. As low-rent as the scenes and makeup effects look today, The Wizard Of Gore’s horrific money shots—one of which randomly made its way into a recent Academy Award-nominated movie—are still uncomfortable to watch. Especially if you’re allergic to Silly Putty and Heinz condiments.

We’re guessing that I Spit On Your Grave’s writer-director Meir Zarchi would defend his infamous rape revenge shocker with some kind of “female empowerment” nonsense. And nothing says “You go, girl” like three rape scenes that are shown with no cuts or visual inventiveness.

Zarchi simply sits back, keeps the camera steady, and lets the sexual deviancy play out. Needless to say, I Spit On Your Grave is just about the worst movie you could ever watch on a Netflix-themed date night.

The victim (played by Camille Keaton, one ballsy actress) eventually gets even with the four hillbillies who defiled her. She slices off one dude’s nuts with a knife, guts another with speedboat propellers, drives an axe into one’s back, and gives the fourth the old noose necklace treatment.

The acting in Marchi’s trashy pic is horrendous, the production values aren’t even of student film quality, and the whole thing generally reeks of sadistic indulgence. And you know what? We can’t help but love I Spit On Your Grave for its unabashed awfulness. We could, however, do without all of the ’70s nudity, which brings the decade’s shunning of self-grooming to gross light.

Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS definitely belongs on this list, but we have to admit: It’s not a movie we’d recommend to many guys, namely any two-pump chumps.

The most infamous entry into the family-friendly Nazi exploitation genre, Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS finds its title character, a buxom captain inside a prisoner-of-war camp, randomly picking one male prisoner per night to head back to her chambers for one-sided sex. But, in response to her forcefulness, men bust too early, which pisses Ilsa off and leads her to chop off their members.

Unless you’re Ron Jeremy, the central idea behind Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS should have you crossing your legs and making a bitter-beer-face. For minuteman everywhere, it’s the cinematic work of the Devil.

As film history tells it, Lucio Fulci’s enormously badass Zombi 2 was made in 1979 as a blatant way to cash-in on the walking corpse hype triggered by George A. Romero’s ’78 zombie masterpiece Dawn Of The Dead. It’s right there in the title; Zombi 2 isn’t a sequel to anything.

Yet, Fulci’s film is so much more extreme than Romero’s that it ironically adheres to the horror sequel formula of more gore plus more nausea-inducing set-pieces equals success. And that’s what the gleefully nasty Zombi 2 is: an insane triumph.

There’s barely a plot at work, only one unbelievably demented sequence after another. Zombies brawl with sharks and treat ripped-open human stomachs like all-you-can-eat buffets; Fulci, meanwhile, dares the viewer to look away. The movie’s most infamous scene is a ridiculously drawn-out shot of a woman's head slowly being pulled into a long wooden spike until it pushes its way into her eyeball, which the director shows up close and personal.

Like all of Fulci’s horror joints, Zombi 2’s sole purpose is to brutally entertain, and it does that with ease.

We told you that Herschell Gordon Lewis’ track record runs machete-slash deep. Seven years before he made The Wizard Of Gore, the “Godfather of Gore” focused his attention on homicidal rednecks in Two Thousands Maniacs!, an exploitation classic that serves no other purpose aside from showing a handful of elaborate murder scenes with the least amount of subtlety possible.

A group of doomed northerners end up in a southern town where the toothless and shower-ready locals band together to brutalize outsiders. And they don’t just cut throats or empty bullets; in Two Thousand Maniacs!, Lewis shows some real imagination, if you can call it that. A girl is hacked up with an axe and then roasted like a pig; a guy is stuffed into a barrel lined with nails and rolled downhill; and another man’s body is yanked in half like a wishbone.

Once Lewis is done lavishly killing his zero-dimensional characters, the movie ends. Who needs character development or an emotional payoff when you’ve got a chick’s limbs being crushed inside a makeshift dunk tank? Certainly not our dude HGL.

Some movies are so evil that viewers are left wanting to take showers and schedule Pixar marathons. And then there’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a Swedish eye-gouger that sets the gold standard for unapologetic depravity.

A naïve girl named Madeleine trusts a charming stranger, heads back to his crib, and gets drugged up and injected with more heroin than an entire shooting gallery's worth of junkies. Her captor then invites a series of men and women over to have their ways sexually with the kidnapped girl. Each week, she’s given one day off, and it’s during those free days that Madeleine teachers herself how to fight and shoot guns.

Once she lashes back against everyone who’s screwed her (literally and figuratively), Thriller: A Cruel Picture becomes less concerned with graphic sex and focuses more on hideous violence. What solidifies the movie’s high placement on this countdown is director Alex Fridolinski’s morbid craftiness: For a scene in which Madeleine’s eyeball gets plucked out, Fridolinski ripped an eye out of a real-life cadaver and filmed it. Makes you appreciate the cheesiest of CGI, doesn’t it?

You know a movie is no joke when its director gets arrested on obscenity charges after the flick’s debut. Back in February of 1980, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust premiered in his homeland of Italy to outbursts of condemnation, with charges labeling the found-footage horror movie as a snuff film. It’s all make believe, of course, but even today it’s pretty damn hard to tell the difference.

Cannibal Holocaust is set-up as footage from the lost tapes of documentary filmmakers who entered the Amazonian rainforest and never returned home. In Deodato’s fucked imagination, they run across flesh-eating tribesmen and their National Geographic-nude women; their primitive nature is exemplified in a bit where a few savages impale a younger female by ramming a long spear through her derriere and out of her mouth. Feel free to upchuck. The primitive sickos then rape the documentary crew’s female member before decapitating her and chow down on one of her male colleagues. And, yes, Deodato shows it all, no questions asked.

Most films from the early ’80s seem cheesy by modern standards, but not Cannibal Holocaust; featuring a cast of no-names and tons of authentic-looking slaughter, it genuinely feels like jungle-feverish snuff footage. It’s one of those movies that if owned on DVD is best hidden underneath the skivvies at the bottom of your underwear drawer.