Category: Film
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Filmed under a title that defies the basic laws of English syntax because Golden Harvest executives were genuinely superstitious about their previous box-office flops starting with the letter ‘M’ (hence Wheels on Meals instead of Meals on Wheels), this movie is an absolute high-water mark of action cinema. By the mid-1980s, the old-school, costume-heavy studio…
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There is a moment during the early 1960s where science fiction cinema abandoned all remaining pretenses of middle-class respectability and plunged headfirst into a subterranean pool of pure madness, and that moment is Joseph Green’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Filmed under the significantly more honest title The Head That Wouldn’t Die in 1959 but…
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There are a lot of ways to tell people what kind of movies matter to you. You can fill shelves with Blu-rays, spend years writing about cinema, or bore your friends senseless by explaining why a particular fight scene from 1978 is better than everything Hollywood produced last summer. I took a slightly more permanent…
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Watching the 1975 Ho Meng-hua classic The Flying Guillotine, is watching the exact moment Shaw Brothers realized that the traditional, honorable swordplay of the 1960s was dead, buried, and ready to be replaced by something deeply cynical and explicitly weaponized. Before this film, the studio’s output under directors like Chang Cheh or King Hu usually…
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If you want to talk about the absolute apex of Taiwanese independent chop-socky cinema, the conversation starts and ends with Lee Tso-nam’s Shaolin vs. Lama. By the early 1980s, the traditional kung fu movie was supposed to be dead and buried. Golden Harvest was leaning hard into urban stunt-spectacles with Jackie Chan, and the big…
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Jusy when you thought it was safe to go into the cupboards, Amityville Shark House is heading to home digital release on June 30th. The independent project is being distributed through a partnership between Lionsgate and Grindhouse Entertainment. The story begins when Richard unearths a malevolent shark artifact, accidentally unleashing a primitive, predatory curse. The…
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An innocent playground challenge evolves into a terrifying localized myth in the upcoming creepypasta-influenced horror anthology, The Summoning. Also slated to stream under the title The Summoning of Baby Blue, the independent film is locked for a digital home release on June 5th, by way of Brainstorm Media. The narrative focuses on a standard evening…
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Fresh off its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, the first teaser trailer for the sci-fi thriller Hope has arrived, showcasing the alien entities terrorizing a secluded community. The South Korean feature is written and directed by Na Hong-jin, acclaimed filmmaker of The Wailing, and has been picked up by distributor Neon for a domestic…
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A young woman’s isolation turns into a supernatural nightmare in the newly released trailer for the upcoming French psychological horror feature, The Curse. Scheduled for a digital debut on June 2nd, through Freestyle Digital Media, the folk horror film centers on Yara, a Moroccan student who moves to Paris for university. Severely restricted by a…
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Some martial arts movies are built around discipline, elegance, and the poetry of physical movement. Fatal Flying Guillotine prefers to treat the human body like an object that can be launched through the air at alarming speeds before eventually losing its head to a spinning metal hat. Released in 1977 during the fevered height of…