Between Arrow, Eureka, and 88 Films, I get an awful lot of Shaw Bros. Blu-rays to review these days. There is only so much time in the...

The Blood of Fu Manchu (German: Der Todeskuss des Dr. Fu Man Chu) is the trashier and most Franco-esque of the two movies. The sleaze factor is juicy, but very of its era it. The implied sex, brief torture, short glimpses of nipples, and barely bloodied wounds are only slightly more risqué than you’d see from a name-brand Bond movie. It’s pretty tame, even by the standards of the next decade, but it’s still fun to see Franco probing the edges of acceptability. The most object

An unsung chronicler of New York gutter life, lover of high concepts, and unlikely cornerstone of the blaxploitation movement, Larry Cohen’s greatest contributions to cult filmdom were (arguably) his counterculture B-sci-fi and horror throwbacks. Beginning with the monster baby thriller It’s Alive (1974) and its sequels, and following through esoteric, deity-based horror comedies God Told Me To (1976) and Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), Cohen’s last great creature feature as di

Detonation! Violent Riders isn’t a surrealistic horror film, bone-crunching karate epic, or jidaigeki drama – it’s an entry in the juvenile delinquent bikersploitation subgenre colloquially known as bosozoku. Bosozuku movies date back to the early ‘60s and tend to be intrinsically linked to other delinquent gang films...

The theme of revenge reverberates across pop and exploitation cinema genres, making up a large share of cop thrillers, gangster movies, westerns, slashers, gialli, jidaigeki, and especially martial arts movies. During their dominant era of the 1960s & ‘70s, Shaw Bros. Studios thrived on revenge narratives, thanks to the wuxia and kung fu templates set by Chang Cheh, Ni Kuang, and Lau Kar-leung. These often revolved around a lone warrior or small group of fighters escaping a m

A truly innovative and unique filmmaker, Teruo ‘King of Cult’ Ishii’s prolific career encompassed almost 100 features, shorts, and television episodes, ranging from the children’s sci-fi serial Super Giant (Japanese: Sūpā Jaiantsu; aka: Starman and Spaceman, 1957-1959) to mainstream hit Abashiri Prison (1965), which inspired no fewer than 17 sequels. But his enduring legacy is a series of pinku eiga thrillers and ero guro shockers, including Shogun’s Joys of Torture (Japanese

While George Miller’s Mad Max (1979) was a groundbreaking work of science fiction action, it was really the first sequel, Mad Max 2 (aka: The Road Warrior, 1981), along with John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (also 1981), that set the standard for the post-apocalyptic action boom of the 1980s. The bulk of the output was made by Italians in the wake of the enormous success of Enzo Castellari’s 1990: The Bronx Warriors (Italian: 1990: I guerrieri del Bronx, 1982). The spaghe

Much like writer/director Shane Black's previous detective movie, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which teamed a fresh-out-of-rehab Robert Downey Jr. with Val Kilmer (RIP), The Nice Guys is a witty, funny, and twisty crime thriller set on the fringes of the Los Angeles film industry. Tragically, like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, it was another box office disappointment, much to the chagrin of, well, pretty much anyone who saw the movie in theaters. Thankfully, with Warner Bros. finally opening

Ah, Alex Proyas. Similar to, say, director Brad Silberling, or the Wachowski sisters' work outside of The Matrix, Proyas has left behind a string of visually dazzling cult films but has never quite managed to become a name, despite his ability to put remarkable images on the screen. First there was The Crow, a comic book movie that feels like the next evolutionary step following Tim Burton's Batman, but which was marked by unimaginable tragedy. More recently, Proyas made the

A contemporary of Kinji Fukasaku, Sadao Nakajima was another hit-maker for Toei Studios during the ‘70s. Like Fukasaku, he found success across genres, but grew into an influential figure during a wave of popular jitsuroku eiga (true account) yakuza movies. Among these was the prison drama The Rapacious Jailbreaker (Japanese: Datsugoku Hiroshima satsujinshû, 1974), which ended up being the first film in a thematic trilogy, including Nakajima’s controversial Riot at Shimane Pr