Winter Kills (1979)

Director William Richert's Winter Kills (1979), adapted from a novel by Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate), is a wild, kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of conspiracy theories piled on top of (and inside and all around) one another with ferocious black comedy and unflinching ambition. That the movie was ultimately buried for years by its studio only adds cachet to its story of Nick Keegan (Jeff Bridges), the brother of a none-too-subtly-JFK-like murdered president, who investigates the assassination and finds one cover-up after another, leading to more puzzles, dead-ends, and open questions than he could have imagined. Winter Kills's astonishing cast includes John Huston (in the pseudo-Joe Kennedy part), Anthony Perkins, Elizabeth Taylor, Toshirô Mifune, and, in her very last screen appearance before completely disappearing from public view, Candice Rialson. There's also sufficiently impressive nudity to render the mind-blower Winter Kills into some genuinely hot stuff.