Prior to 1970, the Hong Kong film industry was firmly in the hands of Shaw Bros. Studios, who exerted a near-monopoly on production and distribution. But things began to change as television became a key piece of the entertainment market, censorship standards shifted, and executives Raymond Chow, Peter Choi, and Leonard Ho left Shaw to found Golden Harvest Studios. Golden Harvest embraced the independent market and offered up-and-coming artists and performers relative creativ

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

Los Angeles’ underground punk and hardcore scene of the 1980s was most famously chronicled by Penelope Spheeris in the first of her trilogy of documentaries, entitled Decline of Western Civilization (1981), and her first narrative feature, Suburbia (1983). The scene was further represented in Adam Small & Peter Stuart’s Another State of Mind (1984) and Alex Cox’s satirical sci-fi classic Repo Man (1984). All of these films were gritty and subversive products of the countercul

The turn of the century was an unprecedented moment for Japanese horror. Once restricted to its home country and a sprinkling of European and North American arthouses, post-Ringu ghost stories were now seeing international success in theaters and especially on home video. This period, generally remembered as the J-horror era, inspired distributors to pick up similar films from Korea, eventually leading to a glut of mostly subpar Hollywood J-horror/K-horror...

The Polonia Brothers are perhaps the ultimate ‘if you know, you know’ figures in the annals of cult film fandom. Twins Mark & John rose to indie horror prominence as teenagers when their inscrutably strange, shot-on-video slasher Splatter Farm somehow got a nationwide VHS release in 1987. Their biggest hit was Feeders (1996), an alien invasion movie that was miraculously carried by Blockbuster Video. The rental giant was desperate to put anything vaguely resembling Roland Emm

TWIN WARRIORS, MUSCLEBOUND BARBARIANS, UNDEAD HORDES, EVIL KINGS, ENSLAVED PEASANTS, MYSTICAL WARFARE, BLOODTHIRSTY GODS & PLAYBOY PLAYMATES…ALL ON A BUDGET!! In the wake of John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982) and the dawn of home video’s dominance in genre filmmaking spaces, independent studios kicked off a short-lived, but prolific series of B-to-Z grade sword & sorcery, fantasy, and barbarian movies. Join Gabe and returning guest Luana Saitta as we look at three film

Poliziotteschi are remembered for their outrageously dangerous stunts, not-so-casual misogyny, fascist power fantasies, ultraviolence, and sleaze factor, but the genre had its prestige entries, too. For example, Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Italian: Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, 1970) won the Best Foreign Film Oscar and Francesco Rosi’s Illustrious Corpses (Italian: Cadaveri eccellenti, 1976) won Best Film and Best Director