Gabe Powers

In February of 1996, after a decade of trying, Jackie Chan finally had an actual stateside hit, when New Line Cinema released an edited and dubbed version of Stanley Tong’s Rumble in the Bronx. Chan’s earlier, failed attempts to break into the American market – Robert Clouse’s The Big Brawl (aka: Battle Creek Brawl, 1980) and James Glickenhaus’ The Protector (1985) – were tailored to international audiences (The Protector more so than The Big Brawl). Rumble in the Bronx proved that this was...

BENEATH THE WAVES ROILS A MURKY STEW OF KILLER ALIENS, MONSTROUS MUTANTS, PSYCHOTIC SOLDIERS, AND EVIL CORPORATIONS!! Welcome to another of Genre Grinder’s patented deep(sea)-dives into a single year in cinema when a specific genre fad peaked. This time, Gabe and Patrick Ripoll are looking at a strange moment in time, the year 1989, when seven different undersea sci-fi/horror/adventures were released*. How did this happen? Your intrepid podcasters will attempt to answer that and other...

In the first decade of the new millennium, a minor moral panic arose over a series of graphic horror films released by major studios. The movement was eventually dubbed ‘torture porn’ by critic David Edelstein, who used the term in a 2006 New York Times op-ed that he wrote after seeing Eli Roth’s Hostel Part II (2007), entitled “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn” (subtitled “Why has America gone nuts for blood, guts, and sadism?”). The appellation was retroactively applied to...