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The British “kitchen sink” films of the ‘50s and ‘60s set a new highwater mark for social realism amongst the working class.  Focused on characters typically deemed  unworthy  of cinematic attention, struggling to survive in a society that looked down upon their very existence, these were movies that tackled subjects escapist fare would not.  Fast forward a few decades to Clifford Choi’s  Hong Kong, Hong Kong  (1983), which embraces the same sympathy for the tired, poor, huddled masses entering the bustling city in hope for a better life…but finding instead an entirely different set of troubles. Si Sun (Cherie Chung) is an illegal immigrant forced to use her body to pay for her room and board.  But a chance meeting with a kind-hearted boxer, Yuen Sang (Alex Mann), adds a dash of hope to her drab existence.  A matchmaker pairs her with a widower, promising an ID card if she can give birth to a son, but Si Sun’s relationship with...

American culture has always had a hard time reconciling eroticism and art.  Maybe it’s our Puritan heritage.  Maybe it’s our deep-seated fear of naked ankles.  Or maybe it’s because we crave violence in every form but the sight of Rachel’s nipples   on a  Friends  re-run   is a national emergency.  Either way, the rest of the world seems to handle it just fine.  In fact, a few hundred years ago the ruling classes in Asia and Europe were renowned for the hedonistic behavior.  Case in point,  An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty  (1984), one of the final films produced at Shaw Brothers studio, which follows the softcore adventures of a female poet who refuses to conform to social norms expected of her gender. Independently wealthy thanks to her reputation as an artist and her former role as a concubine, Yuan-Gi (Patricia Ha) dabbles in business, religion and casual sex hoping to find satisfaction beyond ...

Some horror movies are made out of straw, so precariously constructed that the slightest narrative breeze will unravel the whole film.  But Jeff Leiberman’s  Blue Sunshine  (1977) is made out of bricks, baby!  Even with all its flaws, there’s just something about the ominous inevitability of each scene that glues it together, leading to a generational apocalypse there’s no chance of preventing.  Turn on, tune in, and drop  dead ! After one of his friends goes on a murderous rampage, Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) accidently sets himself up as the fall guy. Now on the run from the cops, Zippy’s only chance to clear his name is to solve the mystery behind “Blue Sunshine,” a strain of LSD sold at Stanford ten years prior which seems to be having deadly effects on its users including headaches, alopecia and psychotic episodes.   With some minor tweaking,  Blue Sunshine  could pass as a major studio thriller.  But it woul...

While current female action films like  Furiousa  and  The Marvels  are facing a premeditated sexist backlash, 1996’s  The Long Kiss Goodnight  remains a mysteriously beloved bit of disposable ‘90s trash.  Starring Geena Davis as an amnesiac superspy whose reemergence onto the political chess board makes her and her family a target for her previous employers - the U.S. government – this Shane Black written, Renny Harlin directed thriller is a chauvinistic wet dream full of slow-motion gunplay, perfectly choreographed explosions and plenty of dick jokes. After living 8 years as a small-town housefrau hottie, Samantha (Geena Davis) finds out she’s actually  Charlie , a highly trained assassin who disappeared into her own cover story.  But with the help of a low-rent private detective (Samuel L. Jackson), she recovers her identity – and her special set of skills -  just in time to foil a terrorist plot, bring home the ba...

What begins as a lighthearted battle of the sexes turns into a spectacular martial arts display in Lau Kar-leung’s  The Lady is the Boss  (1983).  The legendary Hong Kong stuntman/director fills his film with a cast of all-stars and fun callbacks to previous hits while riffing on the  modern woman  attitudes imported from the U.S.  Mei Ling (Kara Hui), American-born and raised, arrives in Hong Kong to take over her father’s struggling martial arts school. But her gender doesn’t cause nearly as much controversy as her business tactics, which includes recruiting new students from discos, brothels and gay bars.  While the older students buy in to her trendy techniques, the old master (played by Lau Kar-leung himself) considers it a betrayal of his conversative teachings.  So when a local triad threatens revenge, he’s torn between saving face and saving his beloved school. Miraculously  The Lady is the Boss  manages to never o...

Although the  Bond  films made supervillains a household name, the idea of a megalomaniacal, mentally-unstable, criminal mastermind had been a literary staple for quite a while.  From Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis Professor Moriarty to the yellow peril of Fu Manchu, the concept of a bad guy out to conquer not just his own zip code but the  whole world  seemed to be a product of the pending international threat and paranoia that led to WW1. France had Fantomas which inspired a series of books and films while Germany had Dr. Mabuse, a master of disguise and mesmerism whose web of spies infiltrated every corner of the criminal underground.  The first film version in 1922 was brought to the screen by none other than director Fritz Lang who was convinced to reboot the franchise in 1960’s  The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse , which finds the doctor – or perhaps someone inspired by his nihilistic tendencies – back on the world stage in a big way. So wi...

Cashing in on both the slasher craze  and  heavy metal mania, 1986’s  Trick or Treat  is much better than its capitalistic origins might suggest.  Directed with a sympathetic ear for high-school outcasts everywhere, Charles Martin Smith’s film works itself into a frenzy of big hair, guitar licks and Tipper Gore-era rebellion but keeps things grounded by focusing on characters rather than its over-the-top killer. Tired of being ridiculed by all the jocks and cheerleaders in school, metalhead Eddie “Ragman” Weinbauer gets his wish for revenge thanks to a test-pressing of rock star hero Sammi Curr’s posthumous record.  When played backwards, incantations bring the devil-worshipping shredder back into the  real  world to settle the score with Eddie’s bullies…and anyone else that gets in his way! Shepherded into production by the same writing team responsible for  Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge , the two films share a lot of...

To paraphrase director Piers Haggard,  Venom  is a film that’s not schlocky enough for the blood n’ guts horror crowd and perhaps too classy for its own good.  It is, in fact, a rather straightforward thriller that uses a snake-on-the-loose plot device to spice things up a bit.  But the title (and marketing campaign in ’82) sold the film as a successor to “nature run amok” flicks like  The Birds  and  Alligator . The cast includes a who’s who of international stars (Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed, Susan George) and puts their larger than life personalities to good use, trapping them inside a British townhouse after a failed kidnapping plot with an army of cops outside and one deadly Black Mamba inside.  There are one or two solid scares, but the majority of the plot focuses on the police siege, led by no-nonsense captain Nicol Williamson (Merlin in Excalibur ), and his attempts to outwit Kinski’s well-dressed terrorist.   Venom ...

You don’t need to be an expert in martial arts to spot someone who’s at the top of their game.  And in the case of the Venom Mob that includes  six  “someones” - Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Phillip Kwok, Sun Chien, Lo Man and Wai Pak -  first brought together in director Chang Cheh’s  Five Deadly Venoms  (1978),  who work together like a lethal version of the Harlem Globetrotters, passing off opponents with carefully choreographed kung-fu skills that are unlike anything else in the Hong Kong action catalog. Cheh reunites them all for 1979’s  The Daredevils  (aka  Shaolin Daredevils ) in which a group of friends plan a long con to get revenge against a corrupt government official who murdered their friend.  Earning money as a tumbling act, the gang works their way into the bad guy’s good graces by posing as arms dealers while secretly setting the stage for his assassination. With long sequences focused on the group’s s...

Hollywood’s painful transition into the ‘70s was marked by several recurring themes both onscreen and off. Counterculture politics and the rise of the film school generation resulted in films that rattled some cages and took intentionally obtuse detours into offbeat territory.  Case in point, 1970’s  Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx , which champions the underdog with a Cinderella gender reversal set in the working-class streets of Dublin.  Quackser (Gene Wilder) himself is a self-employed dung collector, sweeping up horse manure left behind by delivery carts and reselling his “merchandise” back to local gardeners.  But with the mechanization of Dublin on the horizon, Quackser’s dreamy disposition might soon put him out of work permanently.  Enter Zazel (Margot Kidder), a bored and wealthy American studying at Trinity College, who finds Quackser’s candid demeanor and lack of ambition charming.  The two strike up a tenuous ...