Eva Man and The Return of Eva Man are, frankly speaking, not especially good movies. For softcore features, they're adequately made, even if the plots will bring Julianne Moore's line as Maude Lebowski to mind more than once ("the story is ludicrous"). That said, they are fascinating cultural artifacts thanks to their leading lady, Eva Robin's (the apostrophe is intentional), who was fully living as an out transgender woman back in 1979. Although she is probably most famous f

Ho Meng-Huathe’s Black Magic (1974) and Black Magic Part 2 (1976) set a precedent for a special brand of Shaw Bros. horror movies often referred to as their black magic series. Though not narratively connected, these films were united by content and visual themes, including elaborate black magic rituals, esoteric wizard battles, curses, exorcisms, squirming bugs, and gushing bodily fluids. Kuei Chih-Hung more or less perfected the formula with Hex (1980), Bewitched (1982), an

In the history of unlikely pop culture phenomena, few things were less likely than Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Made as a joke, the indie comic became a surprise hit, leading quickly to a cartoon and toyline worth millions of dollars. That in itself isn’t entirely unique – a lot of silly ideas became multi-million dollar cartoon and toy properties in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. No, what was so unique about the Ninja Turtles is that they endured p

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

Welcome back to Wizard Jail – a limited run series from Director’s Club, Tracks of the Damned, and 96 Greers podcast co-host Patrick Ripoll and Genre Grinder creator Gabe Powers where they talk about, what else, but the 1987 syndicated cartoon series Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light . Podcast number six covers episodes ten, The Trail of Three Wizards,  the second best episode of the entire series, and episode eleven, Sorcery Squared , which begs the question: is Cryo

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