It's the stuff of contemporary Hollywood legend. After making ends meet as a stand-up comedian and scoring parts here and there (including the last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, and Earth Girls Are Easy), Jim Carrey first landed on the public's radar as the token white guy on the Wayans Brothers comedy show "In Living Color." Although the show turned Carrey into a rising star, Hollywood moves slow, but in Carrey's case, the wait would pay off when not one, not two, but th

For the most part, the giallo and poliziottescho booms were populist fads, cranked out quickly for low budgets and released in other countries as straight exploitation market fodder. But there were exceptions – films with arthouse aspirations that played with genre, ignored clichés, and gained international prestige. The best examples (as far as I’m concerned) would be Elio Petri’s savvy satirical thriller Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Italian: Indagine su un ci

During the ancient early days of the public internet, I once stumbled across a website called Losman’s Lair of Horror (you can still visit it, thanks to the Wayback Machine). The Lair was devoted to cataloging and reviewing films that Losman considered the most disturbing movies of all time. As a young horror fan with a new rental subscription card, I was always looking for under-the-radar titles to add to my watchlist. Alongside notoriously cruel and disgusting films, like P

Greetings from war-torn Minnesota, where the patron saint of chopping trees has a special message for the rest of America! Get your T-shirt RIGHT HERE!   and your sticker   RIGHT HERE! And be sure to check out our OTHER DESIGNS , including similar messages from Paul's friend Godzilla, celebrations of the brave frogs fighting injustice, and more. These are print-on-demand shirts, not traditional silkscreen. Now that I know a little better how that process works, I'm trying to

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

Lam Nai-Choi, sometimes credited as Simon Lam, began his career as a cinematographer at Shaw Bros. before relocating to rival studio Golden Harvest, where he became a director and made some of the most absurd and imaginative films of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. He only made 13 features in total, but is well-remembered for a trio of unhinged Cat. III masterpieces – the demented Indiana Jones meets Mr. Vampire meets Evil Dead extravaganza, The Seventh Curse (1986), the delirious p

A couple of years before Shaw Bros. released their version of a kaiju movie with Ho Meng-hua’s King Kong rip-off, The Mighty Peking Man (1977), the studio attempted to make a Hong Kong version of a tokusatsu movie called Super Inframan (aka: Infra-Man and Chinese Superman, 1975). Tokusatsu is a sort of catch-all term for Japanese movies and TV shows that use extensive practical effects, but it typically refers to the masked superhero media that grew out of Ishirō Honda’s kaij

HERE’S EVERYTHING YOU MISSED IN THE LAST 25 YEARS!! The gang is back together and we’re talking about our top 5 (sometimes 10) underrated films released between the years 2000 and 2025 (don’t give me that whole “2001 is the first year of the 21st century” spiel, alright, let it go). Join Gabe and Patrick Ripoll, along with call ins from previous Genre Grinder guests Jim Laczkowski, Luana Saitta, Chloe Waryan, Tyler Foster, Kristine Fisher, and 96 Greers co-host Barry Linn. So

Eva Man and The Return of Eva Man are, frankly speaking, not especially good movies. For softcore features, they're adequately made, even if the plots will bring Julianne Moore's line as Maude Lebowski to mind more than once ("the story is ludicrous"). That said, they are fascinating cultural artifacts thanks to their leading lady, Eva Robin's (the apostrophe is intentional), who was fully living as an out transgender woman back in 1979. Although she is probably most famous f

Ho Meng-Huathe’s Black Magic (1974) and Black Magic Part 2 (1976) set a precedent for a special brand of Shaw Bros. horror movies often referred to as their black magic series. Though not narratively connected, these films were united by content and visual themes, including elaborate black magic rituals, esoteric wizard battles, curses, exorcisms, squirming bugs, and gushing bodily fluids. Kuei Chih-Hung more or less perfected the formula with Hex (1980), Bewitched (1982), an