I spent an entire month in this awful no good very bad year holed up watching movies like a healthy adult human. Here’s the best of the best. The cinecream skimmed from a vat of curdled tapes, illegal clownloads, digital-versatile-disc rentals (RIP Vulcan and I Love Video), and streaming services. A rough’n’loose ranking of European fantasy obscurities, OVA scuzz, frightened woman psychodramas, slob comedies, verité documentaries, trash horror, and some canon classics I finally forced my eyeballs to absorb. You’re welcome, I guess, internet. Throw on these nuggets for guaranteed quality while counting down for a vaccine.

1. In the Shadow of the Sun

Derek Jarman and Throbbing Gristle’s immersive vision of British apocalyptic hell complete with flames, mysterious ruins, malevolent entities with magick mirrors, obfuscated robed wraiths, skull masks, writhing nude bodies in pain, and synthesized wails. Jarman overlaps several of his previous shorts to create a xeroxed inferno where figures materialize, vanish, and loop from some otherworld ether. The closest thing I've seen to capturing the reality bending cosmic horror that breaks so many brains in weird fiction. In the Shadow of the Sun exists in a realm beyond The Prince of Darkness looming in the threshold, a forbidden room pulsing with horrible psychic energy. A bad place no mere human can witness and escape unscathed.

2. Hands on a Hardbody

A bunch of local yokels from the Dallas suburbs compete to win a truck by standing around and touching it. The last good ol’ boy or girl or whoever sleep deprived so-and-so left teetering snags the keys. This quality slice of life documentary rips a wormhole into the lives and minds of small-town Clintonian ‘Mericans: the college girl who wants to pay off debt, the slick returning champion, the ex-marine looking for a new challenge, the religious fanatic, the country boy who wears flip flops and loves fast food, a speed freak couple, and more compete for a chance at a life changing new whip. Of course, no Lone Star State tournament would be complete without drug testing the winner before the award ceremony. Talk about some howdy y’all hijinks!

3. A New Leaf

After watching this charming mismatched couple comedy, my glasses slid off my head into a plate of spaghetti. Weird how life imitates art. Leave it to Elaine May to play an unglamorous goof in her own directorial debut and dig beneath Walter Matthau’s permanent grumpy old man exterior to find real warmth. Stellar character driven comedies, that actually provoke guffaws instead of intellectual smirks, drop so rare they should be celebrated. Almost a half century later, A New Leaf still slays with rich boy piss takes and frightened woman physical hijinks. Someone let this still living funnybone queen helm a new picture before it’s too late!

4. Midori

Finally, a horror movie that truly deeply unsettled me. The kind of rotten grotesque stink that seeps into bones. No "boo" scares here. And janky animation, conjured entirely from the hand of Hiroshi Harada, only makes the dread more visceral and all consuming. Stick out the first coupla eyeroll shock moments, get over that OVA anime hurdle, and let the most harrowing moving picture I've experienced in years traumatize.

5. Smiley Face

Can’t believe Gregg Araki made his thinly veiled biopic about my life at the (hopefully?) tail end of quarantine. If you ever felt shame sleeping ‘til the sun sets or accidentally scarfed your creepy roommate’s weed cupcakes or sunk comfortably into a low poly vidya game or passed out snoring covered in Doritos crumbs, Smiley Face hits harder than a desperate resin hit.

And rats off to Anna Faris! She stamps an insane physical performance into the male dominated wasteoid comedy by: hiding her face when she laughs too hard and long, locking her evermoist eyeballs into an anxious stare, cartoon chugging orange juice, and letting flop sweat glisten from her unwashed face. She invents Garfield memes and slurs “man” more than Tommy Chong. Such a brave performance that sheds glamor more than Nicole Kidman clipping on a fake nose or Charlize Theron transforming into The Monster! Where were you when Anna Faris had a panic attack set to Ladytron or drooled on herself riding a Ferris wheel, Academy?

6. Ogroff: The Mad Mutilator

Backyard French slasher trash with a droning synth soundtrack and drained palette creates a singular mutant bad vibe.

Boots stomp through trash

Blood drips down the camera lens

A synthesizer moans like a phantom trapped between worlds

An impossible forest shifts until dirty back roads stretch into eternity

A masked killer lurks everywhere and nowhere

Corpses lurch back to life

Telephone boxes glare with evil eyes

Nature sounds canned, clipped, perverse

Fear distends time until a close encounter with a cannibal feels like a neverending gauntlet

Let me outta this Gallic nightmare!

7. Venus in Furs

Jess Franco stretches out a total bruh moment to hazy jazzbo feature length. Reality warps, revenge fantasies blur, hot and bothered continental cool cats party ‘til night bleeds into dawn and someone winds up dead or maybe a ghost or secretly alive and stalking the club for a new throat to slit! Who can remember, life moves so fast when you’re on the Mediterranean countercultural cutting edge! Eyeball searing, eardrum worming, unforgettable high key horny horror from the master of the genre.

8. Seventeen

"When I die, I want to be buried face down so the world can kiss my ass."

Real locker level high school verité documents a time when hair metal ruled and greasy teens yelled hormonal in Home Economics and friends dropped dead from substance abuse ‘cause getting blacked out behind a wheel provided the only escape from the Bumblefuck Nowheresville void of America known as Muncie, Indiana. This unflinching pimples and pregnancy scares and all look into dead end kids in the danger zone still rattles raw to this day. Sad to say some things never change.

9. Django

Can’t believe I let that cokehead foot freak, Quentin Tarantino, scare me away from watching this perfect pulp Western. Hooded goons wade waist deep through muck, desert sets twist dead and dry unreal, and the lone gunslinger with piercing blue eyes packs a gatling gun in a coffin. Throw in a killer theme song and white-knuckle action pacing courtesy of spaghetti maestro Sergio Corbucci, and you’ve got one rough and iconic once upon a time in the west!

10. Krysar: The Pied Piper (1986)

Czechoslovakian puppet show featuring townsfolk whittled so gaunt they look undead in an impossible gothic city ripped straight from Rhineland Expressionist silents. Finally, a fairy tale transported from another more sinister dimension that hits scared straight bleak!

11.The Legend of the Stardust Brothers

I couldn’t stop smiling while watching this movie! Some of its earworms burrowed deep into my memory banks to the point where I went out and bought an optical disk so I could watch all the posi histrionics over again! In a time where I’m quarantined, fretting about the future, and frequently zoning out alone in my room, it’s nice to have such a perfect escapist object d’art radiating the best vibes. I want to crawl through the screen and join the fantastic music video shenanigans and believe in a simple world where rock’n’roll good guys triumph over evil record mogul ghouls!

12. Haxan

A silent "documentary" about the history of witchcraft featuring dripping goblins and tongue wagging devils and black sabbaths with beasts and torture chambers and old crone lairs strewn with bones that look ripped straight from a medieval church fire and brimstone fresco. The VVitch WHO? 33 years in the game, and I finally got around to watching this absolute banger stuffed with enough phantasmagoric imagery to fuel 23958703244239 Hauntedween parties. Haxan tying witch hunts to modern probs like the persecution of the poor and mentally ill adds a layer of insightful caramel on an already sinfully delicious apple. BOO!

13. Celluloid Nightmares

All cinephiles are perverts you heard it here first.

Prime Sato where sex fiends chase voyeuristic cheap thrills until they spiral somewhere deep and dark where shadow organizations, murderers, and TV static torture dungeons lurk. Breaking from the vanilla daylight world, while freeing and sometimes empowering, can lead to all-consuming obsession that strips reality bare. In pinku maverick Sato's neon grime slathered urban haze, horniness burns so hot it blinds.

14. Fanny and Alexander

Ingmar Bergman meditates on one of the strongest depictions of childhood POV I’ve ever seen where ghosts glide real, adults loom large as unknowable authority figures, emotional extremes like joy and terror shift between a mother’s sobs or bumps in the night, imagination provides escape from bad days dragging forever or enhances the happiest memory, and the cruelest stepfather might as well be the villain in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

I watched the five-and-a-half -hour TV, and The Berg’s preferred, cut. I never wanted this sprawling coming of age to end! I can definitely see Fanny and Alexander becoming a Christmas favorite. If you were ever a kid who felt things too deeply or had some deeper intuitive sense or anxiety about the alien frightening adult world, the hypnotic dark and light dreamscape of Bergman’s magnum opus is definitely a MOOD.

15. Threads

Straight up chilling made-for-TV movie chronicling the very realistic aftermath of two nuclear bombs dropped on England. Falling rubble crushes kids dead, screaming skeletons blow to ash, burned and broken humans vomit from radiation sickness, babies escape from wombs deformed, blood oozes through skin. Supposedly, director Mick Jackson wanted to scare the world straight from smashing The Button by depicting the physical and social fallout of nuclear war in bleak unsparing detail. I guess he succeeded since we're still in one piece. Though, the powerlessness and dread that come with being a working stiff caught between countries playing an escalating game of apocalyptic chicken seems chillingly familiar. The true horror: hearing media updates of impending doom and having no say or power to stop it. Kitchen sink family drama starts to feel like background noise once the world hurtles headlong into oblivion.

16. Fireworks

Takeshi Kitano: Wife Guy

Why did I sleep on Beat's directing work until I’m one foot in the grave? Long static takes, clean precise editing, general bum out slowcore ambience, and that jazzy Joe Hisaishi score! I love pulp crime broken down, scrambled, and served ice cold, and Fireworks did not disappoint!

The way my man Beat Takeshi barely conceals a lifetime of rage and sorrow behind tiny Boyz II Men sunglasses? Love II see it.

17. L’Ange

An impossible experimental whatsit that feels like breaking through to some afterworld after kicking the bucket. A static camera captures ghoulish figures flitting through cluttered libraries and ramshackle living quarters and stark sepulchers that might be heck or heaven or some forbidden planet or some distant forgotten past or who knows where. Light bends and flashes unreal. How'd Bokanowski create a look and feel so alien and uncanny? Just thinking about the behind-the-scenes logistics of L’Ange squeezes my brain until it almost pops.

18. A Dog Day Afternoon

Sidney Lumet said ACAB and LGBTQ rights way back in a 1975 frantic sweat soaked darkly funny NYC crime picture. Pacino plays an anxious bumbling wannabe stickup artist with wild eyed manic perfection. Did the Safdies take notes or what?

19. Josie and the Pussycats

Highlights from this delightful mall punk live action cartoon:

The same loud fashions, production design, and in-your-face performances as a Gregg Araki movie but for tweens.

Parkey Posey dresses like an e-girl way back in 2001. Trendsetter.

Alan Cumming quotes Cypress Hill’s “Rock Superstar.”

Tara Reid showers in a McDonald’s bathroom complete with golden arches painted all over the walls and a plush Hamburglar suction cupped to a mirror.

Carson Daly plays a nefarious version of himself, TRL serves as a major plot point.

An accurate and hilarious boy band parody comprised of Breckin Meyer, Seth Green, Donald Faison, and Alexander Parker.

Just an overall fun and light glam comedy for middle schoolers into Good Charlotte or New Found Glory or Saves the Day or other pop punk sung with a nasal whine. The movie also slips in a solid anti-capitalist message about accepting yourself for who you are and an angle focusing on female friendship. Deborah Kaplan co-wrote and directed which helps make the dialogue and dynamic between the girls seem more authentic. Don’t sleep on this sugar rush of early 2000s nostalgia!

20. Der Todesking

"Life's a joke then you croak!" - Jörg Buttgereit, basically

Can’t say I disagree with this nihilistic German death trip where a time lapse rotting corpse sets the mood, the names and occupations of the dead flash across a suicide bridge, and a mass shooter straps a camera to herself to record carnage in real time and live forever in infamy. Heady stuff from a director who made his name with a transgressive movie about fucking a cadaver.

21. Gunbuster

Amazing early mech anime from Neon Genesis Evangelion mastermind Hideaki Anno that touches on his usual pet themes of future junk depression, fraught familial relationships, the inescapable passage of time, and the very real risk of death when piloting a tin can in the vastness of space or dusting knuckles with an alien beast. The static 4:3 long(ish) takes make lasers whizzing through the stars and flashing computer readouts and intergalactic monsters look almost slow cinema striking. The whole OVA miniseries feels like if Tarkovsky meditated on giant cartoon robots. Sure, I could do without some of those lustful dude-gaze nude scenes of teenage girls that don't match the bleak tone at all. But Gunbuster stands out as peak head trip sci-fi with imagery so strong, it will remain burned in my mind's eye until I rot in the dirt and 2400 A.D. rolls around.

22. The Watermelon Woman

A groundbreaking LGBTQ film told from a black cinephile perspective AND a great '90s Philly time capsule? This movie has it all!

23. Payday

A very '70s character study of an outlaw country musician played by Rip Torn (!), Payday oozes sweat and booze and bad vibes. Weird how those who usually claw their way to success end up being sociopaths willing to throw anyone under the bus. You just gotta really want fame and fortune so bad you cut everyone else's bootstraps to pull yourself up! Who knew Rip Torn could sing? The whole movie has that very New Hollywood bad boy energy that feels like it could collapse into a toxic brawl any minute. What a time capsule! What a stinking drunk philandering vaguely Johnny Cash inspired performance! I'm kind of glad I didn't grow up in the South!

24. Kissed

No wonder this woman wants to fuck corpses after dating a living and breathing simp.

Finally, a necrophilia movie with a female gaze! Come for the uncomfortable cold skin caressing, stay for fly ‘90s fashion and low rent Canadian locales.

25.The Devil, Probably

Tired: breaking into a church donation box for drug money

Wired: taking your own therapist’s cigarette and smoking it

Inspired: Paying your friend to shoot you ‘cause scraping to barely survive on a dying planet is an endless D-R-A-G

And all the rest:

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Guinea Pig 4: Devil Woman Doctor

The Straight Story

Crawlspace

The 25th Hour

Jackass 3-D

Poetry

Decline of Western Civilization III

Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Biotherapy

The Right Stuff

Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore

Bone

Peppermint Soda

The World’s Greatest Sinner

Remember My Name

Orlando

Fatal Exposure

A Page of Madness

Stalked by My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge

The Parallax View

Jonathan

Love Massacre

. . . All the Marbles

Ricochet

Death of a Cheerleader

Quest for Fire

Talk Radio

Lady Oscar

Baxter

Crème de la Cinema: Favorite First Watches in this Too Long Quarantine Year of Our Lordt 2020