Eli Roth’s Top 8 Cult Movies

[Originally published on Film4.com, August 2010]

With FrightFest 2010 just around the corner, what better way to get into the mood than to dig through the DVD racks and pull out some niche genre classics? To help us in our search for neglected gems, we asked Eli Roth, director of Hostel and producer of FrightFest closer The Last Exorcism, to highlight his favourite, under-appreciated genre directors. Expect gore, thrills, sex and silliness as Roth guides us through the cultish underbelly of world cinema…

1) Nightmare City (dir. Umberto Lenzi)

Umberto Lenzi is one of my favourite directors. He’s an italian director, he’s about 80 years old now, but he really had his heyday in the 70s. He’s best known for the Cannibal movies that he did (Cannibal Ferox, etc.). But Lenzi was an incredibly versatile director. He directed fantastic crime films like Milano Rovente (Gang War in Milan). But one of my favourite horror films of his, that I think typifies Lenzi movies, is a film called Nightmare City, which is also known as The City of the Walking Dead, which is ironic, because it’s also kind of the first running zombie movie. Planet Terror was very much influenced by this, and 28 Days Later.

His movies are so fast, and so fun. As soon as you turn on the film, usually right from the opening scene, there’s some kind of action or violence. But what’s great about Nightmare City is that it’s a bunch of infected people running around the city, and they turn other people into crazy infected people. It’s basically a zombie film without using the word zombie.

But these infected actually have the presence of mind to rip women’s clothes off before they kill them. So they’re at a television studio, and there’s some sort of aerobics show going on, and the infected people will crash through the walls, and before they bite people in the necks, they actually rip the girl’s clothing open and bite her breast. It’s one of my favourite movies, it’s really, really fun and entertaining. And typical of the Lenzi movies — they’re never pretentious, they’re always made to entertain the audience.

2) Beatrici Cenci (dir. Lucio Fulci)

Lucio Fulci is best known for Zombi 2, which has the tagline ‘we’re going to eat you!’ He took gore to a level that was unheard of in cinema. But what people don’t know about Fulci is how versatile he was in other genres, specifically in dramas and Italian sex comedies. Horror was a last resort for Fulci. He got hired to make Zombi 2 when he was 50 years old, and he was kind of washed up, and it breathed new life into his career. But he made these amazing political movies which were very much against the Catholic Church. They showed priests molesting children — things that were not done in cinema. So, as a result, a lot of critics really beat up on him, and audiences didn’t respond to his more political movies, so I think he resigned himself to making genre films.

But, one of his truly most impressive films, and completely under-seen, is Beatrici Cenci (Perversion Story), about this woman who later became a saint. It actually kind of moves with the same energy as Reservoir Dogs. It really shows this other side of Fulci. He makes this period, historical movie, that one would think for all intents and purposes, was going to be a boring film, and it was so fascinating and contemporary. So well done, and it just exemplifies how competent a director he was in all genres, not just horror. And I think people don’t really know that side of Fulci. There’s a DVD of Beatrice Cenci that’s out in France, but they’re very, very under-seen films. But try going to the Cinema Store, in London, they’ll have them.

3) Carnal Violence (dir. Sergio Martino)

Sergio Martino made so many movies. He really kind of had his heyday in the 70s in Italian cinema. He started making these fantastic giallo films with Edwige Fenech — the Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (Next!), Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have The Key. You know, titles that only the Italians can come up with. But he made one of my favourite giallo films. The full title is The Bodies Presented Traces of Carnal Violence, then it was translated to Carnal Violence, and it was retitled Torso for the US release. There’s a terrific director’s cut DVD that’s out there. And it’s really one of my favourite giallo films.

4) Who Could Kill A Child? (dir. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador)

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador made one of my all-time favourite suspense movies called Who Could Kill A Child (The Island of the Damned) in 1975. He’s basically known as a television presenter. But to any of those Spanish or Latin directors who make genre or horror films — Alejandro Amenabar, Guillermo Del Toro — this guy’s a hero. He’s a huge influence.

The performances are so good, and the photography’s so beautiful. I actually showed Who Can Kill A Child to Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino. I got a DVD of it with English subtitles, and Edgar’s comment was ‘I can’t believe I’ve gone my whole life without knowing that movie existed!’ It’s such a Hitchcockian film, it’s so tense, it’s just a slow-burn with the most incredible, incredible pay-off.

5) Being Twenty (dir. Fernando Di Leo)

Fernando Di Leo did one of the ballsiest things ever done in cinema. You kind of would only know about it if you lived in Italy at the time. But he took two of their most iconic screen actresses, Gloria Guida and Lilli Carati, who at the time were known for a very specific type of movie. This kind of pre-Porky’s sex comedies, where there were always beautiful twenty year old girls, and fat fifty year old men chasing them around, and people switching beds and wife swapping. Very, very silly films. And these two girls were the hot girls from those movies.

So Fernando Di Leo, who’s known for making crime films, cast these two actors and gets amazing performances in this film Being Twenty, Avere vent’anni. For most of the film, you think you’re in a sex comedy, and these girls are running around Italy, teasing men, and getting away with it because they’re so beautiful and they can do whatever they want. And at the end of the movie they come across these criminals that are like they’re out of some other Fernando Di Leo movie — these violent, mafioso guys, who do not appreciate the girls teasing them. And they follow the girls into the woods, and they rape them and brutally murder them.

It’s one of the most upsetting, horrible, truly horrific endings ever in a movie. When it came out in cinemas, people just assumed that this was going to be another sex comedy, and for the first 85 minutes it is, until the movie turns in the last scene. And people were rioting. They pulled every print from the cinemas the day the movie was released, and completely recut it and changed the ending. Now, there was a point to it, and it does tie in thematically with the film, which is about the older generation’s resentment of the new, hippy generation’s freedom of sexuality, and punishing them for that. But it was just too much for audiences to take. It’s fascinating that someone has the balls to pull that off.

6) Promedio rojo (Nicolas Lopez)

When Nicolas Lopez was 14, he started writing for the major paper in Santiago, Chile, and by 16 he’d created his own show for Latin American MTV, and the biggest website there. He’s really like a Robert Rodriguez-type entrepreneur.

When he was 19, he made a movie called Promedio rojo, which means Red Average, which is basically the equivalent of getting a C or a middle average grade you can get in school. It was so funny and so crazy — people call it Latin American Pie. It’s a really funny, silly, fun sex comedy.

And it was a phenomenon, and then he made a second film called Santos, which was a huge bomb. But he’s a very smart guy. He’s just made a new film called FML, which stands for Fuck My Life, which he shot on digital, in ten days, with an ensemble cast. He’s a really, really interesting young filmmaker.

7) Pieces (dir. Juan Piquer Simon)

Juan Piquer Simon is a Spanish director who made a movie called Pieces, which is also called A Thousand Screams Pierce The Night. Pieces, I believe, is the single most fun experience one can have watching a movie. If you’re with a group of friends, and you want to have a fun time, put on Pieces, it’s the ultimate slasher movie. It’s completely ridiculous. The movie just endures, people are obsessed with it. They love this film so much. I actually showed it to a crowd, to a modern audience, and people went insane for it. It’s not scary, it’s completely gratuitous — a full-on splatter movie.

8) Audition (dir. Takashi Miike)

The guy does seven or eight movies a year, so I can barely keep up with him. But the film that really exemplifies what I love about him for me is Audition. A huge influence on Hostel. It’s a very slow burn kind of horror film. It’s not really a horror film, it’s more of a thriller. But it’s a great film about power and wanting control, and wanting the perfect person.

When this guy loses his wife to cancer, he starts auditioning young actresses to be his girlfriend. He sets up a fake audition. And let’s just say he casts the worst person for the role. The last fifteen minutes of that movie are so fascinating and so painful to watch, but it’s really one of my favourite, favourite films of all time.

9) W la foca (dir. Nando Cicero)

Fernando Cicero is an Italian sex comedy director who made a film called W la foca. It’s a pun — ‘viva la figa’ means long live the pussy in Italian, and ‘foca’ is a seal. So it’s Viva la foca, with Lory del Santo and a seal. And there’s an actor in this movie named Bombolo, who I believe is the unsung comic genius of movies. In Italy in the 70s, this guy came along and just took over sex comedies.

This movie is so completely ridiculous. I’ve shown it to groups of audiences, and their jaws were on the ground, they were shocked at how absurd this movie is. Even if you don’t speak a word of Italian, you can put on this movie, and you’ll be laughing non-stop. And that just speaks volumes about the filmmaker and the direction. Everybody thinks that it’s so easy to make comedy, but it’s very hard to make something that silly and that unpretentious, that’s still, all these years later — it was made in 1982 — funnier than anything out in the cinemas today.