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

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

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

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

In the history of unlikely pop culture phenomena, few things were less likely than Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Made as a joke, the indie comic became a surprise hit, leading quickly to a cartoon and toyline worth millions of dollars. That in itself isn’t entirely unique – a lot of silly ideas became multi-million dollar cartoon and toy properties in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. No, what was so unique about the Ninja Turtles is that they endured p

Ferdinando Baldi was a stalwart workhorse director whose films always looked more expensive than they actually were. Most of his westerns could be mistaken for modest Hollywood productions. They all look nice and have coherent, three-act scripts. Well, most of them – his latter collaborations with American actor Tony Anthony, Get Mean (1976), and Comin’ At Ya! (1981), are over-the-top, one-thing-after-another action spoofs and he made a musical comedy vehicle for pop star Rit

Ho Meng-Huathe’s Black Magic (1974) and Black Magic Part 2 (1976) set a precedent for the Shaw Bros. brand of gross-out horror. The tradition was then carried on by Kuei Chih-Hung, who’d already started the Shaw horror train rolling with The Killer Snakes (1974) and Ghost Eyes (1974). Kuei’s most Black Magic-coded film was Bewitched (1981), released shortly after his outstanding supernatural thriller Hex (1980) and his giallo-esque action slasher Corpse Mania (1981). Bewitche