My Five Favorite Films From...1975

Honorable Mention – Death Race 2000: Look, I'm not going to pretend that this is a good film. It's solid B-movie fare. But it's fun B-movie fare. Death Race 2000 is just a gas to watch, whether it's because of Sly Stallone's overacting as "Machine Gun" Joe Viterbo or the classic scene where Frankenstein runs over the medical staff instead of the elderly patients they put out for him to run over. And it is leaps and bounds better than the remake.

5. The Eiger Sanction: A good, not great, film from Clint Eastwood. But what makes it one of my favorites from this year are the incredible rock-climbing scenes at the end. Eastwood did his own stunts, something you would never see nowadays.

4. Jaws: The film that created the concept of the "blockbuster" film. Scared the hell out of me when I first saw it. I still have issues swimming in the ocean today. Great acting all-around, but Robert Shaw as Quint just steals the movie.

3. The Return of the Pink Panther: This film always kills me. The part where Cato comes flying out of the refrigerator to attack Clouseau is just priceless.

2. Monty Python and the Holy Grail: If you're any kind of geek, as I am, then you know this film forwards and backwards. You know all the lines and all the gags. And it's still freaking hilarious even though I've seen it too many times to count.

1. Rollerball: I love this movie. I love the idea of one man standing up to the Corporation and not only surviving, but winning. And it's a damn fine look at how little corporations care about the common man, and how bloodthirsty we're becoming as a society. The action scenes are fantastic and James Caan is the perfect actor for the role of Jonathan E. For God's sake, don't taint your enjoyment of this film by watching that disastrous remake from 2002.

Films I Like But Didn't Make The List: The Yakuza, French Connection II, The Man Who Would Be King, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Deep Red, Farewell, My Lovely, The Passenger, The Man in the Glass Booth, Rooster Cogburn, The Wind and the Lion, Three Days of the Condor

Insane, Depraved Film I Have To Mention – Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom: Where to begin. This film is chock full of sex and nudity, but if you even get slightly aroused you should have yourself committed. Pier Paolo Pasolini's adaptation of de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom is so completely abhorrent and insane that I can't even begin to describe it. The only goal Pasolini could've had with this movie was to completely de-eroticize the act of sex. Well, mission accomplished, sir. If you want to put kids off of sex, forget abstinence classes. Just have them watch this movie. It's exploitation masquerading as art, repeated to the point where it becomes mind-numbingly dull.

Note: I feel like I have to mention again that my list is not what I consider "the best" films of a particular year. If that was the case, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would be at the top of the list. But while I like it, I simply didn't enjoy it as much as the ones on the list. That's the standard here.