During the 1990s, a string of international hits brought the Hong Kong New Wave to the attention of Hollywood and several top tier filmmakers, including Jackie Chan, John Woo, Yuen Woo-ping, Ronny Yu, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark, were given deals making English-language films. Like previous attempts to import Hong Kong style action to America, most of these films – especially the ones not involving Chan, Woo, or Yuen – were modestly budgeted and either went straight-to-video or

Eloy de la Iglesia was a vital Spanish filmmaker in the waning days of General Franco’s regime. He was especially renowned for his groundbreaking quinqui (delinquent crime) features, queer-themed dramas, and erotic thrillers, all of which pushed the boundaries of the country’s fascist censorship standards. He also made a number of films in the giallo tradition, including straight-forward, Hitchcockian productions, like The Glass Ceiling (Spanish: El techo de cristal, 1971) an

1998. Bill Clinton's affair was uncovered, leading to his impeachment -- bad behavior we now know was only the tip of the iceberg. Andrew Wakefield published a bullshit study that lead to the current, deadly anti-vax movement. Google was founded, arguably launching our current tech oligarchy. Lastly (but perhaps most importantly) New Line Cinema's expensive TV-to-movie adaptation Lost in Space cratered at the box office, grossing only $136.1 million against an $80 million bud

It's the stuff of contemporary Hollywood legend. After making ends meet as a stand-up comedian and scoring parts here and there (including the last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, and Earth Girls Are Easy), Jim Carrey first landed on the public's radar as the token white guy on the Wayans Brothers comedy show "In Living Color." Although the show turned Carrey into a rising star, Hollywood moves slow, but in Carrey's case, the wait would pay off when not one, not two, but th

For the most part, the giallo and poliziottescho booms were populist fads, cranked out quickly for low budgets and released in other countries as straight exploitation market fodder. But there were exceptions – films with arthouse aspirations that played with genre, ignored clichés, and gained international prestige. The best examples (as far as I’m concerned) would be Elio Petri’s savvy satirical thriller Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Italian: Indagine su un ci

During the ancient early days of the public internet, I once stumbled across a website called Losman’s Lair of Horror (you can still visit it, thanks to the Wayback Machine). The Lair was devoted to cataloging and reviewing films that Losman considered the most disturbing movies of all time. As a young horror fan with a new rental subscription card, I was always looking for under-the-radar titles to add to my watchlist. Alongside notoriously cruel and disgusting films, like P

Greetings from war-torn Minnesota, where the patron saint of chopping trees has a special message for the rest of America! Get your T-shirt RIGHT HERE!   and your sticker   RIGHT HERE! And be sure to check out our OTHER DESIGNS , including similar messages from Paul's friend Godzilla, celebrations of the brave frogs fighting injustice, and more. These are print-on-demand shirts, not traditional silkscreen. Now that I know a little better how that process works, I'm trying to

No other director has had a bigger impact on Hong Kong action cinema than Chang Cheh, who directed and/or wrote around 100 movies across six decades. His films were steeped in a formula now known as ‘heroic bloodshed,’ which emphasized brotherhood, redemption, and violent sacrifice, but his style evolved with the times and helped usher in the Hong Kong New Wave styles that, in turn, took Hollywood by storm in the mid-to-late ‘90s. While he was not the first filmmaker of his k

Lam Nai-Choi, sometimes credited as Simon Lam, began his career as a cinematographer at Shaw Bros. before relocating to rival studio Golden Harvest, where he became a director and made some of the most absurd and imaginative films of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. He only made 13 features in total, but is well-remembered for a trio of unhinged Cat. III masterpieces – the demented Indiana Jones meets Mr. Vampire meets Evil Dead extravaganza, The Seventh Curse (1986), the delirious p

A couple of years before Shaw Bros. released their version of a kaiju movie with Ho Meng-hua’s King Kong rip-off, The Mighty Peking Man (1977), the studio attempted to make a Hong Kong version of a tokusatsu movie called Super Inframan (aka: Infra-Man and Chinese Superman, 1975). Tokusatsu is a sort of catch-all term for Japanese movies and TV shows that use extensive practical effects, but it typically refers to the masked superhero media that grew out of Ishirō Honda’s kaij