1970s
Plot: primeval colossus wreaks havoc upon metropolitan Toronto… When Dino de Laurentiis released his 1976 remake of King Kong (1933) its impact was profound and immediate. England has responded to Japan’s allegory for certain nuclear annihilation Godzilla (1954) with its own amiable big monster epic in the form of
2010s
Plot: thirty-something girl anxiously awaits her date… or is she? Spain has always been fertile ground for fantastic – and horror cinema. With several decades of history to draw from and the old masters rightly enshrined as the innovators that they were Spain never really stopped producing horror or weird cinema.
1970s
Plot: dopey industrialist must procure a male heir and hires a maid. Hilarity ensues! The Mammon Cat (or Il Gatto Mammone, released in Spain as the more descriptive El Impotente Seductor, which basically spoils the entire plot) was released during the marquee year that was 1975, probably the busiest year
2010s
Plot: backpacking tourists encounter mercenaries in the jungles of Thailand. There’s something to be said about the tenets and profound effects of globalization when a contemporary Mainland Chinese jungle action-adventure in the 2010s plays out by the exact same beats and character ur-archetypes as the Thai jungle actioners of
1970s
Plot: who are the three on a meathook and who killed them? The 1957 case of Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield or the night ghoul of the graveyards, continued (and continues) to fascinate. In 1959 American novelist Robert Bloch wrote Psycho which formed the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s
2010s
Plot: vacationers run afoul of escaped masked serial murderer. It’s been a strange and confusing journey going from the barely there slashing of Playing with Dolls (2015) to the functional competence of Playing with Dolls: Bloodlust (2016) only to arrive at the utterly minimalist and brutally utilitarian Playing with
1970s
Plot: busload of tourists is forced to stay overnight in a creepy castle. Compared to the rest of Europe, Belgium has always been something of a silent force within the cinematic landscape of cult and exploitation. Often overlooked and forgotten in favor of other countries in the Old World that
2010s
Plot: sleepy farming hamlet is terrorized by fierce spectral predator. As far as we’re aware Thailand never had much of a horror scene in spite their rich history in being a reliable provider of the most wickedly insane action exploitation. Whereas Indonesia had Suzzanna and Malaysia had Maria Menado
1990s
Plot: Wallachian warlord Vlad Tepes vows to find his love Elisabeta again. Informed by three decades worth of Spanish, and Latin American gothic horror tradition and bursting at the seams with all the expectant excesses Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Dracula hereafter) is Italian gothic horror kitsch on a Hollywood mega-budget
2010s
Plot: superhuman vigilante leads the rebellion against an oppressive regime. Twelve years removed from the first Cutie Honey (2004) there were bound to be some significant differences between the original and its eventual sequel. Cutie Honey: Tears (2016) takes more after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Christopher Nolan’s
1980s
Plot: psychotic loner terrorizes New York City with nightly killing sprees. Amidst the deluge of cheap (and often, infuriatingly irritating) slashers it’s easy to forget that the subgenre could occasionally conjure up something halfway interesting when it traded the regressive for the psychological. Maniac is one such example. For
2000s
Plot: comrade Ivan will have you for breakfast… and today he’s very hungry. Back in the Golden Age of exploitation the bootleg remake, imitation or sequel was an art form mastered almost exclusively by the Italians and the Filipino. In times like these it’s nigh on criminal that