5. Joe D'Amato
The Sultan of Italian Sleaze - Joe D'Amato - was very torn between the world of horror films and the world of sex/porno films. His career evolved so that he was shooting mainly hardcore pornos in the late 1980s and the 1990s. D'Amato directed a lot of laudable films in his career - particularly when one considers the work he did with Laura Gemser in the Black Emmanuelle series. He also made several straight horror films, two of which made the Video Nasty list - Anthropophagus and Absurd - and these attained cult movie status. Even more cult status has been afforded to Joe D'Amato for his necrophilia-tinged sleaze epic Buio Omega (Beyond the Darkness). In the late 1970s, D'Amato tried to fuse hardcore sex with horror which resulted in two films shot back to back, intriguingly entitled Porno Holocaust and Erotic Nights of the Living Dead. The films did not live up to their exciting titles. Erotic Nights of the Living Dead was particularly egregious - featuring two women and a very well hung man having a threesome. The catch? The guy has a really bad case of genital warts. D'Amato! If you are going to stage a bit of troilism, hire disease free actors please for the sake of not insulting and grossing out the viewers. Furthermore, do not showcase a woman doing a very unerotic erotic dance with a bottle of Champers. No woman has a vagina that is athletic enough to pop open a bottle of bubbly. And don't put Laura Gemser in a film and woefully under use her charms. And make the gore and violence at least a tad bit satisfying. I don't know why I am yelling at D'Amato. He died many moons ago. But his fans live on and he has reached super cult status with Euro Cult fans. I still think he is an evil director for cynically combining gore with porn to make Hardgore - a recipe that satisfied neither porn fiends or gore fiends and was really scraping the barrel. And he also deserves to be pulled up for the vile snuff scene in Emanuelle in America that gave me nightmares as well as the scene in which a woman manually pleasures a horse - for real. There's no need D'Amato, there's no need, you evil git!