At the top of its most internationally successful decade, the 1970s, Shaw Bros. Studios began diversifying their genre output, including a comparatively small, but vital series of horror films. The turning point was arguably 1974, which saw the release of two definitively Hong Kong-flavored films, Kuei Chih-Hung’s The Killer Snakes and Ghost Eyes, and a combination of Shaw kung fu and Hammer Gothic, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, co-directed by Chang Cheh and Roy Ward B

The Italian/Spanish giallo fad blew up in 1970, following the release of Dario Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970), and peaked quickly over the following year (Patrick and I did a two-part podcast on several of the 40+ gialli released in the year 1971, have a listen here and here). By the middle of the decade, the market was saturated. Quick, cheap, and derivative output brought down the quality, but the influx sludge al

It’s always exciting when an obscure giallo is rediscovered on video, but it’s especially exciting when someone finds a film produced before Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970) turned a burgeoning subgenre into a fullblown cinematic fad. Released a solid two years before Argento’s film and having never made an official appearance on home video outside of Japan, Cesare Canevari’s tremendously underseen A Hyena i

The European continent had been making American frontier style ‘western’ films since the turn of the previous century, but the pop-culture idea of the Eurowestern is typically tied to the Italian western boom that resulted from the international popularity of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (Italian: Per un pugno di dollari, 1964) and Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966). Those films helped establish a genre now known as the spaghetti western, but they didn’t spring out of the

YOU DIDN’T CUT YOUR CARBON EMISSIONS AND NOW WE’RE UP TO OUR EYEBALLS IN SMOG MONSTERS, MUTANT ISOPODS, AND VENGEFUL NATURE SPIRITS!! We’ve already covered natural disasters and killer animals on Genre Grinder, but what about some specifically man-made environmental horrors? Well, that’s where Gabe and returning guest Justin Clark come in. After last month’s epic seven movie podcast, we’re dialing things back to a more manageable three films, all from different countries and

My new friend Chloe Waryan has a podcast and she invited me on. Regular listeners will remember that Chloe was on my podcast back in April of this year when we talked about Anthology Horror Films , so I'm returning the favor and talking about Lucio Fulci on her podcast. More specifically, we're talking about his breakout horror hit, Zombi 2 , aka: Zombie and Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979). If you ever wanted to know about how I became a fan of Italian horror, we talk about th

Stephen Sayadian began his career as a satirical illustrator for Mad Magazine and National Lampoon, eventually graduating to creative director at Larry Flynt Publications in the mid-’70s, where he worked on ad campaigns for Hustler Magazine. Later, he moved with Flynt to LA, where he designed poster art for movies, including John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and Escape from New York (1981), and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), discovered the area’s punk rock culture, an

The idea that all men – not just bloodthirsty psychos – pose a physical danger to women grew as a theme when giallo films hit the height of their popularity during the 1970s. This was probably just the natural escalation of the genre’s dependence on red herrings (you don’t have to write a compelling reason to suspect anyone if your movie already has a dozen scumbags to pin the crime on), rather than a reaction to pushback against its dependence on violence against women. Howe

Surprise! Patrick Ripoll has resurrected his Tracks of the Damned podcast, but only for the month of November. He's releasing one lightly researched episode per day, all of them commentary tracks for films directed by the one and only Roger Corman. That's 30 Roger Corman commentaries in 30 days! And there are already 11 of them available for download on your podcaster of choice! As a bonus, I joined him on the episode for Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Technically, we a

The Hindi cinema scene, colloquially known as Bollywood, is typically remembered for light-hearted romantic musicals, historical melodramas (which are also often musicals), and thinly-disguised remakes of Hollywood hits. In truth, the region is among history’s most prolific movie machines and its output encompasses more or less every genre under the...