In February of 1996, after a decade of trying, Jackie Chan finally had an actual stateside hit, when New Line Cinema released an edited and dubbed version of Stanley Tong’s Rumble in the Bronx. Chan’s earlier, failed attempts to break into the American market – Robert Clouse’s The Big Brawl (aka: Battle Creek Brawl, 1980) and James Glickenhaus’ The Protector (1985) – were tailored to international audiences (The Protector more so than The Big Brawl). Rumble in the Bronx prove

BENEATH THE WAVES ROILS A MURKY STEW OF KILLER ALIENS, MONSTROUS MUTANTS, PSYCHOTIC SOLDIERS, AND EVIL CORPORATIONS!! Welcome to another of Genre Grinder’s patented deep(sea)-dives into a single year in cinema when a specific genre fad peaked. This time, Gabe and Patrick Ripoll are looking at a strange moment in time, the year 1989, when seven different undersea sci-fi/horror/adventures were released*. How did this happen? Your intrepid podcasters will attempt to answer that

In the first decade of the new millennium, a minor moral panic arose over a series of graphic horror films released by major studios. The movement was eventually dubbed ‘torture porn’ by critic David Edelstein, who used the term in a 2006 New York Times op-ed that he wrote after seeing Eli Roth’s Hostel Part II (2007), entitled “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn” (subtitled “Why has America gone nuts for blood, guts, and sadism?”). The appellation was retroact

LUCHA VS ICE T-shirt and sticker! Blue Demon llega a la ciudad y tiene un mensaje especial para el Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas... Get yours RIGHT HERE! and RIGHT HERE! And be sure to check out our OTHER DESIGNS! As before, these are print-on-demand shirts, not traditional silkscreen. Now that I know a little better how that process works, I'm trying to design stuff with its limitations in mind. I was happy with the sample. Hopefully some of you will be too. A

While Putra and Liliek Sudjio, who directed the similarly influential The Queen of Black Magic (Indonesian: Ratu ilmu hitam, 1981), set the template for Indonesian horror in the ‘80s, H. Tjut Djalil quickly established a new baseline for how insane the region’s genre output would become. Little is known about his directorial debut, Benyamin spion 025 (1974), but his second feature, Mystics in Bali (Indonesian: Leák, 1981), is an unhinged, shock-a-minute crowd-pleaser that has

Indonesian genre cinema saw a major boost over the last decade, thanks to streaming distribution models, the efforts of a new crop filmmakers, including Gareth Evans, Timo Tjahjanto, Kimo Stamboel, and Joko Anwar, who brought a new flavor of martial arts action and Southeast Asian horror to international audiences who’d grown tired of the Hong Kong and Japanese influences of the early ‘00s. These films are themselves rooted in a series of films that emerged in Indonesia durin

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