Original title: Lik Wong Masahiko Takajo and Tetsuya Saruwatari’s manga Riki-O, the brutal post-apocalyptic tale of a seemingly indestructible martial artist incarcerated in a privately owned maximum security prison seeking revenge on those who killed a child he had befriended, was first published in serial form in the magazine Business Jump between 1987 and 1990, … Continue reading
Original title: Alien 2 – sulla terra Written and directed by Ciro Ippolito under the pseudonym Sam Comwell, this is one of the less well remembered and certainly one of the less well-regarded films from that boom in Italian horror films in the late 70s and early 80s. Like Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters/Zombie … Continue reading
An offbeat and interesting variation on the vampirism theme from Australia, Thirst was part of the Anthony I. Ginnane stable of “Ozploitation” horrors that boomed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Like a lot of Ginnane’s films it was directed by a relative newcomer, in this case Rod Hardy who used the film as … Continue reading
Original title: La orgía nocturna de los vampiros Leon Klimovsky was one of the lesser Spanish horror directors, despite several films with the much-loved Paul Naschy, including La noche de Walpurgis/Shadow of the Werewolf (1971), Doctor Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo/Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf (1972) and La rebelión de las muertas/Vengeance of the Zombies … Continue reading
Liu Cixin is one of China’s most prolific and respected writers of science fiction, winning the prestigious Hugo Award for his 2015 novel The Three-body Problem and no fewer than nine Galaxy Awards, China’s own, equally prestigious, literary science fiction award. His 2000 novella The Wandering Earth was adapted for film by Frant Gwo and … Continue reading
In the early 1960s, American International Pictures began to move away from micro-budgeted exploitation and into better resourced, but still relatively impoverished by mainstream Hollywood standards, fare, most famously of course the string of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman. Between the first two Poe films, House of Usher (1960) and Pit and … Continue reading
The best remakes tend to be those which are also adaptations of literary sources, films that retain the best of the original film while taking it in a different direction, bringing in elements from the original story that the first film had abandoned. Take John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) for example, or David Cronenberg’s The … Continue reading
