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

Like every title in Radiance’s Daiei Gothic collection, Kimiyoshi Yasuda’s The Ghost of Kasane Swamp (Japanese: Kaidan Kasane-ga-fuchi) is a retelling of a traditional ghost story – in this case, a folktale of the same name (sometimes known as The Pool of Kasane) that was supposedly based on a true crime that occurred in Ibaraki Prefecture during the Edo period. Being unfamiliar with the story and having not seen any of the other five (or so) movie adaptations, I’m immediatel

The Haunted Castle is the third Tokuzô Tanaka film included in Radiance’s two piece Daiei Gothic collection, following The Demon of Mount Oe (Japanese: Ōeyama Shuten Dōji, 1960 and The Snow Woman (Japanese: Kaidan yukijorô, 1968). In fact, I believe if you own both sets you have a nearly complete Tanaka horror/kaidan collection (there are earlier films that I haven’t seen that might fit). Comparing these three films directly reveals obvious similarities and curious difference