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German movies of the 1970s will forever be linked with the New German Cinema movement, the auteur directors — led by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff — who shook the country out of its postwar stupor. “Papa’s Kino ist tot” (‘Papa’s cinema’s is dead’) was their motto, and they held radical new visions of what movies could do.

But alongside this art house wave, ’70s Germany also was a breeding ground for a cruder, more commercial strain of cinema, one that took inspiration from sexploitation and spaghetti Westerns, biker films and grindhouse horror and grafted it onto the zeitgeist-y themes of political upheaval and sexual liberation. The Berlinale pays tribute to this seldom-seen oeuvre of German genre cinema in its 2025 retrospective, which features 15 titles — cult classics and curios from both East and West Germany — that prove that German film could also be “wild,...

Al Adamson: The Masterpiece Collection

Blu ray

Severin Films

1965 – 1989 / 2841 min.

Starring Russ Tamblyn, Regina Carrol, Lon Chaney

Cinematography by Gary Graver, Vilmos Zsigmond, László Kovács

Directed by Al Adamson, David Gregory

The titles grab you by the collar like a desperate carny barker – Psycho A Go-Go, Blood of Ghastly Horror, Satan’s Sadists – then something for the raincoat crowd – Girls For Rent, Nurses For Sale, The Naughty Stewardesses. The rant turns political, incendiary: Black Heat, Mean Mother, Black Samurai. His last gasp – Cinderella 2000, Nurse Sherri, The Happy Hobo. The Happy Hobo?

Al Adamson: The Masterpiece Collection is an alarming new release from Severin Films presenting 32 of the director’s misbegotten “masterpieces” in beautifully restored transfers with enough added attractions to choke a horse. It’s the story of one man’s twenty year run in exploitation cinema that may be too exhausting for the casual viewer to contemplate. But...

Consider West German cinema and the familiar crop of names will rear its head: Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, Schlondorff… and, barring expertise, it’s here that the gas starts running low. To our fortune, New York’s Quad Cinema (working with programmers Dominik Graf and Olaf Möller) are about to commence the delightfully named” Fighting Mad: German Genre Films from the Margins,” which seeks exposure for an entire swath of, to quote Graf, “masters of the expressive, the outrageous, the subversive – they show how it looks and feels when the proverbial Teutonic order collapses and things go ballistic.”

If you aren’t in New York City, allow their program list to be your signpost and their trailer–which the Quad have kindly offered us as an exclusive–a peek at what awaits. Taking in its swirl of antiquated fashion, gunshots, blood smears, and screaming (so much screaming) will have you, at the very least,...