“Thematically the closest Fulci got to his peer Argento. Colorful and wild, with orgies, LSD freakouts and painting-by-knife-throwing. The visuals are Fulci's most impressive.” -- Dana Reinoos, Screen Slate

The daughter of a respected politician (Florinda Bolkan) experiences haunting, hallucinogenic couture visions in which everyone is erotic and murder happens. There’s a plot lurking beneath the surface -- but one watches Lizard for its roasting, left-field psychedelia that explodes from the screen in a flash flood.

Flaming Ears is a pop sci-fi lesbian extravaganza set in the year 2700 in the fictional burned-out city of Asche that follows the tangled lives of three women. Spy is a comic book artist whose printing presses are burned down by Volley, a sexed-up pyromaniac. Seeking revenge, Spy goes to the lesbian club where Volley performs every night. Before she can enter, Spy gets into a fight and is left wounded in the streets. She is found by Nun, an amoral alien in a red plastic suit with a predilection for reptiles... who also happens to be Volley’s lover. Nun takes the injured Spy home and must hide her from Volley. This story of obsession and revenge is also an anti-romantic plea for love in all its many forms. A truly underground film shot on Super 8 and newly restored, Flaming Ears is original for its playful disruption of narrative conventions, its witty approach to film genre, and its punk visual splendor.

Flirting with the conventions of blaxploitation and the horror cinema, Bill Gunn’s revolutionary independent film Ganja & Hess is a highly stylized and utterly original treatise on sex, religion, and African American identity. Duane Jones (Night of the Living Dead) stars as anthropologist Hess Green, who is stabbed with an ancient ceremonial dagger by his unstable assistant (director Bill Gunn), endowing him with the blessing of immortality, and the curse of an unquenchable thirst for blood. When the assistant’s beautiful and outspoken wife Ganja (Marlene Clark) comes searching for her vanished husband, she and Hess form an unexpected partnership. Together, they explore just how much power there is in the blood.

For this icily erotic fusion of flesh and machine, David Cronenberg adapted J. G. Ballard’s future-shock novel of the 1970s into one of the most singular and provocative films of the 1990s. A traffic collision involving a disaffected commercial producer, James (James Spader), and an enigmatic doctor, Helen (Holly Hunter), brings them, along with James’s wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger, in a sublimely detached performance), together in a crucible of blood and broken glass—and it’s not long before they are all initiated into a kinky, death-obsessed underworld of sadomasochistic car-crash fetishists for whom twisted metal and scar tissue are the ultimate turn-ons. Controversial from the moment it premiered at Cannes—where it won a Special Jury Prize “for originality, for daring, and for audacity”—Crash has since taken its place as a key text of late-twentieth-century cinema, a disturbingly seductive treatise on the relationships between humanity and technology, sex and violence, that is as unsettling as it is mesmerizing.