Movieline Online

As one of the most important figures in Hong Kong cinema, a study of Sammo Hung’s career is a study of the HK film industry itself.  And that’s exactly the case with  Triple Threat: Three Films with Sammo Hung  which captures his talents as a performer and fight choreographer in various stages of development.  Never content to simply play “pudgy villain number 2,” Hung worked his way up from a Shaw Brothers role player to the golden boy of Golden Harvest, leaning into the fat jokes for laughs and turning himself into the most unlikely of superstars. The Manchu Boxer  (1974) walks a well-trodden path of ‘70s kung fu flicks:  a wandering fighter, a town in trouble and a band of thugs in need of a beat-down.  Shot using cut-rate sets in the freezing cold (you can see the actors’ breath in every scene), this is pretty much as far from the well-oiled machinery of a Shaw Brothers production as you can get.  But Hung’s presence, ...

What’s a giallo without copious amounts of blood, gratuitous nudity and acrobatic camerawork? 1976’s The House with Laughing Windows manages to avoid all that but still fit comfortably in a genre known more for its excessive exclamation marks than actual narrative coherence. Director Pupi Avati creates a giallo more by implication than definition, leaning into Gothic cliches and an almost puritanical approach to sexuality…until he doesn’t. Hired to restore a disturbing fresco in a quiet country village, Stefano receives disturbing anonymous phone calls warning him to back off. But curiosity leads him to uncover the artist’s history, revealing a sadomasochist-incestuous past with ties to the local citizenry who have pledged a vow of silence. The answers lie buried in the bricks and mortar of the decaying tourist town that would prefer its dead stay buried. Avati seems determined to prove he can make a “respectable” giallo. The pieces are all there: ominous artwork ( Deep Red ), my...

Criterion is the Mt. Everest of boutique labels. Its body of work – going as far back as the laserdisc days – includes some of the most important, most influential and most collectible films of all time. In an era when just being able to watch a classic film in its correct aspect ratio, they expanded to include commentary tracks, interviews, storyboards and alternate scenes before those special features were even a glint in the traditional studio marketer's eye. But, just like Everest, the boutique mountaintop has become a bit more crowded since then. And no one seems to be carrying the torch for introducing audiences to obscure, invigorating and adventurous cinema more than Radiance Films, the specialty label that released its first titles in 2023. Since then, their ratio of hits to misses has been nothing short of jaw-dropping, including their latest: three films from French actor-director Robert Hossein collected under the title Wicked Games . Hossein, probably best known i...

Thanks to WW2 and a lengthy civil war, Greek cinema was always lagging behind other European countries. But as waves of Italian neorealism, film noir and screwball comedies passed through, filmmakers picked up the baton and began incorporating popular genres into their own productions. Beginning in the ‘50s, this golden age spawned hits from the major studio, Finos Film, but also gave birth of independents whose influence wasn’t felt until decades later. That, in a nutshell, exemplifies The Ogre of Athens (1956) a socio-political, film-noir, musical comedy that truly fits the description all of the above. Thomas, a meek and lonely bank clerk, is mistaken for a notorious criminal after a photo in the newspaper matches his description. On the run from police, he stumbles into sketchy club full of showgirls and gangsters, the latter of whom also mistake him for the Ogre and force him to participate in their latest heist. Fearful but flattered, Thomas begins to embrace his role as a...

She’s a political prisoner.  He’s a nazi officer.  But even the Third Reich is powerless against true love!  The synopsis might be factually accurate; but the short-lived  Naziploitation  sub-genre wasn’t really designed for critical analysis.  It was just another excuse to parade rape, torture and phony surgeries in front of audience’s that were getting increasing hard to shock.  Truth be told,  SS Experiment Love Camp  (1976) is far from the worst of the bunch, shot with some restraint (in the Trump era, anyway) in terms of debauchery…and in regards to evil Nazi scientists. Brought in with the latest group of hot enemies of the state, Mirelle falls head over heels for Helmut, a soldier brought in to help propagate the Aryan race.  While casual hook ups are encouraged, their relationship is strictly forbidden by Col. Von Kleiben, who’s hoping to use the advanced medical techniques to solve his own, uh, erec...