It’s enough to make you believe that liberation was just a jump to the left - and then a step to the ri-iii-iiight - away. Frank-N-Furter, Tim Curry’s iconic mad scientist in fishnets and a man capable of making you shiver in antici… pation. O’Brien himself is Riff-Raff, the hunchbacked handyman who initiates lost innocents Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon into a world of freaks, geeks and sexual fluidity their resistance is, of course, futile. There were “midnight movies” before the big-screen version of Richard O’Brien’s tongue-in-cheek stage show, assembled from the spare parts of science fiction double features, musical theater and underlined passages of “Notes on Camp.” But this would come to both define and refine the entire concept of filmdom cults, turning its after-hours screenings into interactive cosplay gatherings designed for a communal experience. Image Credit: Jerry Tavin/Everett Collection To quote a wise man: “It’s showtime, folks!”

You won’t agree with all of these choices, but hopefully you’ll revisit every single film on this list and find something new in these documents of a wild, wacky, weird decade of movies. Here are our picks for the greatest movies to come out of that fertile era of filmmaking, from godfather-led family businesses to tales in a galaxy far, far away.

(Forget it, Jake - it’s a deadline thing.) Our only regret is that we didn’t take this list up to 200, or even 300 titles. Looking back at the second golden age of Hollywood while this group of writers attempted to wrestle with the notion of the 100 best movies of the 1970s, it’s mind-boggling to think so many of what we now consider the high points of a still young-ish art form came from this small pocket of time. There’s a reason that the 1970s are idolized, fetishisized and consistently namechecked by several generations of cinephiles: the sheer abundance of great movies that came out during that 10-year span, especially (but not exclusively) from American filmmakers. (In all fairness fair to Regan MacNeil, the devil made her do it.) These were the years when we learned to be scared of sharks, masked slashers and pea-soup-spitting youngsters. Later, boxers, biking teens, baseball kids and broken-down hockey players would prove that sometimes, the underdogs win even if they don’t actually win.

The “Film Brats” were in full bloom, and after the studio system had let the bearded barbarians in through gate, audiences were gifted with what seemed like some new beautiful, bleak vision of American life on a weekly basis. It was the decade that gave us midnight movies, modern blockbusters, Blaxploitation epics, neo-noirs and the cream of the New Hollywood crop.

Soul Style by Duane Thomas