Once upon a time, a professional weightlifter and developing actor named Jacinto Molina Álvarez developed a script based on his love of...

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 decades. His films were steeped in a formula now known as ‘heroic bloodshed,’ which emphasized brotherhood, redemption, and violent sacrifice, but his style evolved with the times and helped usher in the Hong Kong New Wave style that, in turn, took Hollywood by storm in the mid-to-late ‘90s. While he was not the first filmmaker of his kind a

There is the impression that, at the end of the millennium, as postmodern horror grew in popularity, bereft of ideas, every Hollywood studio tried sending their aging horror mascots to space. The absurdity of the concept overshadowed the actual scope of this movement, as technically only three established franchises attempted this – Kevin Yagher & Joe Chappelle’s Hellraiser IV: Bloodline (1996), Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Leprechaun 4: In Space (completed in 1996, but not releas

As someone who arrived at their love of films through cult movies (namely, Entertainment Weekly's list of the top 50 Cult Movies of All Time), one gets used to the idea that many very good films are simply overlooked for one reason or another. Take the Wachowski sisters' Speed Racer adaptation, which was doing something visually ambitious and surprisingly cutting, politically, or the cult detective movie Zero Effect, which features a pre-Something About Mary Ben Stiller and B

All film franchises must come to an end. Some of them can be reborn, but they have to die first and few franchises were as destined to die with the Reagan era than Friday the 13th. The original film was a surprise hit in 1980, so Paramount struck the iron at its hottest, producing eight films in nine years and sticking pretty closely to an established formula in hopes that it would generate money forever. Alas, 1989’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was a box

The Italian giallo tradition took its nickname from an existing slang term for the pulp crime novels first published by Mondadori, which used garish yellow covers for their Il Giallo Mondadori series. Several were translations of American and British books, from writers who became the bedrock for the Italian thrillers to come, including Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, Patricia Highsmith, Robert Bloch, and, pertinent to this review, Edgar Wall

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