Larry Cohen is one of the great cinematic provocateurs, but Bone is one of his few films worthy of being considered genuinely troubling. Cohen’s films are intrepidly amusing and almost always mischievous with their grasp of truth, but Bone, his debut, tilts normality in a subtler, and ultimately, more forceful manner. In the image of married couple Bill (Andrew Duggan) and Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten) lounging outside by their pool, Bone frames a horridly bland image of bourgeois suburban domesticity. In the image of Yaphet Kotto (Bone) appearing out of nowhere, dressed like an escaped criminal and ready to move to a decidedly more banal prison. Lasciviously grabbing a rat out of the pool, he impishly winks  “you wanna touch it.” The sexual joke is funny, but Kotto’s wryly menacing eyes and shit-eating grin makes it truly uncomfortable in a way that, say, The Stuff simply isn’t, even when the characters are exploding into morasses of liquid sludge. Cohen’s screenplay is working at a higher level than The Stuff because it goes lower, right into modernity’s cloaca.

“Is there anything I can do for you all?,” Bone asks with playful gruesomeness that exposes him as a hilarious perversion of the “magical Negro” stereotype, the black man as cosmic force who intrudes on the normal order of things in order to reveal the middlebrow monotonies and manicured calculations of their bourgeois lives. Rather than salvation, though, the titular Bone offers destruction. He comes not to absolve them of their existence, but to corrode the strictures of their being, to filter their sanity through a prism of psychological erosion. He’s the existential specter they need, a cinematic wraith who emerges, as if out of the liminal undulations of a cinema of the id, the infested impurity of their pool itself, to clarify their fears and catalyze their anxieties. When Bill walks through the city on a mission from Bone, he passes a sign that says “new adult theatre open.” You said it, buddy.

Burn, Witch, Burn, directed by Sidney Hayers and based loosely on Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife, follows Norman Taylor, a newly appointed psychology professor at a quaint British school whose professional identity rests entirely on self-confidently deconstructing irrational beliefs. An arbiter of post-enlightenment skepticism, he, and his subject position, necessitates that superstition be seen as a relic of primitive, pagan thinking. Taylor’s position reflects a characteristically mid-20th-century confidence in scientific rationalism, a worldview the film subtly interrogates as it evokes the early 1960s – a moment poised between postwar solidity and the creeping resurgence of countercultural forces. To those invested in the sanctified stability of mainstream forms, these new energies seemed to rekindle an occult past that had been only apparently foreclosed by the hegemony of rationalism.

In this film, however, these energies were only superficially dormant, less absent than silently constitutive of the very reason that Taylor grounds his identity in. An identity the film finally destabilizes, disfiguring Taylor’s self-enclosure by slowly exposing the protective influence of his wife Tansy. Her charms, written off by Taylor as trivial superstitions, ultimately prove entirely essential for maintaining the subterranean order beneath the internecine rivalries and bristling anxieties of the modern academic world, which claims that it thrives on order but can clearly not sustain itself without tensions and complexities it must superficially disavow.

When Taylor discovers these threats – in the form of his wife’s protective superstitious charms hidden throughout the house – he destroys them. His sense of self depends on this destruction, but this very act begins to scrap away the veneer of rational stability that had granted this practical man of mid-century academic affairs, and the social structures he represents, legitimacy. These seemingly irrational currents which he must deny are ultimately exposed as the hidden backbone of the system that must excise them to the margins in order to preserve its identity, revealing a science that is more vulnerable, and ultimately more fragmented, than it is willing to admit.

If only director Stephen Hopkins’s Predator 2 was quite as awful and empty as its reputation suggests. Turning from post-Vietnam parable to a vision of the U.S. as a police state, Predator 2 is at once too inadequate and ham-fisted to take home and too canny and cunning in its critiques of American society to write-off. If the first Predator was, at base, an imperialist fantasia of an action movie cracked in half, turned into a vicious thriller about an interracial group of American men united in working as puppets for American corporate and governmental hubris, Predator 2 figures all races, groups, clans, and organizations as one more front in a violent war of unceasing viciousness that reaches from the streets to the penthouses to the institutions of power. If Predator concluded with a set-piece that systematically reduced Arnold Schwarzenegger, paradigmatic icon figure of ‘80s American masculinity, into a sort of visual negative space reduced and stripped barren, Predator 2 lets the titular Predator loose in a high-tech, dystopian Los Angeles to reveal how empty the whole edifice of Western progress might be. The film is basically empty, but it also suggests, here and there, in moments and fragments, that we are too.

I’m only winking a little bit when I claim that Larry Cohen was one of the great New York artists, a bedraggled poet of a forlorn city. Evocatively directed by his compatriot William Lustig with an eye for spontaneous eruptions of brutality and an ear for the underlying violence beneath them, Maniac Cop II is curdled and vicious enough to leave a stench. It isn’t messing around. It’s also distinctly Cohen-esque, the work of a unique voice not because Cohen wanted to be an auteur or really cared about his personal vision but because he couldn’t but do it. This is evident in the near-fetishistic infatuation that a would-be criminal has with zombie police officer Matt Cordell (a Vorhees-esque Robert Z’Dar), which never plays out as straightforward attraction. Or the undercurrent of real melancholy that the lighting ropes around Cordell, who is presently on the war path for those who wronged him in his waking life, suffusing him in a melancholy menace despite the character seldom speaking and never expressing a vocal line. The suggestive relationship between cop and criminal keep the text remarkably ambivalent, transforming Cordell into an icon of entombed masculinity and silent devastation, a mutant man incapable of human expression anymore. That’s evident in more than just the titular character too. Robert Earl Jones, who shows up only briefly, nonetheless wears on him a century of racial violence, a much longer echo of a brutal world than Cordell does.

And Lustig, more than just a hired goon, is a true partner in crime. Some of the gruesome beauty he brings to the film is simply a matter of time passing. It looks better, of course, than 80% of any given year’s cinematography Oscar nominees, because it came out before Netflix turned everything into a homogeneous aesthetic paste. Whatever else Maniac Cop II is, you can tell it wasn’t made with the assumption that the people watching it are off doing their laundry or chopping vegetables. This is cinema, someone with a genuine eye exploring visual textures because he happens to be curious about them, no more and no less. Maniac Cop II evokes an entire sensibility with its style in a way that I can’t imagine another slasher from the dreaded early 1990s doing. This is expressive sleaze in the best sense, channeling – and frequently being confused about – the violence of an era it outlines in what we might, paradoxically, call ambiguous boldface.

What does it mean to watch a murder? What does it mean to meditate on the cause of a murder? What does it mean to plan one? What does it mean to watch one being planned? To what extent are these four things different, and to what extent are they the same? “We’re just not very skillful at that sort of thing,” the film reminds us, and demonstrates, and the statement might apply to all of the above. Even when we think we’ve got a bead on what will happen to Edward G. Robinson’s Professor Richard Wanley, or what bit of evidence will or will not convict him, we keep wondering what it even means to judge someone, or to find someone guilty, or whether we can or should rely on any evidence given how easily each agentive act is contaminated by context, each exhibit for the prosecution claimed in part by chance. The ease with which the two protagonists find themselves more prepared than they expected to cover up a death and facilitate a murder, and the methodical way they begin to calculate their own moral slippage, is quietly penetrating. When the lights go up and the machinations of fate are apparently reversed in the film’s final minute, the grim realization is not that this was all an unfathomable dream but that the membrane separating determinism from contingency, demarcating sudden relief from a nightmare of existential guilt, is only molecule-thin.