The advent of the DVD has unleashed a continual stream of classic film noir re-issues, starring actors like Humphrey Bogart and Joan Crawford, and directed by talents like Orson Welles and Billy Wilder. But with Kino’s “Film Noir: Five Classics From the Studio Vaults,” we’re getting down to the mucky sediment on the bottom with B-list stars and Z-grade budgets — movies that were churned out quickly to capitalize on current events and meant to fill the back sides of double bills.

The stars and the budgets were smaller, and, as if to compensate, the directors became even crueler, which makes watching four of these five movies as deliciously painful as swallowing a fistful of razor blades.

The most sadistic is Fritz Lang’s “Scarlet Street” (1945), about a henpecked bank clerk, Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson), who rescues a hooker named Kitty (Joan Bennett) from her pimp in a spontaneous act of assertiveness. This being film noir, his good deed is thoroughly punished; the more he breaks out of his shell, the further he slides into a shadowy swamp of sex and sin.

These films generally made their women the stars of the show, and Kitty, whether she’s forcing Christopher to kneel at her feet or getting an ice pick in the face, is both this movie’s villain and its victim. Bennett, who secured her place as a queen of noir femmes fatales with Lang in 1941’s “Man Hunt” and 1944’s “Woman in the Window,” had an equally double-edged life, sticking by her husband, the producer Walter Wanger, for 14 years after he shot her agent in the groin when he discovered the two were having an affair. Bennett’s loyalty, if you want to call it that, effectively ended her screen career.

Another long-suffering actress, Valerie Hobson, stars in 1940’s “Contraband,” the least vulgar and least interesting film in the set. Ms. Hobson gave up acting to marry the British politician John Profumo, whose affair with a hooker helped topple the Conservative government in 1963. Nevertheless, Ms. Hobson stood by her husband until the end of his life, having honed her ability to manage her gag reflex in “Contraband,” in which she’s romantically paired with Conrad Veidt, almost 25 years her senior and looking like a withered cadaver. The film is a limp warning to Europe’s northern nations about the price of their neutrality in the fight against the Nazis, but it’s a posh thriller that derives most of its tension from Veidt’s passion to ensure that his comrades are dressed appropriately for a raid on a nest of Nazi spies. “Remember,” he instructs them, “white ties.”

No one’s wearing white ties in Alberto Cavalcanti’s “They Made Me a Fugitive,” one of the best and bleakest of the British postwar noir wave. Clem (Trevor Howard), an alcoholic war hero, hits hard times and becomes a henchman for Narcy (Griffith Jones), a black-marketer who’s smuggling dope into Britain via coffins. Shockingly brutal, this film gets extra credit for never glossing over the reality of a gang moll’s life: These women may be street-smart and spunky, but any man is strong enough to slap the pep out of them when the mood strikes. It’s appalling to watch Narcy use his fists to sift his gal’s face for clues as to Clem’s whereabouts, reducing the previously bright-eyed young woman to a catatonic shell.

Anthony Mann’s campy “Strange Impersonation” (1946) is all about the female face: Acid is thrown in it, it is reshaped by plastic surgery, and it is damaged considerably when women dive from tall buildings. But female faces are completely absent from the one film noir in the new Kino set directed by a woman: Ida Lupino’s “The Hitch-Hiker” (1953). Based on the real-life case of hitchhiking serial killer Billy Cook, the movie is a near-silent nightmare about two family men kidnapped while on a fishing trip to Mexico.

Lurid as a county fair freak show, “The Hitch-Hiker” is strong medicine from a time when movies were only 70 minutes long and women got a chance to be actors and directors as opposed to sex objects deployed to capture a key demographic.

When kill-crazy Billy Cook was finally arrested in real life, all he had to say was, “I hate everybody’s guts, and everybody hates mine.” It’s a fitting epitaph for a genre of movies that were incredibly kind to actresses and incredibly cruel to the characters they portrayed.