Sold by Troma Studios as an irreverent action film, Surf Nazis Must Die (1987) is actually a late-to-the-party Delinquent Dystopia movie. This minor blip of a subgenre is an extension of the American and European juvenile delinquent movies of the ‘50s/‘60s and a similar Japanese movement that peaked in the ‘70s. The Rosetta Stone that connected teen scare type movies with near-future dystopia fiction was, of course, Stanley Kurbrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), itself based o

Having made a living as a working-class filmmaker in Japan since 1991, Takashi Miike initially directed whatever scripts he was handed. In interviews, he’s incredibly modest about his creative talents during retrospective interviews, stating that he didn’t even originally want to be a director – it was simply the most viable career choice. It was this uncharacteristic lack of artistic pretension that left Miike free to make uniquely intuitive and subversive motion pictures.

Sergio Donati was among the unsung founders of the spaghetti western movement, responsible for script-doctoring duties on Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More (Italian: Per qualche dollaro in più, 1965) and, based on unverified rumors, possibly A Fistful of Dollars (Italian: Per un pugno di dollari, 1964), as well as Leone’s co-scripter on Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian: C'era una volta il West, 1968), where he was brought on to make sense of Bernardo Bertolucci & Dar

In the 1980s, the Hong Kong box office was beset by a glut of martial arts/horror hybrids and police thrillers, fueled by genre spoofs, like Kuei Chih-Hung’s Hex vs. Witchcraft (1980) and Sammo Hung’s Winners & Sinners (1983), Hung’s groundbreaking jiangshi comedy Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980), and various hardnosed Jackie Chan cop movies. Eventually, someone at Golden Harvest said “Hey, why don’t we try combining all of these hits into a single production?” and Haunte

New Zealand-based filmmaker Peter Jackson introduced himself to cult audiences around the world with a trilogy of uniquely transgressive, independently produced, gross-out, black comedies entitled Bad Taste (1987), Meet the Feebles (1989), and Braindead (1992). Braindead (released unrated, but still cut as Dead Alive in the US) in particular was an unparalleled zombie epic that pushed the idea of splatter humor to its very limits. There are grosser and more shocking movies ou

The popular concept of the motion picture vampire has, over a hundred years and thousands of movies, become a largely homogenized mythology, based on Eastern European folklore, a couple of bestselling books (Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1897] and Frances Burney’s Camilla [1796]), and Christian religious doctrine. Creative types will always find an interesting angle to the classic vampire, but unique versions of blood-sucking monsters already exist throughout the world. In Asia alon

As of this writing, nine of the top ten grossing films of all time (not adjusted for inflation) land somewhere in the category of sci-fi and/or fantasy*, but there was a time before Star Wars and Close Encounters where science fiction was considered strictly a B-genre, worthy only of drive-ins, pre-feature serials, and the bottom end of double-bills. There were always exceptions, but, when the ‘40s rolled around, budgets and quality standards were plummeting.

Here at Genre Grinder, Patrick Ripoll and I have had an annual tradition of taking a deep-dive into a single year in which a genre fad peaked. The first of these was our three part look at the slasher movies of 1981. If you’re very liberal with the term, about 42 slasher or at least slasher-esque films were released between January and December of that year, including classics, like George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine and Jeff Lieberman’s Just Before Dawn, overlooked foreign

Before VCD and DVD took over the home video market and Ringu-inspired kaidan became the export of choice, a home-grown, straight-to-video underground splatter movement reintroduced Japan to cult horror audiences. Characterized by short runtimes, sloppy gore, and mega-ambitious, do-it-yourself special effects, the movement is largely tied the legendary Guinea Pig series, but also produced more likeable films, like Akihiro Kashima’s Biotherapy (1986), Takuro Fukuda’s Conton (ak

In the annals of legendary martial arts weapons, no sword, spear, staff, or axe can compare to the violent esoteric mechanics of the fabled “flying guillotine.” Supposedly invented during the Qing Dynasty (221 to 206 BC), the flying guillotine was a folding cage attached to a chain that was designed to be thrown onto the head of an enemy. Following a successful lassoing, the chain would be pulled, activating buzzsaw blades around the base, severing the victim’s head, and capt