If there’s one thing I love about the grotty films of Lucio Fulci, it’s no matter how terrible a flick of his might be, there are always one or two vomit-worthy scenes that tend to hellishly elevate the thing above most other horror movies. In Aenigma, there’s plenty to choose from, but I’m going to go with a schoolgirl waking up covered in slimy snails.

I know here, in digital print, it doesn’t sound like much, but visually, it’s truly a waking nightmare of slithering special effects.

One of Fulci’s later films, he dutifully takes the worst elements of movies like Patrick, Carrie and Phenomena to make a film that, while not better, is definitely a lot more fun than any of those. Over the strains of a terrible attempt at a pop song, a young girl has a date with the hot gym teacher. Before anybody questions the morals, it turns out to be a bloody joke and she ends up in a coma.

Around that same time, horny new girl Eva (Lara Naszinski) show up at a Boston school for girls and she might be possessed by the bullied student who likes to manifest herself over a famed poster of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. From a head decapitated by a window to a Renaissance statue coming to life and choking a girl, the grotesque deaths keep piling up and how.

But, now that I think about it, even more disturbing than the traumatic snail death is the constant rotation of prepubescent strange the older men hanging around campus seem to be getting all up in — most notably, the gym teacher and the hospital doctor who, when at the school, wears a sweater that reads “University.”

The illicit intercourse, along with the splatter-filled set pieces Fulci (Demonia) was best known for, the only thing that truly remains an enigma to me is how to pronounce the fleetingly pretentious title. Eh-nigma? Augh-nigma? Augh-eh-nigma? —Louis Fowler

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When I was around 12 years old, almost every weekend I’d walk the mile up the road to the closest Blockbuster and rent three or four movies, with its cult selection the best thing I had ever since Sound Warehouse shut its doors forever.

As basic as the small group of movies were, it did have the Shinya Tsukamoto film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a cyberpunk masterpiece of gray-matter metal, complete with a massive drill as a penile substitute. Shocked and awed, I copied the film on my VHS setup and watched it repeatedly for the next year, becoming a big fan of Tsukamoto in the process.

While I have seen many of his films since, the pseudo-period piece Gemini has always escaped my eyes until now, ultimately revealing his most challenging film yet. Based on the short story by Edogawa Rampo, it is set in the Japan of 1910 as former military doc Yukio (Masahiro Motoki) has settled down, now practicing private medicine and married to the charming amnesiac, Rin (Ryo).

With a plague destroying the surrounding slums, Yukio finds his upper-crust world crumbling when he saves a drunk politician instead of a poor mother and her baby. As a somersaulting man in dirty robes invades his house and kills his parents, Yukio soon finds himself stuck at the bottom of a well as the homeless villain — who looks exactly like him, by the way — takes over his life above.

While trapped, Yukio reverts to an animal-like state while the interloper, named Sutekichi (also Motoki), seduces said wife as we learn of the impoverished life and lusty connection they once had as well.

Utilizing a well-versed combination of classic filmmaking skills and industrial know-how, Gemini is an uncomfortable film, possibly more than any of Tsukamoto’s other kinetic flicks, if only for his ability to have his already-unlikable characters mechanically transform into even worse human-sized kaiju who can do more destruction than Godzilla and Gamera combined.

It’s something that, unexpectedly even for this type of film, is on full display here, both physically and emotionally. It’s pure grotesquerie that, if you’re able to connect with it, can leave anyone fully unsettled, just as much when I saw Tetsuo all those maggot-riddled years ago. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.