The Shinobi series consisted of eight official films and one attempted reboot, released between 1962 to 1970. The first three films were based on the exploits of historical figure Ishikawa Goemon, whose life, like that of many similar folk heroes, is largely lost to time, making it impossible to separate the fact from the legend. Over centuries of stories, kabuki performances, movies, and comics, Goemon has been a protagonist and villain, but the most enduring portrayal is th

Among animation’s most admirable traits is the possibility of producing a singular artistic vision with the absolute minimum of outside influences. The problem, then, is one of time. Even with modern digital enhancements, traditional animation consists of either thousands of drawings or delicate frame-by-frame manipulations. Under a studio-backed team of artists, it can take years to complete a feature-length animated film. Off the back of a small, independent group or, in so

Polish-born French silent era director Jean Epstein is largely remembered for his adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher (French: La Chute de la maison Usher, 1928) and association with surrealist icon Luis Buñuel, who worked as an assistant on several of his films, before a falling out in the late ‘20s. Given the magnitude of Buñuel’s career, Epstein’s work has otherwise been largely overlooked in North America outside of certain critical and academic circles. Fortunat

As the 1970s drew to a close, actor Yusaku Matsuda had grown into a counterculture idol. His cool screen persona, as seen in director Tôru Murakawa’s Game trilogy (The Most Dangerous Game [Japanese: Mottomo kiken na yûgi, 1978], The Killing Game [Japanese: Satsujin yûgi, 1978], The Execution Game [Japanese: Shokei yûgi, 1979]) and the Detective Story TV series (Japanese: Tantei Monogatari, 1979-80), became legendary, inspiring a long line of live action, comic book, and anima

Tobe Hooper’s original 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre was an unprecedented and unrepeatable motion picture experience that, nonetheless, led to countless imitations. Even Hooper himself struggled to recapture lightning in a bottle when he made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 more than a decade later in 1986. The next two official franchise entries – Jeff Burr’s Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) and Kim Henkel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

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