ALRIGHT, YA HOSERS, GRAB YOUR PLAID TRAPPER HAT, YOUR MOOSEHEAD, AND YOUR BIGGEST BOWL OF POUTINE – WE’RE CHECKING OUT SOME CANADIAN...

A contemporary of Kinji Fukasaku, Sadao Nakajima was another hit-maker for Toei Studios during the ‘70s. Like Fukasaku, he found success across genres, but grew into an influential figure during a wave of popular jitsuroku eiga (true account) yakuza movies. Among these was the prison drama The Rapacious Jailbreaker (Japanese: Datsugoku Hiroshima satsujinshû, 1974), which ended up being the first film in a thematic trilogy, including Nakajima’s controversial Riot at Shimane Pr

Based on the folktale of the Oiwa spirit and two separate historically-documented murder cases, Tsuruya Nanboku IV’s kabuki play Ghost Story of Yotsuya in Tokaido (Japanese: Tôkaidô Yotsuya Kaidan, 1825) is one of the – if not the – most commonly told Japanese ghost story. It inspired literature, art, other plays, and at least 30 films (and counting), including multiple silent adaptations, Daisuke Itô’s The Phantom of Yotsuya (Japanese: Shinban Yotsuya kaidan; aka: Yotsuya Gh

Once upon a time, a professional weightlifter and developing actor named Jacinto Molina Álvarez developed a script based on his love of...

No other director 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 style that, in turn, took Hollywood by storm in the mid-to-late ‘90s. While he was not the first filmmaker of his kind a

There is the impression that, at the end of the millennium, as postmodern horror grew in popularity, bereft of ideas, every Hollywood studio tried sending their aging horror mascots to space. The absurdity of the concept overshadowed the actual scope of this movement, as technically only three established franchises attempted this – Kevin Yagher & Joe Chappelle’s Hellraiser IV: Bloodline (1996), Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Leprechaun 4: In Space (completed in 1996, but not releas

As someone who arrived at their love of films through cult movies (namely, Entertainment Weekly's list of the top 50 Cult Movies of All Time), one gets used to the idea that many very good films are simply overlooked for one reason or another. Take the Wachowski sisters' Speed Racer adaptation, which was doing something visually ambitious and surprisingly cutting, politically, or the cult detective movie Zero Effect, which features a pre-Something About Mary Ben Stiller and B

All film franchises must come to an end. Some of them can be reborn, but they have to die first and few franchises were as destined to die with the Reagan era than Friday the 13th. The original film was a surprise hit in 1980, so Paramount struck the iron at its hottest, producing eight films in nine years and sticking pretty closely to an established formula in hopes that it would generate money forever. Alas, 1989’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was a box

The Italian giallo tradition took its nickname from an existing slang term for the pulp crime novels first published by Mondadori, which used garish yellow covers for their Il Giallo Mondadori series. Several were translations of American and British books, from writers who became the bedrock for the Italian thrillers to come, including Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, Patricia Highsmith, Robert Bloch, and, pertinent to this review, Edgar Wall

We have new design available on the Genre Grinder Cares sales page and it's an obscure-ish and geeky reference to the greatest movie of...