The low-budget action movies that the iconoclastic critic Manny Farber called “underground films” in an essay defiantly subtitled “a bit of male truth”— nothing effete about these flicks — were Hollywood mainstays through the 1950s.

Although such movies, which Farber saw as the filmmakers’ struggle against the constraints of cliché (an “aesthetic give-and-go with banality’’) , have all but disappeared, a few outré filmmakers continue the tradition. One unsung proponent is the 46-year-old writer-director-heavy-metal musician S. Craig Zahler.

The author of some 40 largely unproduced screenplays, the Miami-born, New York-based Zahler has directed three movies : the horror-western “Bone Tomahawk” (2015), the nightmare prison film “Brawl in Cell Block 99” (2017) and the gruesome bad-cop caper “Dragged Across Concrete” (2019). Their titles give a fair indication of Zahler’s attitude: Mash a genre, smash a skull.

Farber described the old-school action director Anthony Mann as “a tin-can de Sade” with “an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body.” Zahler is another creative sadist, one as humorous as he is lurid in his fabrication of ordeals and gross-out effects (entrails scooped, bones snapped). His films may not be to every taste but they are compulsively watchable.