In December of last year, director Mike Hodges passed away at the age of 90. With his debut film Get Carter from 1971, one of the grittiest and most significant British gangster films with an immortal lead role by Michael Caine, he delivered a masterful calling card. However, the rest of his filmography was less successful, except for the delightfully campy remake of Flash Gordon in 1980. Many of his films faced a difficult distribution history or, beyond his control, encountered (post)production troubles. His sci-fi thriller The Terminal Man from 1974 never received a theatrical release in his home country; he was fired from the set of Damien: Omen II; the IRA thriller A Prayer for the Dying with Mickey Rourke was completely re-edited behind his back, and the supernatural thriller Black Rainbow, one of his best films, unfairly never gained the recognition it deserved because its distributors ran into financial difficulties and released the film directly to the video market. "If you make films that don’t fit into a particular slot, distributors and publicity people just don’t know what to do with them," he commented on this. It is high time, therefore, to rediscover two of his films and rehabilitate the British filmmaker, with a strong penchant for B-movies and a great eye for aesthetics and style, as an innovative genre and cult film director.

Let's start with The Terminal Man, a thorough and sinister science fiction film based on Michael Crichton’s novel. Hodges' brilliant cinematography packages the technophobia of the early 1970s and a bleak vision of the future in a chillingly clinical, antiseptic perspective and modernist mise-en-scène. In Black Rainbow, Hodges subtly blends different genres – crime film, conspiracy thriller, and gothic horror – into a unique and unconventional chiller about exploitation, murder, corruption, and religious fundamentalism.