Blood Feast (Image Entertainment)

Herschell Gordon Lewis made gory, low-budget "splatter" movies for 1960s drive-ins. This is his most famous film, if for no other reason than he was able to cajole Playboy Playmate Connie Mason into being its star. Even with her salary, the film was made for under $25,000, and the lack of money shows. I won’t go into the details of the story, other than to say that the title is literal. And if you don’t find Blood Feast scary, think about this as you watch the scene in which the villain rips out Mason’s character’s tongue. Special effects were more simplistic in those days, but on his super-low budget, Lewis had to be especially creative: He convinced Mason to allow him to put a raw lamb’s tongue in her mouth to make the scene more realistic. The film was shot in Miami; in the heat, the prop director decided there was no money for ice, so the lamb’s tongue got rank pretty quickly. Check Mason’s face and you’ll see more than mere acting going on.

A Boy and His Dog (First Run Features)

I wonder how many parents in 1975 took their children to see A Boy and His Dog. Despite the sweet title, this is a violent black comedy about a post-apocalypse Earth in which a serial rapist, played by 26-year-old Don Johnson, and his ultra-intelligent dog, Blood, voiced by Tim McIntire, roam the wild frontier looking to satisfy their hungers for women and food. Lots of bloodthirsty mutants provide the sci-fi backdrop, and there’s a mid-story twist in which the rapist gets a sort of feminist comeuppance. L.Q. Jones’s film has been imitated so many times that you have to wonder why it isn’t more famous.

Caged Heat (New Concorde Home Video)

Standing at the apex of the chicks-in-chains genre, Caged Heat introduced to the world director Jonathan Demme. As with so many other directors of Demme’s generation, producer Roger Corman was the man who raised the money and let his young director run wild. Besides letting Demme hire Tak Fujimoto, a seriously weird cinematographer, Corman gave Demme the go-ahead to hire the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, who provided a score filled with screechy solo viola. All Corman asked for was a surefire moneymaker in which lots of buxom women romped around naked. Corman got what he wanted, but the film still has the look of experimental cinema. It remains the strangest movie Demme has ever made.

Eraserhead (available only from www.davidlynch.com)

A candidate for the weirdest film ever made. David Lynch worked on and off for five years with virtually no budget, often borrowing money from his family, to create this desperately gloomy yet strangely sweet film. The story has little meaning, though in a droll way it is about the cycle of life. Many Lynchisms are already apparent -- rumbling low noises, scary social norms, industrial malfunctions, and physical mutations. In terms of direct communication to the unconscious, this is still his most fully realized film.

Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (Anchor Bay Entertainment)

Like so many directors before him, Sam Raimi (Spider-Man) had his first opportunity to show his stuff in the horror genre. While the first Evil Dead had camera tricks and gross-outs, the second film crosses psychedelia with intellect to spice up the horror. Blood and guts spew in every direction, and Raimi repeats his genius camera work by following the evil force from its point of view. Hey kids, let’s read a book!

Freaks (Warner Home Video)

Vying with The Terror of Tiny Town for the honor of being the most politically incorrect film of all time, Freaks follows the lives of a group of human circus sideshow attractions and the mistreatment they receive at the hands of the "normal" world. Director Tod Browning labored for years in the "B" genre, and hit gold twice: with Dracula (1931) and Freaks (1932). This movie still disturbs with its slow, caring inspection of various physical malformations -- enough, in fact, to still be banned in several countries.

Jacob’s Ladder (Artisan Home Entertainment)

I’m sure no one involved in Jacob’s Ladder ever intended it to be a "B" film. Director Adrian Lyne already had four hits to his name (Foxes, Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction), and Tim Robbins had already done Bull Durham. What dropped Jacob’s Ladder into the netherworld of "B" films was its relentlessly upsetting descent into one person’s organic psychosis. This film is a perfect candidate for DVD -- you need to see it at least three times to catch all the clues that scriptwriter Bruce Joel Rubin drops between the cracks. This is still Robbins’ most powerful work; Elizabeth Peña and Danny Aiello round out a brilliant cast.

Killing Zoe (Artisan Home Entertainment)

The early 1990s saw a small flood of bloody crime films inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Killing Zoe, co-executive-produced by Tarantino and the first film directed by Roger Avary, who cowrote Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, was one of the least publicized and lowest-budgeted of the bunch, but it had two things going for it. First, the two leads, Eric Stoltz and Jean-Hughes Anglade, had magnetic screen presences that raised the film above the buddy genre. More important, director Roger Avary had a visual kineticism that could make your hands go numb from gripping the edge of your seat. Watch the drug-taking scene for a vision of true hell only matched twice in film (Requiem for a Dream and The Addiction). Be prepared to be very, very sad.

Phantasm (MGM Home Entertainment)

Director Don Coscarelli has made a whole career out of Phantasm and its sequels, which is pretty good for a film that opened at drive-ins. For those who haven’t seen it, I’ll go light on the details. A tall old man is stealing bodies for nefarious purposes. A young boy and his brother catch on, but then find out the knowledge carries some danger. Phantasm is chock full of great ideas and unbelievable special effects, given the budget. There’s also a good dose of humor in between the jolts. Still, not for the weak of stomach.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (New Line Home Entertainment)

This granddaddy of really gory splatter films is based loosely on the true story of Ed Gein (of Wisconsin, not Texas), a murderer and grave robber who liked to skin his victims and wear their flesh while he danced around in the moonlight. Director Tobe Hooper took the story several steps further by imagining Gein as having an equally crazy family and adding a chainsaw. The result scared drive-in patrons for months in the fall of 1974. The film retains much of its visceral power today, and has ended up making more than $100 million -- not bad for a "B" movie.