Watching and writing about pandemic movies certainly feels different in the years following an massive real-world outbreak. The horror loses the safety of make-believe and the missteps of fictional authorities trigger unrealistic anxiety of pandemics to come. Or, worse, the fictional authorities are more competent than their real-world counterparts. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, let’s put that aside while we look back at the greatest pandemic/outbreak film of its era and

Of the New Wave era Hong Kong filmmakers that leveraged their international success into Hollywood careers – Jackie Chan, Tsui Hark, John Woo, Yuen Woo-ping, and Ronny Yu – Ringo Lam often seems to be the odd man out. He is fondly remembered for his work with Chow Yun-fat in Hong Kong, City on Fire (1987), Prison on Fire (1987), and Full Contact (1992) in particular, but his wider output remains overlooked and his American films never reached the wide mainstream audiences of

House of Clocks and Sweet House of Horrors were developed as two parts of a six-movie series under producer Luciano Martino (brother of director Sergio, ex-husband of starlet Edwige Fenech). Martino had, in 1986, found modest success with a different made-for-TV horror anthology, entitled Brivido Giallo, and the plan was to build a second series, entitled Houses of Doom (Italian: Le case maledette), around the theme of haunted houses. Lamberto Bava, who directed all four part

Over the first three decades of his long career, Lucio Fulci deftly navigated the waves of Italian cinematic fads. Unfortunately, when he finally found himself at the forefront of one of those fads – the gore-soaked horror trend that grew out of Zombie (Italian: Zombi 2; aka: Zombie Flesh Eaters, 1979) – the entire industry began to crash. The already low budgets cratered and the distribution market for exploitation films began favoring home video over theatrical releases (no

While not a household name outside of specific corners of exploitation fandom, writer/director Norifumi Suzuki was a vital contributor to...

About two years ago, perennial podcast co-host Patrick Ripoll and I recorded a two-part piece on the giallo movies of 1971...

Despite the enormous impact of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombie fiction took years to fully embrace the mechanics

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...

Outside the sentiment that states all animation is for adults if it’s good enough, the term ‘adult animation’ applies to everything from...

Hokuriku Proxy War (Japanese: Hokuriku dairi sensô, 1977) was the last film in the ‘true-account’ line. He made one more street-level...