Gabe Powers

No other director 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 from...

Belgian martial artist and actor Jean-Claude Van Damme’s meteoric career hit its stride with Newt Arnold’s Bloodsport in 1988 and peaked around Roland Emmerich’s Universal Soldier and John Woo’s Hard Target (1992 and ‘93, respectively). Between those, there was a quick series of films released that more or less used that first hit as a template. Everyone outside of the biggest Van Damme fans would be forgiven for confusing these titles, especially Bloodsport, David Worth’s Kickboxer (1989)...

In 1989, underground filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto wrote, directed, produced, edited, and co-starred in Tetsuo: The Iron Man. It became astoundingly influential in the cult, cyberpunk, and pop art scenes of the era, leading to surprising mainstream penetration in the form of movies (Darren Aronofsky’s Pi [1998], for example, would not exist without Tetsuo’s success), music videos (Portishead’s “Machine Gun”), and advertising (Tsukamoto teamed with Trent Reznor for an MTV promo that was also used...