An American Werewolf in London

The transformation is the reason, and it deserves the reputation.

Rick Baker built it as a sequence of prosthetic pieces pushed from underneath by air bladders, shot in bright light in a single room, running about a minute. It hurts to watch because David is screaming through all of it and the film refuses to cut away. Baker won the first Academy Award ever given for makeup.

The rest is stranger than people remember. Landis wrote it in 1969 and could not get it made for a decade because nobody could work out whether it was a comedy. It is: the tone lurches from Rick Baker's bones snapping to a decomposing best friend giving cheerful advice in a Piccadilly porn cinema.

The soundtrack is a joke that runs the whole film. Every song is about the moon.

The ending stops dead, with no wind-down at all, which annoyed people in 1981 and is now the part critics praise.