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

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...