Gabe Powers

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. This is it, folks, the end of the road. We’re picking up the pieces and moving on from Visionaries, but not before we talk about the original Marvel comic series (spoiler, it was canceled before they...

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)...