Nastassja Kinski in
CAT PEOPLE
1982
A movie for the sweaty palmed thrill of waiting to meet what may be a new lover: the danger--heady and intoxicating--taking over and trumping all other states in the electoral college of the Electric Self. The sense of incredible longing coupled to intense anxiety about the hazards involved is one most teenagers get to know all too well, and I was worse than most, unaware that my relentless longing was not sexy to behold... How great then, a movie that champions sexual stasis? Nastassja Kinski is afraid to surrender because she knows she'll turn into a panther if she gets too excited, and won't turn back again until she kills someone. The touchingly open ending hints at the dawn of an inter-species love affair with the mix of sacral chakra-moving low synth beds and "See these eyes so blue / I could stare for a thousand years" from Bowie all letter perfect. I hummed that Bowie song all the way through the rest of high school. You can argue the original is better, but why bother? I've seen them both dozens of times and Kinski is so perfectly cast I swoon just thinking about it. Look at her ,atop, like the love child of Ingrid Bergman and a leopard, which is nearly true. Meanwhile Annette O'Toole is her perfect foil --all-American, busty, good with animals, and sexually available as all hell to John Heard, who may not be perfect but is better in every way than dopey Kent Smith in the original. 
2. Alison Hayes / Dorothy Neumann
in THE UNDEAD
1957
My favorite Corman movie, I love THE UNDEAD's sheer ballsy lunacy, Charles B. Griffith's and Marc Hana's droll script, and Corman's dream poetry econo-direction. The whole film feels like it was shot in sequence over one long night in a single empty soundstage full of black toxic mist (and it was!). Pamela Duncan is hypnotized to travel through the sea of time to her past lives, but she ends up derailing the scheme of things when she's able to whisper advice to her about-to-be-beheaded for witchcraft Middle Ages incarnation. Her prior self escapes the axe, and while her loyal suitor and the palace guards give chase, the hypnotist joins her in the past to try and correct the matter. I saw this when very young on TV and the scene were Duncan seeks shelter at the witch's house is to me the eternally definitive Halloween moment, Neumann the definitive witch (see photo top of post). She's a good witch, despite her crooked nose (putting to rest the libelous claim of Glenda in OZ that "only bad witches are ugly"), and I love the casual way she asks the stranger at her door "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future were not uncommon. Alison Hayes is awesome as the va-va-Voom-level hot 'real bad' witch with eyes on Pamela's man. And the devil shows up! Put this on real DVD... now!!! 
3. Susan Cabot in
THE WASP WOMAN
1959
I wrote this review for Muze back in 2001 when I was covering the entire Corman canon and as a result fell madly in love with his early muse, Susan Cabot. WASP was her tour de force, but she was also featured in Corman's MACHINE GUN KELLY, VIKING WOMEN AND THE SEA SERPENT, SORORITY GIRL and CARNIVAL ROCK. She's good in every one, but nowhere is she is awesome as when she's half-wasp: ...the first feminist horror film. Susan Cabot stars as aging cosmetics mogul Janice Starlin, who injects herself with an experimental wasp enzyme in order to restore her fading youth and save her company from going broke. Eccentric scientist Dr. Zinthrop (Michael Mark) first tries the serum on cats, but when they later sprout wings and stingers, he realizes the formula might not be market ready. Unfortunately, he winds up in a coma before he's able to warn Starlin of the ghastly side effects, and before long she's buzzing around the building at night, attacking and devouring her enemies. What's admirably feminist about the film is how Starlin is portrayed as intelligent, powerful, and sympathetic while her male underlings are condescending buffoons who first dismiss her serum as mere wishful vanity and later find themselves smitten by her newly restored beauty (and later bitten by her wasp alter ego). Barboura Morris plays Starlin's worried secretary, and Bruno Ve Sota is an unlucky night watchman. Cabot is splendid in the title role, reverse-aging beautifully." (read rest here )
4. Lilyan Tashman in
MURDER BY THE CLOCK
1931
I'll defer to Amy Jeanne's sublime and trenchant vintage fashion blog, It'll Take the Snap out of your Garter, where I found the above picture:Murder By The Clock (1931) is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. It was fantastically creepy in every way possible. Irving Pichel (a Harvard Graduate, no less!) plays a disturbingly deranged young man who gets 3 murders pinned on him. His mother refuses to leave him the family fortune and instead leaves it to her nephew, whose wife is the wonderful Lilyan Tashman! Lilyan was a complete evil BITCH in this movie and I loved every minute of it. She masterminds three murders including her husband and her lover. She also flirts shamelessly with the detective on the case and the deranged Irving.
Anna May Wong in
THE DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON
1931
Like Cabot in THE WASP WOMAN, Wong is delectably beautiful and actoriciously tormented as the late Fu Manchu's daughter. Torn between loyalty to her murderous father's wish for vengeance, and her own wish to just be fabulous dancer at posh clubs, her fate is pre-ordained. Fah Lo Suee would later be hit out of the park by Myrna Loy in MGM's THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1933). DAUGHTER is a much cheaper, lower key take on the character. But since I've already written about my love for Loy's sadistic rendition, I thought I'd cover the seductive and sensational Wong. Naturally despite her lack of experience, she takes to murder and torture as it's in her blood, and this includes acid in the face! Meanwhile it's delightful to watch some dumb, lovestruck Asian detective bend every rule on her behalf and ultimately get nowhere, conjuring complex racism. 
SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
1973
Hey, whatever man. We all have our weaknesses, things we love because they hit a certain nostalgic longing, like our first tele-crush. For me, it's the booksmart sexy of Kate Jackson, and no film was as out of reach than SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, which was always on TV way past my bedtime, in late-night reruns, before VCRs existed, so I could just read the blurb in TV Guide and feel my prepubescent mystique-ridden polymorphous jouissance entwine inwards. What a title! It's cut from the same Aaron Spelling mold as Charlie's Angels: dry weed patch and dirt bike trail L.A. exteriors, makeup trailers doubling as mansions, flat lighting, glistening teeth, 70's encounter group fad mentality, terrible taffeta scarfs and delectable hip-hugger jeans. I would not change it. 
Valerie Leon in
BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB
1971
The first time I saw this I fell madly in love with Valerie Leon. It also helped that I'd just read Bram Stoker's novella--The Jewel of the Seven Stars--right before seeing this, not knowing it was actually based on said novella until about half-way through, and since the story is all deja vu and murderous spirits embodying beautiful women rising from the ashes to kill those who dared desecrate her tomb, et al, it was a perfect meta moment for me. It helps the rough stretches that Leon's mod fashion choices are spot-on during her killing sprees--I'm a sucker for the pale skin, black hair, black velvet choker look--and she underplays recklessly in a double role. Just look at that awesomely haughty ambivalence in her eyes above!
Vanessa Howard is
GIRLY
1970
Rocking the scoiopathic jailbait look, Vanessa Howard captures the spirit of wicked evil, her eyes alight in unholy mischief, in this horror comedy. And her legs are lovely, and always on display in mod skirts, including a beech-skin cowboy costume. Her straight blonde hair demarks a princess and her simmering red schoolgirl uniform is like a pomegranate-squeezed hallucination against the perennial dim fog of the green, brown, and all-grey English countryside. She bites into her character with such a cunning glee that you want to lick the juice off her chin...." (more here)
Ingrd Pitt in
THE VAMPIRE LOVERS
1970
The year 1970 was a very good year for horror movie women in England as it was a time of relaxed censorship standards but not yet just softcore Maxim-style boredom. In other words, there was still the sizzle, and some of steak too, with a high level of proper adhesion to narrative and atmosphere in addition to the sapphic nudity.Pitt is beautiful and awesomely evil, but what's the deal with the inevitable cutaways to the pimp in the tall black hat waiting off in the distance on his horsey? I can't help but feel there was this knee-jerk need to stick these shots in so it seems Pitt's Carmilla isn't following her own drummer but needs a man to guide her on her evil missions even if from afar. That's crap, brothers! But luckily he never really intrudes, so I've come to think of him as a Crypt Keeper or Whistler / Hitchhiker-type narrator, in order to keep my inner militant feminist at ease.
Mabel Karr and Estella Blaine in
DIABOLICAL DR. Z
1966
One is the daughter of a mad scientist, the other her robotic killer henchmen. When dad dies after receiving a dissing at the medical conference for his wild theories about turning criminals into robots, daughter Karr goes on a spree of revenge. I won't go into the nasty things she does to fake her own death, but let's just say she's not f---ing around. Later she spies a hot girl (Blaine) in a spider bodysuit doing a web-dance seduction of a mannequin and mind-melds her into being her poison fingernailed sex assassin. In other words, yes, it's typical Jess Franco 'storyline' but clearly one of the 'master's' most focused and inventive works. There's even a few actual tracking shots as opposed to his usual lazy zooms! And both women are luscious and stone cold creepy at the same time. As Michael Weldon would say: Essential viewing.
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