Gabe Powers

No other director has 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 styles that, in turn, took Hollywood by storm in the mid-to-late ‘90s. While he was not the first filmmaker of his kind and borrowed...

Lam Nai-Choi, sometimes credited as Simon Lam, began his career as a cinematographer at Shaw Bros. before relocating to rival studio Golden Harvest, where he became a director and made some of the most absurd and imaginative films of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. He only made 13 features in total, but is well-remembered for a trio of unhinged Cat. III masterpieces – the demented Indiana Jones meets Mr. Vampire meets Evil Dead extravaganza, The Seventh Curse (1986), the delirious pseudo-remake of...

A couple of years before Shaw Bros. released their version of a kaiju movie with Ho Meng-hua’s King Kong rip-off, The Mighty Peking Man (1977), the studio attempted to make a Hong Kong version of a tokusatsu movie called Super Inframan (aka: Infra-Man and Chinese Superman, 1975). Tokusatsu is a sort of catch-all term for Japanese movies and TV shows that use extensive practical effects, but it typically refers to the masked superhero media that grew out of Ishirō Honda’s kaiju movies and...