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

Few filmmakers set the temperature for Shaw Bros. horror better than Kuei Chih-Hung, beginning with the pre-Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) creature featureThe Killer Snakes (1974) and the pre-Black Magic (1975) vampiresque thriller Ghost Eyes (1974). He hit his stride back-to-back-to-back in the ‘80s with Hex (1980), Hex vs. Witchcraft (1980), Corpse Mania (1981), Bewitched (1981), Hex After Hex (1982), Curse of Evil (1982), and The Boxer’s Omen (1983). In previous re

Between groundbreaking gross-outs Black Magic (1974) and Black Magic Part 2 (1976), director Ho Meng-Huathe made a different brand of horror film called The Oily Maniac (1976). Like the Black Magic movies, it was shot outside of Hong Kong on the Malay Peninsula, based on local folklore (that of the Oily Man or Orang Minyak), and was brimming with exploitative sex and violence, but gone were the elaborate rituals, love potions, and wizard...

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...