The Sadist

This low-budget 1963 film opens with three schoolteachers breaking down on the way to a ball game. They pull into an abandoned wrecking yard and fall into the hands of a young man and his girlfriend. The next hour is a hostage situation played out almost entirely in that one yard. The character was patterned on the Charles Starkweather killings in the United States in 1958, and the most disturbing thing about the film is that the killer offers no reason and the violence is given no narrative payoff. It is among the first jobs by the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and the hand-held work, unusual for 35mm at the time, gives it an urgency that was imitated for years afterward. Made with very little, it still stands out inside its genre. Who it's for: viewers looking for the harder independent horror and suspense of the sixties. Who it's not for: anyone who will find unmotivated violence and an unrelieved tone too much; the film offers no release.