10 Sleaziest Films You've Never Seen

Before Disney owned the block, New York’s 42nd Street was lined with movie theatres playing low-budget horror pictures, sexploitation epics and foreign films, the more thoughtfully paced of which caused riots when bored audiences ran amok.

Plywood archways fitted around the entrances to the theatre lobbies would be adorned with film stills to which fake blood would be added, along with words like SHOCK, LURID Or SEX. It was, in short, a long way from when John Barrymore had performed Hamlet there during the 1920s.

Once inside, the coming attractions promised yet more sex and violence. “A ghastly tale drenched with gouts of blood spurting from the writhing victims of a madman’s lust,” claims the trailer for A Taste Of Blood, promising more than the movie delivers. Exploitation filmmakers might not have been up there with Kubrick and Kurosawa, but they knew how to sell their product.

Sometimes that product offered more sleazy fun than the Hollywood blockbusters they were ripping off. Humanoids From The Deep, for instance, is Jaws as only Roger Corman could do it, with rubber monsters who want naked starlets not for food, but to mate with.

When people say they don’t make ‘em like they used to, they’re right, and here are 10 films that prove it. 

Leave to Andrea Bianchi, the director of the Italian classics Exciting Love Girls and Strip Nude For Your Killer, to crank out one of the sleazier imitations of George Romero’s zombie films.

Confining his protagonists, who look 20 years too old to be acting like horny teenagers, to a scenic Italian mansion, Bianchi has one character model lingerie for her man, who tells her: “You look just like a little whore – I like that!” As another couple argue about cash, the boyfriend says: “I’ll give you a rise, but it has nothing to do with money.” You get the idea.

Creepiest of all is young Michael who, in between fighting zombies, decides to declare his “true feelings” for his mother by unbuttoning her blouse. Thankfully, he dies horribly in the next scene, but when he returns from the grave, it’s not to eat his mother’s brains.