At the top of its most internationally successful decade, the 1970s, Shaw Bros. Studios began diversifying their genre output, including a comparatively small, but vital series of horror films. The turning point was arguably 1974, which saw the release of two definitively Hong Kong-flavored films, Kuei Chih-Hung’s The Killer Snakes and Ghost Eyes, and a combination of Shaw kung fu and Hammer Gothic, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, co-directed by Chang Cheh and Roy Ward B

The Italian/Spanish giallo fad blew up in 1970, following the release of Dario Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970), and peaked quickly over the following year (Patrick and I did a two-part podcast on several of the 40+ gialli released in the year 1971, have a listen here and here). By the middle of the decade, the market was saturated. Quick, cheap, and derivative output brought down the quality, but the influx sludge al

It’s always exciting when an obscure giallo is rediscovered on video, but it’s especially exciting when someone finds a film produced before Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970) turned a burgeoning subgenre into a fullblown cinematic fad. Released a solid two years before Argento’s film and having never made an official appearance on home video outside of Japan, Cesare Canevari’s tremendously underseen A Hyena i

The European continent had been making American frontier style ‘western’ films since the turn of the previous century, but the pop-culture idea of the Eurowestern is typically tied to the Italian western boom that resulted from the international popularity of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (Italian: Per un pugno di dollari, 1964) and Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966). Those films helped establish a genre now known as the spaghetti western, but they didn’t spring out of the

Stephen Sayadian began his career as a satirical illustrator for Mad Magazine and National Lampoon, eventually graduating to creative director at Larry Flynt Publications in the mid-’70s, where he worked on ad campaigns for Hustler Magazine. Later, he moved with Flynt to LA, where he designed poster art for movies, including John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and Escape from New York (1981), and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), discovered the area’s punk rock culture, an

The Hindi cinema scene, colloquially known as Bollywood, is typically remembered for light-hearted romantic musicals, historical melodramas (which are also often musicals), and thinly-disguised remakes of Hollywood hits. In truth, the region is among history’s most prolific movie machines and its output encompasses more or less every genre under the...

Few things are as patently offensive as the Third Reich and the concentration camps that Hitler’s goons concocted in order to systematically murder millions of people. As such, it’s not surprising that there is a substantial exploitation subgenre devoted to these historical atrocities. Nazisploitation sprung from reputable movies, like Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), and less reputable S&M softcore and roughies, such as Josep

At the center of a decade of heavy-hitters stands Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) – a modest production compared to its studio-backed counterparts that is nonetheless the funniest, sweetest, most efficiently told, and, arguably, most subversive of the bunch. Looking for a Frankenstein-like story to tell, Gordon, along with writers William J. Norris and Dennis Paoli, culled their script (which was initially intended to be a six-part TV miniseries) from H.P. Lovecraft’s shoc

A group of independent, maverick horror directors rose to prominence during the late ‘60/early ‘70s. We’ve since dubbed them the Masters of Horror (there was a TV show and everything). As distribution models changed alongside audience tastes and the years turned to decades, the quality of the Masters’ work began to falter with exceptions for those lucky few that ended their careers working with studio money, like Wes Craven, and those that broke into the mainstream via other

For the record, I find myself extremely uncomfortable discussing movies that fall within the purview of the always controversial rape/revenge genre. Because I don’t really see it as my place to discuss the moral standards and gender politics of rape/revenge movies, for the most part, I try to avoid writing about them and haven’t covered them on the podcast. However, even the most contentious genres tend to produce at least a few outstanding, thoughtful, and/or compelling feat