Teleport City

Compared to the appellations given to the protagonists of other 1980s action films — the Exterminator, the Punisher, the Executioner — the Stabilizer sounds pretty benign. You’d almost think that he was given that name only because all of those others had already been taken. But then you learn that what the Stabilizer is in charge of stabilizing is the

So, yes, if you’ve seen a James Bond movie, you know exactly what tropes Altin Cocuk holds in store. But the film nonetheless offers distinct pleasures in the course of watching them unfold.

In the mid sixties, Hong Kong’s Cantonese language film industry, faced with the emerging dominance of the considerably more well-funded and increasingly action-oriented Mandarin language Shaw Brothers Studio–as well as changing audience tastes in a rapidly modernizing society–found itself in need of retooling its output. Melodramas, romances and period martial arts films featuring heroic female swordsmen had been staples of

The Black Rose takes the female-centric swashbuckling of wuxia cinema and the heroics of Chinese folklore and places them in a contemporary setting. It also pays service to the James Bond films.

A while back I held forth at extraordinary length about The Mummies of Guanajuato, detailing how it was the first film to team up lucha cinema’s “Big Three”; Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras. I also bloviated at the expense of many words on how it went on to reap rich rewards at the Mexican box office as a result.

One need only glance over the many titles in the lucha movie genre to see that there is a long history of enmity between Mexican wrestlers and mummies. This goes all the way back to 1964, when Elizabeth Campbell and Lorena Velazquez threw down against a pop-eyed, reconstituted Aztec warrior in their sophomore effort as The Wrestling Women, Las Luchadoras

The special thing about Turkish pulp films is how, even at their most plagiarized, they can serve as an example of just how unique a complete rip-off can be. After all, no one ever mistook Turkish Star Wars for regular Star Wars, or Bedi, the Turkish E.T., for E.T., the American E.T. And the same goes for Seytan, director Metin

If you wanted to live in the Philippines, it would help if you really, really liked Jesus. A lot. With a Catholic majority of at least 85%, the nation is the third largest predominately Catholic country on Earth, and the largest in Asia (with East Timor being its lone competition). And, for the most part, we’re not talking about fair