One fun thing about exploring subgenres is that you sometimes run into one that is both unusually specific and unusually popular, like Samurai Time Travel. In J. Larry Carroll’s Ghost Warrior (1986), a samurai is frozen in ice for 400 years and awakes in modern-day Los Angeles. In Stuart Gillard’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993), the titular heroes are thrown back in time to feudal Japan via an enchanted lamp. In Takashi Miike’s Izo (2004), Izo Okada (a real historica

In 2011, the Seattle Art Museum held a retrospective called American Heart: The Films of Jeff Bridges. I bought a series pass and went to as many as I could. Most of the lineup was what you'd expect. The ones I'd never seen (Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot) were fantastic, and the familiar ones (John Carpenter's Starman, Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski) were a joy to see with an audience. However, the one that stood

Conceived as a brutal homage to Roy Ward Baker’s British anthology horror classic Asylum (1972), Alex Chandon’s Cradle of Fear (2001) was a surprisingly well-promoted entry in the early-millennial indie extreme horror sweepstakes. Though nasty, Chandon’s film has more interest in entertaining a standard horror audience than nihilistic gore reels, like Fred Vogel's August Underground (also 2001) and Nick Palumbo’s Murder-Set-Pieces (2004). The vibe here is “Oh, man, gross!,” n

After Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) took home the Big Five Oscar awards, the film world contracted serial killer fever. Throughout the rest of the decade and into the early 2000s, the genre helped studios put a classy sheen on an established slasher model. These were prestige products called ‘psychological thrillers,’ not dirty ‘horror movies.’ But serial killer movies didn’t require big budgets, so the bandwagon was easy for independent filmmakers to jump onto