5) House Of 1000 Corpses
Rob Zombie’s directorial debut began with House of 1000 Corpses, a sort of patchwork tribute to exploitation cinema like many of Zombie’s other films that came after.
While most people despise House for being way too similar to a variety of other horror films, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I cant help but love it. Even for a ripoff, there’s plenty of heart to be found.
There have been films like Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof which struggled to emulate the exploitation era, but Zombie does it perfectly with House of 1000 Corpses.
It’s your usual setup for a slasher movie – dumb teenagers end up in the clutches of a degenerate family of psychopaths – but it works so well. Even Zombie’s music video styled cinematography works because it’s so heavily based in the style of 1970’s horror films.
It legitimately feels like it could’ve been made around that time period, which makes it all the more worthwhile. It’s a true shame that none of Zombie’s succeeding films managed to contain the same ludicrous imagery that House presented us with.
6) Zombie
Although George A. Romero created the zombie subgenre in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, it wasn’t until a decade later with Dawn of the Dead that the genre really became popular. As such, a series of copies and ripoffs were being produced at an alarming rate from all over the world, each one trying to cash-in on Dawn’s success. But it was Lucio Fulci’s Zombie that really lived up to the name.
Zombie is something of an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead, having been released in its home country of Italy as Zombi 2 where Dawn of the Dead was released as Zombi. But the connections end there, as Zombie takes its viewers to the genre’s tropical voodoo roots of films like I Walked With A Zombie and White Zombie.
Because of this, most of the film takes place on a tropical island, but there’s still plenty of flesh-eating Romero-styled zombies to be found. One of my favorite sequences that makes use of the island setting has a zombie actually wrestle with a shark underwater. It’s a truly exploitative battle that could only happen in the grindhouse era of cinema.
There’s also a variety of gruesome kill scenes, including a painful shot of a woman being stabbed directly through her eyeball. Many fans agree that the special effects in this Italian bloodbath are actually even better than those in Dawn – and how right they are.
Once the film ends, we’re presented with an eerie view of the undead walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s an ending of apocalyptic proportions, complete with rotting fleshy makeup and a killer score.