Independent animation mogul Ralph Bakshi worked his way up from cell polisher to animation director at Terrytoons, the B-grade studio behind Mighty Mouse (1960), before striking out on his own with Bakshi Productions in 1968. Against impossible odds, through sheer tenacity and stubbornness, Bakshi built his solo career off of his 1972 feature debut, Fritz the Cat, which was the first officially X-rated cartoon released in US theaters. It was made with producer Steve Krantz an

Long before he had his Hollywood breakthrough with Rush Hour (1998) or his international breakthrough with Rumble in the Bronx (1995), Jackie Chan had his Hong Kong breakthrough with a pair of kung fu comedies in 1978 – Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master – both made under choreographer-turned-director Yuen Woo-ping. Chan had been groomed as a possible replacement for the late Bruce Lee at Golden Harvest as early as 1976, when he starred in Lo Wei’s New Fist of Fur

In February of 1996, after a decade of trying, Jackie Chan finally had an actual stateside hit, when New Line Cinema released an edited and dubbed version of Stanley Tong’s Rumble in the Bronx. Chan’s earlier, failed attempts to break into the American market – Robert Clouse’s The Big Brawl (aka: Battle Creek Brawl, 1980) and James Glickenhaus’ The Protector (1985) – were tailored to international audiences (The Protector more so than The Big Brawl). Rumble in the Bronx prove

In the first decade of the new millennium, a minor moral panic arose over a series of graphic horror films released by major studios. The movement was eventually dubbed ‘torture porn’ by critic David Edelstein, who used the term in a 2006 New York Times op-ed that he wrote after seeing Eli Roth’s Hostel Part II (2007), entitled “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn” (subtitled “Why has America gone nuts for blood, guts, and sadism?”). The appellation was retroact

While Putra and Liliek Sudjio, who directed the similarly influential The Queen of Black Magic (Indonesian: Ratu ilmu hitam, 1981), set the template for Indonesian horror in the ‘80s, H. Tjut Djalil quickly established a new baseline for how insane the region’s genre output would become. Little is known about his directorial debut, Benyamin spion 025 (1974), but his second feature, Mystics in Bali (Indonesian: Leák, 1981), is an unhinged, shock-a-minute crowd-pleaser that has

Indonesian genre cinema saw a major boost over the last decade, thanks to streaming distribution models, the efforts of a new crop filmmakers, including Gareth Evans, Timo Tjahjanto, Kimo Stamboel, and Joko Anwar, who brought a new flavor of martial arts action and Southeast Asian horror to international audiences who’d grown tired of the Hong Kong and Japanese influences of the early ‘00s. These films are themselves rooted in a series of films that emerged in Indonesia durin

Prior to 1970, the Hong Kong film industry was firmly in the hands of Shaw Bros. Studios, who exerted a near-monopoly on production and distribution. But things began to change as television became a key piece of the entertainment market, censorship standards shifted, and executives Raymond Chow, Peter Choi, and Leonard Ho left Shaw to found Golden Harvest Studios. Golden Harvest embraced the independent market and offered up-and-coming artists and performers relative creativ

One fun thing about exploring subgenres is that you sometimes run into one that is both unusually specific and unusually popular, like Samurai Time Travel. In J. Larry Carroll’s Ghost Warrior (1986), a samurai is frozen in ice for 400 years and awakes in modern-day Los Angeles. In Stuart Gillard’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993), the titular heroes are thrown back in time to feudal Japan via an enchanted lamp. In Takashi Miike’s Izo (2004), Izo Okada (a real historica

Conceived as a brutal homage to Roy Ward Baker’s British anthology horror classic Asylum (1972), Alex Chandon’s Cradle of Fear (2001) was a surprisingly well-promoted entry in the early-millennial indie extreme horror sweepstakes. Though nasty, Chandon’s film has more interest in entertaining a standard horror audience than nihilistic gore reels, like Fred Vogel's August Underground (also 2001) and Nick Palumbo’s Murder-Set-Pieces (2004). The vibe here is “Oh, man, gross!,” n

After Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) took home the Big Five Oscar awards, the film world contracted serial killer fever. Throughout the rest of the decade and into the early 2000s, the genre helped studios put a classy sheen on an established slasher model. These were prestige products called ‘psychological thrillers,’ not dirty ‘horror movies.’ But serial killer movies didn’t require big budgets, so the bandwagon was easy for independent filmmakers to jump onto