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Plot: corporate assassin is targeted for extermination Over the years Hawaiian pulp director Albert Pyun has dabbled in realistic, non-cyberpunk scenarios to often varying results. Hong Kong 97 wasn’t the first of such ventures, but has become memorable for all the wrong reasons. With two name stars, an
1990s
Plot: demi-gods quarrel over dominion, until a semi-devil appears… Dragon Chronicles – The Maidens Of Heavenly Mountains (or 新天龍八部之天山童姥 back at home, for brevity’s sake Dragon Chronicles – The Maidens hereafter) is a fantasy wuxia from that fertile decade-long period from the early eighties to, give or take,
1970s
Plot: you are what you eat… or what he puts into his sausages. Lo strangolatore di Vienna (or The Strangler Of Vienna, released internationally as the more sensational sounding The Mad Butcher Of Vienna - or simply The Mad Butcher - and in North America as Meat Is Meat) is an Italian
1970s
Plot: nobleman is having a mental breakdown, or is he possessed by a demon? Byleth (Il demone dell'incesto) (or Byleth – The Demon Of Incest, simply Byleth hereafter) is a curio in the pantheon of Italian gothic horror that has remained remarkably minor and elusive despite having all the
2010s
Plot: vampire recounts her life, losses and regrets over the centuries. Have you ever wondered what and how a Jean Rollin vampire film would have looked like on a modest budget (at least in Hollywood terms) of $8 million? Byzantium offers a glimpse into what such possiblity might look like.
1970s
Plot: disabled morgue worker will stop at nothing to resurrect his lost love. The Spanish Lon Chaney, Paul Naschy, is rightly associated with horror and the macabre as that was his genre of choice. Through out his long career he played most, if not all, of the Universal Classic Monsters.
2000s
Plot: journalist investigates mysterious going-ons in a remote village. Viy (1967) is the quintessential Russian folkloric horror that every serious fan of the genre at least should have a passing familiarity with. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol’s novel Viy served as an inspiration to Mario Bava for his classic gothic
1970s
Plot: not all is well behind the white picket fences in suburban Reykjavík. Art is bound to and reflective of the time it was produced in. As such certain things can only be made under specific circumstances or only in certain time periods. Cinema of the 1970s is particularly wicked
1970s
Plot: girls in a Parisian brothel are brutally murdered by unseen assailant. Even for those in the know of such things director Ferdinando Merighi is a nobody. Judging from the company he kept it’s not exactly a surprise. His association as assistant director to legendary hack Alfonso Brescia is
1970s
Plot: Only one agent can stop a cartel from bankrupting several Asian countries. Singapore never quite etched out a regional cinematic industry the way the Chinese mainland and the more Western inclined Hong Kong did. Like the nearby Taiwan the country often joined in co-productions but never developed much
1960s
Plot: colonial prospectors discover feral white girl in the Congolese jungle. What do you do when the jungle adventures you had been making no longer are profitable? You look to what other countries are doing. That must have been what Romano Ferrara did when he helmed Gungala, Virgin Of the
1970s
Plot: onward Christian psychos! When Wes Craven directed The Last House on the Left (1972) he couldn’t possibly have foreseen the sheer deluge of imitations it would spawn almost overnight. Interestingly, most of these imitations tended to come from Italy. There was only one Grecian but it was so